In Search Of Success.(The Talk of the Town)(United States's foreign relations)

In 2007, a Guantanamo military commission reviewed prisoner No. 008, also known as Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, a designated enemy combatant who had been held without legal rights for about six years. Rasoul told his captors that he had "never been America's enemy and I never intend to be." Guantanamo's quasi-jurists transferred him to Afghanistan's government, which set him free. This spring, under the name Mullah Abdullah Zakir, he has resurfaced as one of the most vicious and effective Taliban commanders in Afghanistan's southern Helmand Province, where thousands of recently deployed U.S. troops are now arriving to join the battle.

As a parable of the United States and its enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Rasoul's case has a familiar, circular quality. See in its particulars what you will: the deficiencies of the Bush Administration's detention system; incompetent intelligence collecting; an Afghan government without a plausible justice system. The long-lived trend is of greater consequence. Exactly three decades ago, in the spring of 1979, an uprising against Afghanistan's then-Soviet-backed regime drew the Carter Administration into discussions about how to assist the region's Islamist rebels. Ever since, the United States has been struggling to grasp the patterns of cause and effect in its own policymaking.

The miscalculations across five Administrations are by now generally understood: near-unequivocal support for anti-American militias during the nineteen-eighties; averted eyes as Pakistan pursued its covert nuclear ambitions; the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the failure to recognize the menace of Al Qaeda during the nineteen-nineties; erratic investments in Pakistan's democracy, economy, and civil society; and, most recently, a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 which did not defeat Al Qaeda or the Taliban but chased them into Pakistan, where they regrouped and have proceeded to destabilize a country now endowed with atomic bombs.

For several months, the Obama Administration has been rethinking American policy, hoping to depart from this history of dysfunction. It has announced a formal strategy: an adaptive counterinsurgency doctrine that seeks to emphasize the security and the prosperity of the Afghan and Pakistani people above all; economic and development aid; vigorous diplomacy; and carefully targeted warfare, particularly aimed at Al Qaeda. Already, however, Obama and his advisers have had to confront the puzzle of which policies in their new portfolio will promote stability in the region, and which will promote instability.

Just a few weeks ago, the Taliban advanced so close to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, that it seemed the Pakistan Army might have lost its will to fight. The Obama Administration urged the Army into battle. Fortunately, given the stakes, the Army acted, and it has evidently fought with gusto in recent days, but to such an extent that it has now churned up a million internal refugees, who constitute yet another pool of displaced and disaffected civilians that the Taliban will surely attempt to exploit.

"A key aspect to the new strategy is to put more attention and resources toward Pakistan's economic and governance challenges," Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to the region, told Congress last week. Yet Pakistan's prideful insistence on its sovereignty means, among other things, that the United States cannot provide relief directly to internally displaced civilians. Their fate will now depend on Pakistan's fragile and unpopular government, with support from charities and the United Nations; the Obama Administration must stand in the rear, urgently working its ...