As he prepares his Tuesday speech to present Americans with his plan to increase troops in Afghanistan, the US president Barack Obama could be forgiven for feeling like the economist in the old joke that finds him marooned on a desert island along with an engineer, a chemist and hundreds of cans of food but no way of opening them. The engineer gets to work trying to fashion tools for the job; the chemist tries combinations of salt water and sun to get the tins to rust. Having had no luck, they ask the economist to lend the insights of his profession. His answer: “Assume a can opener...”
The “can opener” in the assumptions of the Afghanistan exit strategy that Mr Obama will propose is the Afghan security forces. The president faces the unenviable task of trying to bridge the competing demands of a military commander on the ground who has warned that 40,000 new troops are needed simply to halt the Taliban’s momentum, and of a Congress controlled by his party but increasingly sceptical of the strategic purpose and economic viability of continuing a ground war in Afghanistan.
At the same time, he has to answer the question so acutely posed recently by the defence secretary, Robert Gates: “How do we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this is not open-ended?” (The Afghans and their neighbours expect that, sooner or later, the Americans will go – which is why the Taliban profits from the hedged bets of so many key players on and around the battlefield).
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