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The AfPak PuzzleThe good news: Obama understands what's wrong in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The bad news: He can't fix it.

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, May 7, 2009, at 6:58 PM ET

We finally have a president who grasps what needs to be done about Afghanistan and Pakistan. The frightening thing is that much of what needs to be done lies beyond the scope of American power.

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President Barack Obama realizes, to a degree that George W. Bush never did, that the two countries can't be dealt with separately, that the threats facing each are intertwined. He recognizes that Pakistan is central to the entire region's security and that its fate will affect Afghanistan far more than vice versa. He understands that political and economic development are at least as decisive as military strength. His special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has assembled a team of advisers who know the complexities of South Asian politics as deeply as anyone. Yet despite all this knowledge and insight, there's only so much that the United States can affect, much less control (and most of the major players know this, too).

For much of this week, Obama, Holbrooke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top officials have been meeting with the Afghan and Pakistani presidents, Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari. Everyone has emerged from these meetings with encouraging words about the common need to battle the Taliban and to strengthen democratic institutions.

Today, in an unprecedented move, the secretaries of the interior, agriculture, and other domestic agencies met with their Afghan and Pakistani counterparts—who traveled to Washington along with Karzai and Zardari—to discuss ways of improving civilian infrastructure. As those versed in counterinsurgency well know, and as Obama himself has frequently said, the best way to build loyalty to the government—and thus undercut the appeal of insurgents—is to display competence in providing basic services.

But there's an enormous practical barrier to this idea. No American diplomat, Agency for International Development worker, or other civil servant or contractor can, or should, be expected to roam Afghanistan without security forces standing by, and it's unclear where these forces are going to come from. President Obama has ordered an increase in U.S. troops; most of them will arrive this summer. But their main mission will be fighting insurgents along the eastern border and protecting Afghan civilians. There simply aren't enough of them to protect American civilians, too. (And that task involves more than sending out a handful of bodyguards; those guards, in turn, require a perimeter defense, a supply network, and so forth. This is a perennial paradox of counterinsurgency operations: Security requires development, but development requires security.)

Of course these civilian advisers could be stationed in Kabul. But the last thing Karzai, or any other popularly elected president of Afghanistan, needs is a vast American apparatus—a replay of Baghdad's Green Zone—that makes it seem as though foreign infidels are running the country.

The situation in Pakistan is more delicate still, because we barely have a presence there at all—nor are we likely to have one anytime soon. Pakistanis hold a very dim view of the United States; in the Pew Global Survey's most recent poll, they are second only to the Turks in this regard. Our standing may have improved a bit since Obama's election (the numbers are not yet in), but nobody anticipates that U.S. troops will be tolerated on Pakistani soil. Mere drone attacks, aimed at Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, have triggered widespread resentment, because they have occasionally killed civilians as well. The Islamabad government has permitted a small number of Pakistani soldiers to be trained by Americans in counterinsurgency, but only outside Pakistan's borders, a restriction that limits the training's relevance, since counterinsurgency is by nature a local enterprise, varying case by case and requiring on-the-scene calibration.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

Photograph on Slate's home page of Barack Obama with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.

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