hankyoreh

United States President Barack Obama approved a plan to send an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan yesterday, marking the beginning of a greater military presence in that country, as promised during his election campaign. Once those additional troops arrive in the summer, the United States will have more than 50,000 troops in Afghanistan.

The United States’ hasty Afghanistan troop surge will very probably repeat the same mistakes of its long-term occupation of Iraq, which has turned out to be a failure. For starters, it’s not clear what the goals are. The problems of Afghanistan are not going to be solved with a one-dimensional approach that says you just have to send more troops because the public security situation there continues to worsen. If isolating and eliminating the threat of al-Qaeda is the final goal, then the United States needs to widely reexamine the successes and failures of its existing approach and work to achieve international agreement on how to proceed. In particular, its attempt to put down the Taliban, a group that can be largely characterized as an indigenous political force, with military might, needs to change. It is wrong to increase troop size and ask other countries to do the same without first giving ample time to considering what a legitimate and effective Afghanistan policy would be.

Even more frustrating is the attitude among some in the Lee Myung-bak administration and the ruling Grand National Party. Ahead of the arrival in Seoul of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the GNP is said to have drafted an internal document considering the possibility of sending Korean troops to Afghanistan and affirming what the United States would do in return. GNP Supreme Council member Gong Sung-jin says the document was never submitted to an official party, probably body, but that Korea could demand high-tech weaponry from the Americans as payment for sending Koreans. His thinking is pathetic for plotting an inter-Korean arms race on the premise that Korea is definitely sending troops. You have to assume it is at least to some degree a reflection of the mood within the party to have a high-ranking party official saying such things.

The Lee Myung-bak administration is considering a plan that would send somewhere around 100 engineers, three to four times the size of the provincial reconstruction team, or PRT, active there now. That plan must not be allowed to become something that paves the way to sending troops. Even increasing the PRT should be decided with prudence, with consideration for the conditions and demands of the region. We cannot have a situation similar to the one in July 2007, in which 23 Koreans were abducted in Afghanistan.

The first U.S.-Korea foreign ministers’ talks since the inauguration of President Obama takes place in Seoul tomorrow. The most important item on the agenda needs to be the question of how to build a framework for package deal negotiations that can take the six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue to a new level. When it comes to the question of Afghanistan, Seoul should advise Washington to avoid repeating the mistakes of Iraq and make it clear Korea will not be sending troops.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]