As President Obama decides how to proceed in the Afghan war, he needs to add one more variable that is rarely mentioned: Iranian determination to acquire nuclear weapons. An ongoing Afghanistan campaign means that resort to force against Iran would be tantamount to starting a second war. The politics being what they are, that will knock the military option against Iran off the table, with negative implications for an empowered diplomacy toward Iran.

Consider the timelines of the Afghan and Iranian policy portfolios, as President Obama must. Whether or not Iran parts with some of its fissile material in coming months in accord with the recent Geneva deal, it will still have enough nuclear “stuff” for one at least bomb within 18 months. (It may have more than that if, as looks increasingly likely, the recent Qom revelation displayed the tail end of a significant and protracted effort.) It will probably have overcome its weaponization and delivery-system challenges within 36-48 months. In 36-48 months U.S. and NATO forces will probably still be fighting in Afghanistan, whether Obama decides on a minimalist, counterterrorism-plus approach or General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency-minus one.

The logic and overlapping timetables of the Afghan-Iran linkage suggest a need to choose. How should we think about that choice?

Both problems are consequential, but an Iranian nuclear breakout poses more serious long-term security dangers to the region and to the United States than any likely fallout from the Afghan war. Losing in Afghanistan could boost the morale of Islamist extremists worldwide, harm NATO and possibly exacerbate the situation in Pakistan. But acquiescing to an Iranian nuclear capability would spell the collapse of the Non-Proliferation Treaty regime and likely set off a proliferation race in and around the region that could catalyze a regional nuclear war. Unlike the Cold War deterrence relationship many of us remember, which involved just two sides with mostly secure weapons and command-and-control systems, a multifaceted nuclear Middle East without stable second-strike arsenals would be extremely crisis unstable and accident-prone, and could “leak” dangerous materiel to terrorists, as well. It is facile to assert that a deterrence relationship which worked in one context will also work in others; that assumption with respect to Iran is a textbook example of the “lesser-included case” fallacy.

If American interests require the prevention of an Iranian bomb, then major combat operations in Afghanistan must end before the moment to decide on Iran is at hand. That’s not the track we’re now on. General McChrystal’s plan is a stop-loss effort that cannot achieve a level playing field upon which to drive a new Afghan diplomacy, let alone achieve anything remotely resembling victory in three years or less.

There are only two alternatives to preserve a credible military option, and hence a credible diplomacy, with regard to Iran: accept defeat in Afghanistan, whatever we may call it, and leave; or surge militarily to reverse the perception of Taliban ascendancy, and then drive a new political arrangement there to end the war within the next 18-24 months.

Either option is preferable to a protracted and inconclusive bloodletting, but the latter option—depending more on air power and avoiding the massive (and counterproductive) garrisoning of the country with foreign forces—is preferable. It would avoid the optic of defeat. A new Afghan coalition government, blessed by a Loya Jirga within and supported by high-level contact-group diplomacy from without, would have at least a chance of creating a stable environment over the longer run—something that cannot reliably be said about the current regime in Kabul.

A success in Afghanistan also would lift the admittedly modest prospects that diplomacy can persuade the Iranians to step back from the nuclear precipice, just as failure to turn the tide would likely tempt them forward. And if the Iranians do not step back, a success in Afghanistan will better undergird the diplomacy that must accompany any military operation directed toward them.

Clearly, however, no McChrystal-plus option is on the table. This suggests that, barring some major out-of-the-blue event, like the collapse of the Iranian regime, the administration will be unable to consider using force against Iran when the time comes to decide, even if it might wish to do so. And Tehran’s knowledge that all U.S. military options are off the table is not liable to be helpful.

If U.S. policy eventually founders in Afghanistan and fails to prevent an Iranian nuclear breakout, and Iraq’s relative stability begins to crumble—not a far-fetched possibility, regrettably—then we will face a trifecta of real trouble in the Muslim world and beyond. To avoid that debacle, the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that when President Obama finally decides on Afghanistan, he will be constraining or expanding his options on Iran.

One wonders whether this link is well appreciated.

The role of Iran in fueling insurgency in Iraq, particularly attacks against U.S. forces, has been well-documented and forms one front in Iran’s proxy war against the United States. Receiving much less attention than Iraq, is the role Iran has played in supporting anti-NATO insurgents in Afghanistan as a second front against U.S. and NATO forces.

At first blush, such support seems bizarre given the intense antagonism between radical Shiites in Tehran and the fringe Sunni Taliban movement, each of which sees the other as lying outside the bounds of true Islam. Indeed, the two were at odds throughout the 1990s, at times approaching what some considered a full-blow regional crisis. Late 1998 saw the Taliban murder of hundreds of Shiites in Mazar-e-Sharif and an Iranian buildup of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps troops along the border with Afghanistan.

By 2000, however, the Taliban had dispatched an emissary charged with reaching out to the Iranian regime, Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa. Cooperation, even with ideological enemies, fits with Tehran’s pattern of willingness to work with any ally to oppose the United States. (Iranian regime support for Al Qaeda in Iraq is part of this trend.)

During a January 2000 meeting in Iran, its representatives offered weapons assistance in light of the Taliban’s inability to procure weapons on the open market; and at a November 2001 meeting, Iranian diplomats offered anti-aircraft weaponry to the Taliban for use in impending action with the United States and NATO and offered safe passage of fighters, weapons, and money across the Iran-Afghanistan border.

Direct Iranian government assistance to the Taliban was first alleged by U.S. officials during 2007. In January of that year, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns alleged that “There’s irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this and it’s a pattern of activity.… It’s certainly coming from the government of Iran. It’s coming from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps command, which is a basic unit of the Iranian government.”

A 2007 Treasury Department Fact Sheet identifies the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Qods Force as Tehran’s main vehicle for providing the Taliban with financial and weapons support. Secretary Gates has argued that the quantity of materiel proffered to the Taliban from Iran requires senior Iranian government involvement. Such support, even if not directly ordered by senior political leadership in Tehran, is certainly known of and allowed to continue unabated.

The same Explosively-Formed Penetrator IEDs Iran ships to Iraq are turning up in western Afghanistan, a previously quiet area compared to the eastern border with Pakistan. There have been 15 U.S. deaths in western Afghanistan in the last five months. One Taliban commander told BBC News in mid-2008 that Iranian businessmen sell Explosively Formed Penetrators, called “Dragons,” at a premium price to select Taliban commanders. In addition to businessmen who sell the weapons, the Taliban commander added that “There are people inside the state in Iran who donate weapons.” The Afghan press is reporting in October 2009 that Afghan security forces confiscated 860 Iranian-made land mines in northern Afghanistan. Tehran is also escalating by sending shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles to Afghanistan, which would greatly complicate NATO operations.

General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, alleges in his September report to the White House that in addition to supplying weapons, “The Iranian Quds Force is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups.”

As U.S. forces gradually shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, Tehran likely sees the opportunity to bog down the American military in a way it was unable to do in Iraq. Such an analysis accords with American assessments that see the U.S. position in Afghanistan as tenuous at best.

The Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council (P5+1) initiative to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and use maximum leverage to do so, diminishes the ability of NATO countries to use diplomacy to discourage Iranian support for the Taliban. Success against Iranian infiltration in Afghanistan will almost definitely require changing the security environment on the Afghanistan side of the border, rather than transforming the behavior of Tehran on the Iranian side of the border.

As President Obama weighs General McChrystal’s request for some 40,000 additional troops to execute a population protection counterinsurgency strategy, it is important to bear in mind that with external support from the likes of Tehran, the Taliban is unlikely to be defeated by anything less than rejection by the Afghan people themselves. To this end, the United States may be well-advised to seek support of members of Pashtun tribes that have formed alliances of convenience with the Taliban. A counterinsurgency strategy with enough U.S. forces to win the trust of locals by providing security will be essential to allow the American military to wean some of the Taliban’s tribal Pashtun allies away from the insurgency.

The Washington Post reports that some in the administration see the Lebanese Hezbollah as a possible model for transformation of the Taliban. Describing the Taliban as a movement “deeply rooted” in Afghanistan, much like Hezbollah is in Lebanon, proponents of a Hezbollah model for the Taliban see a scenario in which the Taliban participates in Afghan politics, occasionally flexes its military muscles to benefit its political positions at home, but does not directly threat the United States even if it remains a source of regional instability.

According to the Post, while the idea has been discussed informally “outside the Situation Room meetings,” it has not yet been presented to President Obama. That’s a good thing because the notion is deeply flawed, and its implementation would have dire consequences for Afghanistan, the region more broadly, and U.S. counterterrorism efforts all.

Hezbollah in Lebanon is a destabilizing force, as is the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not only does Hezbollah maintain an independent militia in explicit violation of United Nations resolutions, it uses this private army to create semi-independent enclaves throughout the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley where Lebanese Armed Forces are not allowed. In these spaces, Hezbollah maintains training camps, engages in weapons smuggling and drug trafficking, and maintains tens of thousands of rockets aimed at its neighbor to the south, Israel. Hezbollah collects intelligence on people traveling through Beirut international airport, and has built its own communications infrastructure beyond the reach of the national government.

In Afghanistan, an independent Taliban militia that controls territory of its own; maintains bases and training camps; facilitates weapons smuggling; and engages in every aspect of the narcotics production pipeline from poppy cultivation and processing to taxing delivery and smuggling abroad, would certainly seek to maintain its control over its own territory. Indeed, an increasing number of major Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) arrests over the past few months have targeted drug kingpins closely tied to the Taliban, like Haji Juma Kahn and Baz Mohammad.

Neither will Hezbollah today nor a similarly modeled Taliban tomorrow tolerate government challenges to its private army or other sources of power. In the words of then-Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald Kerr, such groups are out for themselves, and will turn on their fellow Lebanese or Afghan citizens, respectively, when under pressure. “Events in Lebanon since May 7 [2008] demonstrate that Hezbollah—with the full support of Syria and Iran—will in fact turn its weapons against the Lebanese people for political purposes,” Kerr explained. “Hezbollah sought to justify its attacks against fellow Lebanese as an attempt to defend the resistance against attacks by the government.” Scores of Afghan civilians have been killed in Taliban suicide bombings, including the most recent attack outside the Indian embassy which claimed the lives of 17 Afghans, including 15 civilians and two Afghan police officers. It is all the more difficult to imagine a scenario in which the Taliban play a stabilizing political role in Afghanistan in light of the fact that, unlike Hezbollah, the Taliban adhere to a strict salafi-jihadi doctrine which is anathema to secular politics and requires the strict implementation of shariah law.

Commenting on the philosophical distinctions some in the administration make between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs distinguished between the Taliban as an Islamist element in Afghanistan and “an entity that, through a global, transnational jihadist network, would seek to strike the U.S. homeland,” like Al Qaeda. But in the assessment of people like Bruce Reidel, an Al Qaeda and Taliban expert who oversaw the administration’s policy review regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban’s ties to Al Qaeda run deep. “It’s a fundamental misreading of the nature of these organizations to think they are anything other than partners,” said Reidel. “Al Qaeda is embedded in the Taliban insurgency, and it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to be able to separate them.”

Here too, Hezbollah—a group involved not only in politics in Lebanon but in terrorist activity worldwide—is the wrong model. Even as the Hezbollah-led March 8 coalition campaigned ahead of Lebanon’s June 7 elections this summer, the group was forced to contend with the unexpected exposure of its covert terrorist activities both at home and abroad. At home, Hezbollah stands accused of playing a role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Abroad, law enforcement officials have taken action against Hezbollah support networks operating across the globe, including in Egypt, Yemen, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Azerbaijan, Belgium, and Colombia. Just this past week, a court in Azerbaijan found two Hezbollah operatives guilty of plotting attacks on the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Baku, among other plots, and sentenced them each to 15 years in prison.

The Taliban is primarily involved in attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, though it has been tied to at least one plot in the United States and another in Europe. In the United States, a group of eleven jihadists in Northern Virginia were found to have connections with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Lashkar-i-Taiba. In Europe, the Pakistani Taliban—distinct from but closely allied with the Afghan Taliban—claimed responsibility for a failed plot to bomb subway trains in Barcelona in 2008. And while historically the Taliban was an adversary of Iran’s, the United States believes since at least 2006 Iran has arranged frequent shipments of small arms, RPGs, explosives and other weapons to the Taliban. The Qods Force also provides the Taliban in Afghanistan with weapons, funding, logistics and military training, according to the U.S. government.

As National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter made clear in his congressional testimony last week, Hezbollah is a very poor model for a future Taliban. According to Leiter, the U.S. intelligence community holds the following to be true:

While not aligned with al-Qa’ida, we assess that Lebanese Hizballah remains capable of conducting terrorist attacks on U.S. and Western interests, particularly in the Middle East. It continues to train and sponsor terrorist groups in Iraq that threaten the lives of U.S. and Coalition forces, and supports Palestinian terrorist groups’ efforts to attack Israel and jeopardize the Middle East Peace Process. Although its primary focus is Israel, the group holds the United States responsible for Israeli policies in the region and would likely consider attacks on U.S. interests, to include the Homeland, if it perceived a direct threat from the United States to itself or Iran. Hizballah’s Secretary General, in justifying the group’s use of violence against fellow Lebanese citizens last year, characterized any threat to Hizballah’s armed status and its independent communications network as redlines.

Modeling the Taliban after Hezbollah is a recipe for failure. It would doom efforts to promote democracy in Afghanistan and engender long-term instability in both Afghanistan and Pakistan along the traditional Pashtun tribal belt that straddles the country’s shared border. It would embolden one of Iran’s newer allies in the region and empower a salafi-jihadi organization with close and ongoing ties to Al Qaeda to firmly establish control over parts of the country from which it would continue to produce massive quantities of drugs that ultimately make their way to the West. Looking to Hezbollah as the model for a future Taliban displays both ignorance of Hezbollah and naïveté regarding the Taliban. No matter how you slice it, that’s a dangerous combination.

MESH Admin: There is an Arabic translation of this post.

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The other week over at ForeignPolicy.com, in a post titled “The ’safe haven’ myth,” Stephen M. Walt offered six reasons to be skeptical of the argument that a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would pose a significant threat to the United States. On the same website, Peter Bergen rebutted Walt. Running through Walt’s six reasons one by one, Bergen argues that the historical record severely undercuts Walt’s assumptions about how a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan would have little impact on US security.

Bergen is unsparing in his criticism. Yet although he calls Walt’s sixth reason “one of his flimsiest arguments,” he misses just how flimsy it is.

Walt writes, “Sixth, one might also take comfort from the Soviet experience. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujaheddin didn’t ‘follow them home.’” Bergen rightly responds that even before the U.S. invasion, Al Qaeda was carrying out attacks on American targets while based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

But what he might have stated is that self-described mujaheddin in fact did follow the Soviets home, and did so quite deliberately. Afghanistan served to support violent Islamism in former Soviet Central Asia and inside Russia in the Caucasus.

Islamist militants in former Soviet Central Asia—most famously in Uzbekistan, but also in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—used Afghanistan as a base of training and support and cooperated with the Taliban. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 knocked back these movements for a time. For the past several years their members have been preoccupied with defending themselves inside Afghanistan, and little was heard from them.

The resurgence of the Taliban, however, may have already made it possible for some of these militants to again take up arms in Kyrgyzstan. At the least, others inside Afghanistan are again openly talking of carrying their jihad deeper into Central Asia. For two recent reports, see this one by New York Times correspondent David Lloyd Stern, and this one by The Guardian’s Ghaith Abul-Ahad.

Stern is a long-time friend whom I have known since our days studying Russian as undergraduates, and he has extensive experience reporting from throughout the former Soviet Union. Writing from Kyrgyzstan, he correctly notes that in the past, Central Asian governments have been quite happy to hype the threat of Islamist militants to suppress dissent and justify crackdowns. But as Abul-Ahad reports from within Afghanistan, there exist militants all too willing again to take up arms in the name of Islam against the governments in Tashkent, Bishkek, and Dushanbe as well as Kabul.

Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors have unsophisticated armies made up of poorly trained and motivated conscripts, and had a difficult time countering these movements in the late 1990s. It is likely that this time around, their insurgent opponents will prove more capable in combat. U.S. military personnel fighting in Afghanistan have observed a steady and marked improvement in the Taliban’s tactical and combat skills. This is not unusual; practice makes perfect. But it does not bode well for the Central Asians.

Were the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan, there is good reason to believe that the surrounding countries will again face violent insurgencies. This is not to predict a domino effect of toppled governments. States waging counter-insurgency campaigns can compensate for the lack of professionalism of their security forces by applying coercion and repression more widely. Uzbekistan’s security forces in particular are known for their mercilessness, and it is possible that Uzbekistan and the other states could contain their insurgencies by continuing to employ draconian measures. But it is, however, to predict that the misery index in countries bordering Afghanistan will go up. True, some might argue, the United States would not be paying that cost directly, Central Asians would be, and therefore it is not a U.S. national interest. But in that case we should at least be honest about it, and not ignore it in an effort to salve our collective conscience.

The fallout from Taliban-led Afghanistan was not restricted to Central Asia, however, but extended into Russia. Boris Yeltsin’s ill-advised, even criminal, attempt to crush the defiant Mafioso-state of Johar Dudaev by invasion in 1994 ignited a popular insurgency in Chechnya. Joining the Muslim Chechens who rallied to defend their homeland were self-styled mujaheddin who had trained in Afghanistan. Their ranks included Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem, a Saudi citizen known more famously as Amir Khattab.

Khattab was a dedicated jihadist. Before coming to Chechnya, he had trained in Afghanistan and fought in Tajikistan. Although the depth of his tactical prowess has been debated, his charisma was exceptional. By 1996 he emerged not merely as the leading foreign jihadi in Chechnya, but as one of the principal power brokers inside Chechnya.

After the end of the first Chechen war and Russia’s withdrawal from Chechnya in 1996, Khattab teamed up with the most famous of the Chechen warlords, Shamil Basaev. Basaev himself has stated that he had trained in Khost, Afghanistan in the spring of 1994, prior to the beginning of the first Chechen war. Together, Basaev and Khattab established their own camps inside Chechnya where they trained volunteers from throughout Russia’s North Caucasus in guerrilla warfare. Their activities, which extended to involvement in hundreds of kidnappings inside Chechnya and neighboring regions, undermined the elected government of Aslan Maskhadov and created hellish conditions for inhabitants in Chechnya and surrounding areas.

Whether by design or accident, Chechnya and its environs were coming to resemble Afghanistan. Residents were being reduced to having to choose between unbridled criminality or a rudimentary order based on a harsh interpretation of sharia. It is worth noting that during this period in 1997 Ayman al-Zawahiri, described often as the mastermind of Al Qaeda, was arrested and detained in Dagestan for five months. Zawahiri was searching for a safe haven, and had been trying to make his way to Chechnya. Upon being released from Dagestan he then made his way to Afghanistan.

The aim of Basaev and Khattab was to drive Russia out of the whole North Caucasus and unite the region in an Islamic state. To assist their cause they recruited Adallo Aliyev, a famous Dagestani poet, as their figurehead leader. (I met with Adallo on several occasions while he was on the lam in Turkey. Adallo was later amnestied by Dagestani authorities due to his age and stature as a cultural icon. He was the subject of a good overview of the turbulent North Caucasus in Der Spiegel this past July.)

Basaev and Khattab attempted to execute their plan in 1999 and invaded Dagestan, triggering the second Chechen war. Shortly after, the Taliban “recognized” Chechnya to underscore its solidarity. It was, of course, an almost wholly symbolic act, but one that did encourage still more Chechen fighters to identify still more closely with the radical Islam of the Taliban. According to the U.S. State Department, Basaev returned to Afghanistan in 2001, and allegedly also sent Chechens to fight in Aghanistan, returning the favor, as it were.

The second Chcchen war proved to be much more difficult for the jihadists. Khattab was poisoned in 2002, and Basaev was killed in 2006. But from 1995 until about 2001, Chechnya was of immense importance to the jihadi propaganda and fundraising. The example of Chechnya seemingly illustrated the underlying promise of jihad: that a small group of Muslims could defeat a major power so long as they trusted in God and their arms.

After U.S. forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, news accounts were filled with implausible claims of “Chechens” fighting in the ranks of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, to the point that the uninitiated would have thought that the Chechens were a major ethnic group inside Afghanistan, and not a nation of barely a million in the Caucasus. Clearly, these are exaggerations. The best explanation I have seen for this phenomenon is that the word “Chechen” became shorthand among Afghans for any Russian-speaking Muslim. The glory associated with Chechnya’s struggle against Russia up until Chechnya’s pacification popularized the Chechens and endowed them with a mythic reputation vastly larger than their numbers. Nonetheless, a multitide of sources leave no doubt that the ties between the Taliban and jihadists in Chechnya were considerable.

The presence of jihadi training camps inside Afghanistan and the Taliban’s support for foreign jihadists were not the sole or even primary cause of Islamist insurgencies in Central Asia or the Caucasus, but they did contribute to the development of those insurgencies. The only consoling thought one can take from the Russian or post-Soviet experience is the suggestion that even states with limited capabilities can contain jihadist insurgencies, albeit at a high price of repression.

In short, when contemplating the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Soviet experience should give us no comfort. To the contrary, that experience would tell us to expect that the return of a Taliban-led Afghanistan will invigorate jihadists and again facilitate the spread of militant Islam inside Central Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere.

In his response to Bergen, Walt makes no attempt to dispute Bergen’s critique. Instead, he writes that his original post really was directed toward the omission of any cost-benefit analysis in the debate over Afghan policy. The need to weigh objectives and resources and define clear priorities in policymaking is axiomatic. Given the consistent tendency of policy wonks only to insist that their pet issue deserves a higher priority and greater resources without deigning to explain what issues deserve fewer resources, perhaps this point, however basic, bears repeating.

I actually share some of Walt’s pessimism about the U.S. course in Afghanistan and I can agree that that question of whether our policies might be making things worse rather than better is an urgent one. But what I cannot agree with is the refashioning of history to make us feel better about our preferred policy choices. If Afghanistan is all about bad choices, and I think it is, we owe it ourselves to be honest about how bad those choices are when we debate them.

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President Obama in his charm offensive in Europe and Turkey said all the right things—about a new peaceful world order, about a world without nuclear weapons, about Turkey’s greatness, about America’s responsibility to take a lead solving the global financial crisis because it began in the United States, about America not being at war with Islam, about the Czech velvet revolution helping to bring down an empire without a shot been fired and so on. Public relations are of considerable importance in international affairs as in other fields of human endeavor. It would be churlish to complain about the lack of specifics—public appearances were not the occasion to deal with them.

But it is not too early to ask what will follow next, to what extent will the charm offensive make it easier for America to cope with the major international crises ahead. As this is the subject of a book rather than of short comment, I would like to single out one issue: Afghanistan/Pakistan.

The establishment of stable conditions in these countries is of critical importance. They should not become failed states, safe havens for the preparation of terrorist attacks in various places. Nor do I believe that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, and that the war against Taliban cannot be won. It can be won on two conditions: that the border with Pakistan will be effectively sealed and that several hundred thousand NATO soldiers will be stationed in Afghanistan.

Closing borders is of decisive importance as historical precedents have shown time and again. The Greek communist guerrillas had the upper hand in the years after World War Two. They collapsed almost overnight the moment Tito defected from the Soviet bloc and closed the border between Yugoslavia and Greece.

But America is not in a position to dispatch substantial forces to Afghanistan and NATO Europe even less so, and the border will not be closed. The 3,000 soldiers promised in Strasbourg, most of them for non-combatant service, are a symbolic gesture. In the circumstances, present U.S. policy of trying to win the war with insufficient means does not make sense—unless it is part of a wider exit strategy.

Afghanistan and Pakistan will remain sources of major danger, but not only to the West. They will be a threat for India, China, Russia (with its interests in Central Asia) and even Iran. They will have to deal with this problem once the United States and NATO will have left.

But what about further proliferation and possibly, even likely, attacks with weapons of mass destruction? There is no answer as long as the concern about this danger is limited to the West, manifesting itself in little more than hand wringing. It will probably take a military conflict (or even two) fought with such weapons until the major powers (perhaps even the United Nations) will understand that there are certain common interests and a need for common action in this respect.

In the meantime, following the successful trip to Europe and Turkey there should be a moratorium on press conferences and speeches. Too frequent appearances are bound to lead to repetition, wear and tear, even disenchantment. I do not suggest President Obama should follow the example of General de Gaulle (one press conference a year with questions submitted three weeks before). But it ought to be possible to find a compromise between the two extremes.

The appointment of Dennis Ross as “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia” (announcement here) has caused some puzzlement, in part because the geographic focus of his title seems fuzzy. This is especially so for “Southwest Asia.”

On the face of it, “Southwest Asia” looks like a geographic reference, and it has always had a few enthusiasts among geographers. It’s also been favored by those who deem it less Eurocentric than “Middle East” or “Near East.” (Maybe it is, but since Asia as a continent is a European idea, calling any region “Southwest Asia” hardly solves the problem.) Once there was even a maverick academic program, at SUNY Binghamton, called the Program in Southwest Asian and North African Studies (SWANA for short). But “Southwest Asia” got no traction in American academe, and even the SUNY program eventually swapped SWANA for MENA (Middle East and North Africa).

So when did “Southwest Asia” finally get its big break, and begin to turn up in high places as a near-synonym for the Middle East? “From the moment of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979,” wrote U.S. diplomat and strategist John C. Campbell, “Washington began to talk of ‘Southwest Asia’ instead of the Middle East as the area of crisis and of American concern.” Cold War strategists wished to emphasize that the region was crucial not because it was east of us, but because it was immediately southwest of the Soviet Union, which had a plan to push through to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The sooner Americans started thinking about the region as “Southwest Asia,” the sooner they would grasp the nature of the threat.

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski effected the shift in labeling. Two days after the Soviet invasion, he warned President Jimmy Carter that “the collapse of the balance of power in Southwest Asia… could produce Soviet presence right down on the edge of the Arabian and Oman Gulfs.” Carter, reeling from the combined effects of the invasion and the Iran hostage crisis, opened a dramatic television address to the nation some days later with these words: “I come to you this evening to discuss important and rapidly changing circumstances in Southwest Asia.” Carter proceeded to warn Americans of “a threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia.” A month later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee jumped on board, and held a series of landmark hearings later published as “U.S. Security Interests and Policies in Southwest Asia.”

“A new name has been devised to cover these counties on which attention has been concentrated during the past 12 months,” wrote the military historian Sir Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs a year later. “Southwest Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and the oil-bearing states bordering what now must tactfully be termed simply ‘the Gulf,’ all constituting a politically seismic zone of incalculable explosive potential.” Campbell later gave a similar definition: “‘Southwest Asia’ includes everything from the eastern fringes of the Arab world to the western limits of the Indian subcontinent.” (Campbell also added that “roughly, it is Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘arc of crisis.’” Brzezinski had coined that phrase a year before the Soviet invasion, and it figured prominently in a January 1979 story in TIME magazine, whose cover showed a Soviet bear looming over the Persian Gulf. TIME explained that Brzezinski’s “arc of crisis” consisted of “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.”)

This “Southwest Asia,” then, wasn’t a geographic reference at all, but a strategic one with a Cold War application. Not surprisingly, both the CIA and the Pentagon quickly picked up the term and ran with it. The CIA established a Southwest Asia Analytic Center, which produced papers like “The Soviets and the Tribes of Southwest Asia.” The Defense Department acted similarly, applying “Southwest Asia” (SWA) to a large area centered in the Gulf, but extending far beyond it. “Southwest Asia” is now the core of CENTCOM’s “Area of Responsibility” (AOR), which runs from Kazakhstan to Kenya.

Which brings us back to the Ross appointment at the State Department. “Southwest Asia” isn’t much used at State, which still prefers “Middle East” and hasn’t even given up entirely on “Near East.” (”Southwest Asia” is regularly used only in the Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, where it includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka.) After the Ross announcement, journalists wanted to know exactly what Ross’s own area of responsibility covered. In particular, did it include Afghanistan and Pakistan, the original entry point to “Southwest Asia” of the Cold War strategists? Hadn’t responsibllity for both countries already been given to Richard Holbrooke, named only a month earlier as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan?

At first, even the acting State Department spokesman, Robert Wood, didn’t know just what “Southwest Asia” included, which made for an embarrassing exchange at the Department’s daily press briefing. (Question: “You guys named an envoy for Southwest Asia. I presume that you know what countries that includes.” Wood: “Yes. Of course, we know. I just—I don’t have the list to run off—you know, right off the top of my head here.”

But the next day, Wood had an answer:

MR. WOOD: Let me give you my best—our best read of this. From our standpoint, the countries that make up areas of the Gulf and Southwest Asia include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, and those are the countries.

QUESTION: Not—not Afghanistan and Pakistan?

MR. WOOD: Look, Ambassador Ross will look at the entire region, should he be asked to, including Afghanistan. But this is something that would be worked out. You were—you asked the question yesterday about Ambassador Holbrooke and whether there was going to be some kind of, I don’t know, conflict over who is working in—on that particular issues in that country.

Look, Ambassador Ross and Ambassador Holbrooke will work together where necessary if they need to, if there’s some kind of overlap. But that’s, in essence, the State Department’s geographical breakdown of Southwest Asia.

QUESTION: Okay. So it does not—it is not the same breakdown as the military uses?

MR. WOOD: No, the military uses a different breakdown, but I’d have to refer you to them for their specific breakdown.

QUESTION: So it doesn’t include Jordan? It doesn’t include—

MR. WOOD: I just gave you the breakdown as I—as the State Department breaks it down.

QUESTION: So if Ambassador Ross is special envoy—special advisor for Gulf and Southwest Asia, what is the difference between Gulf and Southwest Asia?

MR. WOOD: Look—

QUESTION: For me, this is Gulf.

MR. WOOD: Well, it may be for you. For others, it may be different. I’d have to—I’ve given you what the Department’s position is with regard to the geographic makeup of the region.

Why did the State Department construe “Southwest Asia” so narrowly—so much so that it really is indistinguishable from “The Gulf”? That’s a matter for speculation. One report says Ross did have Afghanistan and Pakistan on the list of countries he thought belonged in the package. Holbrooke reportedly insisted they both be dropped, and got his way.

But it’s already clear that last week added yet another layer of confusion to the terminology the United States inflicts on the region to suit its own political, diplomatic, and strategic requirements. There is a “Near East” and a “Middle East” and a “Greater Middle East” (GME) and a “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) and a “Broader Middle East and North Africa” (BMENA). And now, alongside the Defense Department’s greater “Southwest Asia,” we have the lesser “Southwest Asia” of the State Department as scaled down for Ross. (This is not to be confused with the “Southwest Asia” of the State Department’s own Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Not a single country in that bureau’s “Southwest Asia” is identical to Ross’s.) Of course, labels tend to slip and slide across the map over time, depending on circumstance. It’s just remarkable to see them slip and slide at one time, in one building.

Meanwhile, in Iran, there is no confusion, only outrage that the appointment of Ross mentions “The Gulf,” as opposed to the Persian Gulf. Iran has waged a persistent campaign to keep the Persian adjective firmly fastened to the Gulf. But the Iranian government won’t take offense at Iran’s inclusion in “Southwest Asia”—to the contrary. Last year a leading Iranian journalist wrote a column entitled “There Is No Middle East.” The message:

The people of Southwest Asia and North Africa should not use the appellation Middle East to describe their home region because it was coined by European imperialists. The use of such non-indigenous terms only serves to reinforce mental slavery and subjugation…. The vocabulary that we use influences our thought patterns. If Muslims use Eurocentric vocabulary, even when speaking our own languages, it will undermine our sense of identity. A better substitute for the Middle East/North Africa would be Southwest Asia/North Africa, which could be abbreviated as SWANA.

Don’t Persians know that the naming of Asia is owed to… the Greeks?.

••

Below: Jimmy Carter delivers his January 4, 1980 televised address concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (There is a brief preface on the Iran hostages.) His White House diary records this as an “Address to the Nation on the situation in Southwest Asia.” Notice the prop in the opening shot: a globe positioned so as to show the region. Toward the end of this segment, the camera pans across a map. (If you cannot see the embedded clip, or wish to view the entire address, click here.)

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Some of the many interactive geography quizzes on the web ask visitors to identify the countries and capitals of the Middle East. We assume MESH readers have no problem there, so we’ve collected links to more challenging quizzes. There’s no end to learning.

• Iraq. The United States has been at war in Iraq for five years, but only one in three young Americans can even find it on the map. You can find it, but can you identify all of Iraq’s governates and their capital cities? There are two good versions of the governates quiz, here and here. And once you’ve aced that, move on to the capitals quiz.

• Iran. This weblog has devoted much attention to Iran, the rising power. An Iranian who purports to know something about the United States can probably identify the great State of Texas on a map. So can you identify the great province of Fars? Try your hand at this quiz.

And there is also much talk about how Iran’s ethnic groups might be turned against the Islamic regime. Take this quiz and see whether you can find them.

• Afghanistan and Yemen. U.S. forces have been in Afghanistan even longer than they have been in Iraq, and the President-elect wants to send more. Take the same rigorous test for provinces of Afghanistan, in two versions, here and here. And for the truly expert (or for Yemenis), see if you can navigate another hot spot in the GWOT, by identifying the governates of Yemen, here.

• More fun/frustration. Forget about those simple interactive quizzes that ask you to identify leaders or flags, and try these instead. Here are ten Middle Eastern countries; order them by population size. And here are another ten; order them by total military expenditure. (The answers are supposedly based on the CIA World Factbook.)

The online journal Heartland: Eurasian Review of Geopolitics devotes its latest issue to “The Pakistani Boomerang,” and provides this map of the situation on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, as prepared by Limes, an Italian review of geopolitics. The map shows the tribal areas, sites of clashes between Pakistani forces and jihadists, and cross-border infiltration routes of the Taliban and other jihadists. Click on the thumbnail to view the map.

Fifteen years from now, when classified documents produced today begin to be declassified, we will surely look back with some discomfort and see just how far off some of our judgments were when written in 2008. Such is the nature of intelligence assessments. What would be worse, however, would be for us to look back fifteen years hence and find ourselves stuck in much the same place we are today.

This reflection is prompted by reading a recently declassified August 1993 report, “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous,” written by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Its subject was the possible spillover effect of Afghan Mujahidin fighters and support networks moving on to fight in other jihad conflicts, alongside other militant Islamic groups worldwide. Much of the report could be applied to the themes Daniel Byman raises in a recent post on this blog, about Al Qaeda in Iraq.

For example, writing in 2008 Byman notes that “fighters who went to Iraq learned a new set of capabilities that are now dispersed to the far corners of the earth.” Compare that to the 1993 report, which found that “the support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan Mujahidin is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide.” When these veteran fighters dispersed, the report presciently predicted, “their knowledge of communications equipment and experiences in logistics planning will enhance the organizational and offensive capabilities of the militant groups to which they are returning.”

Writing in 2008, Byman very rightly noted that “many of the foreign fighters in Iraq will go home, and even small numbers of fighters may radicalize and change the orientation of existing local groups, as happened with Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon.” A section of the 1993 report, entitled “When the Boys Come Home,” noted that these veteran volunteer fighters “are welcomed as victorious Muslim fighters of a successful jihad against a superpower” and “have won the respect of many Muslims—Arab and non-Arab—who venerate the jihad.”

At that time, these Mujahidin returned to Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Libya and beyond, where they trained local militants and further radicalized local groups. Libya, the 1993 report notes, was once one of the largest backers of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (since then designated a terrorist by the United States and the UN) but “now fears the returning veterans and has lashed out publicly against them.” Indeed, several of these Libyan veterans formed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and became senior members of core Al Qaeda. In 2006, the U.S. government would note that “The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group threatens global safety and stability through the use of violence and its ideological alliance with al Qaida and other brutal terrorist organizations.”

The 1993 report describes several trends that remain issues of serious concern today, including some of the same streams of financial support that continue to finance today’s militant Islamist groups. To the present-day reader, who will digest this 1993 report with an eye towards the conflict in Iraq, perhaps the most disturbing analytical judgement (which could have been pulled out of a current National Intelligence Estimate), is this:

The war-era network of state sponsors and private patrons which continues to support the mujahidin has no rigid structure and no clearly defined command center, but receives guidance from several popular Islamic leaders and financial support from charitable Islamic organizations and wealthy individuals. Key figures who have emerged as the mentors of the mujahidin provide one another with the contacts and conduits needed to keep the militant groups they support in business.

The network circa 1993 was not an exact parallel to today’s combination of Al Qaeda operatives (a smaller but no less committed cadre) and like-minded followers of a virtually-networked, leaderless jihad. But the 1993 warning of an unstructured network of jihadists moving on from their current area of operations to other battlefronts could have been written this morning.

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(A MESH member who prefers to remain anonymous submits the following comment on the film Charlie Wilson’s War.)

This is a movie made by a highly sophisticated political and artistic mind, someone—the director—who knows all the arguments and charges and nuances of what this important episode has come to mean to various interpreters. I came away feeling that the film is aimed at four different audiences, the last of the four being the most important.

The first and most inconsequential audience is people like us, who know a lot about all of the doings covered in the story and who, like me, will find the movie to be a rather charming bad-boy fairy tale comedy involving some preposterous assertions.

The second audience, I imagine (I’m hardly knowledgable about the cinema “industry”) is the famous 18 to 29 demographic. They will like the sex scenes and proliferation of the F word. They also will delight in the parodies of Washington authority-figures. The battle scenes in Afghanistan will also be attractive to them as almost as good as video games, and about as meaningful. The geopolitics of it all will be utterly lost on them, as they wouldn’t be able to tell you what a “Soviet” was anyway.

The third audience would be those in East Texas and elsewhere across “real” America, where the story will seem to be a delightfully stirring tale of how a Good Ole Boy from Nagadoches took on the effeminate Washington establishment bureaucracy and whupped those Commies.

The fourth audience is the one that really matters to those who produced and directed the movie. That would be people like themselves: well-to-do, highly educated, politically active “Progressives” who proclaimed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that “We (America) brought it on ourselves.” To them, the underlying story is that the U.S. supply of weapons to the Afghan Mujahedin virtually created the movement which would later emerge as the Taliban, would energize Al Qaeda by proving that holy warriors could win a world-historical victory over a powerful industrailized imperial power, and would launch the religiously-driven terrorist war against America.

Finally, as an example of the sophisticated fine touch of the makers of this film, there is the vignette early on when Congressman Wilson in the corridor of the House is told that The Speaker wants to put him on the Ethics Committee looking into the charges against John Murtha. Wilson snaps back, saying that the charges against Murtha are baseless. Only those closely following the 2006 anti-Iraq War movement, in which Congressman Murtha’s calls for the United States to pull the troops out in acceptance of defeat were central, would recognize that the film makers here are trying to refute the re-emerged criticism of Murtha for being involved in the “Abscam” scandal of the time in which the movie is set. In Charlie Wilson’s War every little scene has a meaning all its own.