Obama's Afghan challenge

PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama has said he intends to expand the military effort to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. The reality that Obama must soon confront, however, is that Afghanistan cannot be saved from the Taliban by military means alone.

Ultimately, Afghan stability will require cooperation among many parties. This need for cooperation is illuminated by current American and NATO efforts to arrange for supplies to be transported into Afghanistan from Central Asian states to the north. These include Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, where the US military already has use of an airfield.

The reason for turning to these Central Asian neighbors is that the passage from Pakistan, through the bottleneck of the Khyber Pass, has become too dangerous. A resurgent Taliban and kindred groups have been ambushing US convoys that carry supplies overland from the port of Karachi, through the Khyber Pass, to Afghanistan.

The strategic lesson is two-fold. Most obvious is the need for Pakistan's government and army to get their house in order. For too long, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency sponsored the Taliban as a cut-rate means of shielding Afghanistan from Indian, Russian, or Iranian dominance. Lately, though, the Taliban and its Pakistani allies have become a threat to Pakistan itself.

A less obvious lesson to be drawn from the search for new supply routes is that, for too long, Afghanistan has served as a proxy battlefield for both near and distant powers. During the era of Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, Russia, India, and Iran supported the anti-Taliban forces of the Northern Alliance, a combination of ethnically Tajik and Uzbek Afghans who resisted the Taliban in the north of the country until - with the aid of US air power and CIA operatives - the Alliance was able to take Kabul in late 2001.

There is little chance for peace in Afghanistan until a crucial majority of its neighbors act on a common interest in Afghan stability.

One intriguing sign that such cooperation is possible comes from Russia. Despite the tension in US-Russian relations since the war in Georgia last August, Russian officials are saying openly that they share with NATO a strategic interest in helping protect Afghanistan from the Taliban. Toward that end, Russian and NATO representatives have been discussing the transport of NATO supplies to Afghanistan through Russia's airspace.

Obama's Afghan challenge will be more diplomatic than military. To save Afghanistan, he will need to mold a strategic partnership that includes parties as disparate as Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and the Central Asian states. This will not be an easy task. But the alternative is endless war in Afghanistan.