When President Biden announced in the spring that America would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by the fall, he spoke of terrorism threats — but never mentioned Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan. In threat assessments about Afghanistan as late as April, the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, barely brought up ISIS-K. On Aug. 20 Mr. Biden mentioned the group, in a speech on the last-minute effort to evacuate stranded U.S. citizens and vulnerable Afghans after the Taliban had overrun Afghanistan.

Read the rest at The New York Times

This Q&A with Allen S. Weiner was originally published on the Stanford Law School website.

As the Taliban’s forces closed in on Kabul on Sunday, August 15, 2021, the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left his country, the acting U.S. ambassador was evacuated, the American flag on the embassy in the country’s capital lowered—and the Biden administration’s plans for an orderly withdrawal of troops, diplomats, and Afghan aids and translators by the anniversary of 9/11 dashed as a scramble for the door becomes more chaotic. After twenty years, 2 trillion dollars, and the lives of almost 2,500 American personnel lost, President Biden said it was time to let the Afghan government and military stand on its own. Here, Stanford Law national security law expert Allen Weiner, who is a research affiliate at FSI’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, discusses the U.S. mission to Afghanistan, its withdrawal, and potential consequences.

What was the American/NATO objective when we invaded Afghanistan almost twenty years ago?

The immediate United States objective at the time of the 2001 invasion was to destroy Al Qaeda’s base of operations in Afghanistan and to kill or capture senior Al Qaeda leaders there.  As those of us who are old enough to remember will recall, the invasion (“Operation Enduring Freedom”) was the U.S.-led response to the 9/11 attacks against World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon that were carried out by Al Qaeda. Because the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had a symbiotic relationship with—and provided a safe haven to—Al Qaeda on Afghanistan’s territory, the U.S. and its NATO allies also sought to drive the Taliban from power. At the time, the Taliban was fighting a civil war in Afghanistan and by October 2001 had achieved effective control over most of the country. President Bush and others quickly began to emphasize an additional objective for overthrowing the Taliban— to liberate the Afghan people from the regime’s repressive practices. We sought to promote basic human rights and to end the Taliban’s oppression of women.

Were those objectives met?

The U.S. and its NATO allies largely met those initial goals. Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan were destroyed, many of its leaders were killed and captured (although some, including Osama bin Laden, managed to escape at least initially), and its ability to plan, finance, and execute major global terrorist operations was severely diminished. U.S. and NATO forces drove the Taliban from power, and after a transitional period, a new government led by Hamid Karzai was established. Women and girls resumed participation in public life in Afghanistan, including education.

But those successes were fleeting?

As we know, the successes did not last. Although Al Qaeda never resumed significant operations in Afghanistan, the organization metastasized, and lethal variants of the organization arose in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, and the Maghreb, among other places. Other terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State and al Shabaab, either grew out of or have affiliations of varying degrees of intensity with Al Qaeda. We have also seen attacks carried out by homegrown terrorist organizations with only loose affiliations to Al Qaeda, sometimes only ideological affinities. So, while Operation Enduring Freedom significantly disrupted terrorist operations originating from Afghanistan, it cannot be said to have eliminated the threat of transnational terrorism.

And the Taliban continued to be a simmering problem in Afghanistan, didn’t it?

The goal of eradicating the Taliban, obviously, also was unmet. Although then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared an end to major combat operations against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in May 2003, a revitalized Taliban renewed an intense civil war in the summer of  2006. That civil war against the Afghanistan government—which appears now to have been won by the Taliban—continued with varying degrees of intensity until the past few days. And if another of the goals of the invasion was to improve the protection of human rights in Afghanistan, we must recognize that civilians suffered terribly during the civil war.

Are there any (hopefully) enduring successes from the twenty-year investment by the U.S. and NATO?

Afghanistan did make significant progress in terms of economic development and the realization of at least some civil and political rights. Per capita GDP rose dramatically in the decades after the U.S. invasion. The status of women and girls improved along many dimensions, including health, life expectancy, education levels, and participation in government institutions. The Taliban’s victory clearly imperils these gains.

The Trump Administration negotiated an agreement with Taliban in 2020 providing for the withdrawal of U.S. Forces from Afghanistan by May 2021, as part of which the Taliban promised not to deliberatively attack U.S. troops during the withdrawal period.  Since then, the Taliban has been steadily gaining control over provinces in the county, and civilian casualties have been rising. Was it pure fantasy that the US was maintaining the peace?

The Trump Administration’s February 2020 agreement with Taliban, in which the U.S. promised to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in a little over a year, even though the Taliban did not agree to even a ceasefire, much less reach any political agreements with the government about ending the civil war, was the beginning of the end. It clearly signaled to both the Taliban and the government that the U.S. was now concerned only with the security of its own forces, and that the Afghan government was on its own. Given that the Taliban was making progress in gaining territory, at least in the countryside, even with U.S. troops present, many analysts—including the U.S. intelligence community—forecast the eventual overthrow of the Afghan government. It is only the shocking speed with which that happened that is a real surprise.

The fall of the Afghan government has taken many, including apparently some in the Biden administration, by surprise. Why did the collapse of the Afghan military happen so swiftly?  And what role did the Afghan police force and corruption play?

Many commentators who have been critical of the U.S. effort to build up the Afghan military have long expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), and many analysts predicted that the Taliban would ultimately prevail against the government after the U.S. and its NATO allies withdrew from Afghanistan. That said, I don’t think anyone predicted it would happen as swiftly as it did.

Multiple factors have been cited to explain how the Taliban—a force estimated to comprise some 75,000 fighters—defeated the 300,000-member strong ANDSF. First, despite the seeming superiority of the government forces, conditions for ANDSF soldiers were quite abysmal. Many reportedly went months without being paid. They lacked ammunition and even food. There are reports of incompetent leadership within the armed forces, leaving Afghan soldiers exposed in the middle of pitch battles, without reinforcements.

A second factor is the pervasive and corrosive corruption among Afghan government actors.  This helps explain why—despite the U.S. infusion of billions of dollars in military assistance— Afghan soldiers went without pay and lacked adequate ammunition.  It also explains why in some cases, after Afghan forces fighting alongside U.S. forces succeeded in clearing territory of Taliban insurgents, the Afghan government would fail to hold it. The notoriously corrupt and unprofessional Afghanistan police forces—who were in charge of security after territory had been cleared of Taliban fighters by the ANDSF—reportedly engaged in predatory practices targeting the local community or could be bought off by the insurgency to cede ground back.

Third, some critics of the U.S. effort to modernize the Afghan army have long argued that the ANDSF lacked resolve to aggressively engage the Taliban insurgency in the absence of active support from U.S. soldiers. Although there are many stories of Afghan soldiers fighting fiercely, there are anecdotal accounts of Afghan armed forces engaging in “mini non-aggression deals” with Taliban fighters in their area of responsibility in an effort to avoid armed engagement.

Fourth, the lack of motivation of Afghan armed forces was exacerbated in recent years by the unpopularity and perceived fecklessness of the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani. Re-elected in 2019 after an election with sharply disputed results, in which voter turnout was less than 20 percent, the Ghani government was widely seen as ineffective in addressing corruption, effectively managing the country, or confronting the growing security threat posed by the Taliban. It became a common refrain among Afghan soldiers that the Ghani government was not one worth fighting for.

Fifth, it appears that in at least some provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban, in essence, offered government forces negotiated settlements to cede control of territory. In some cases, this involved offering payments to government soldiers to switch sides—a particularly attractive offer for soldiers who had not been paid in months. It is likely that the Taliban offered broader commitments, e.g., not to engage in retribution against government soldiers who abandoned the fight, although I have not yet seen reports of such deals.

Sixth, there a seasonal calendar to armed conflict in Afghanistan, and the Taliban has typically engaged in its major military operations during the spring and summer.  Delaying the U.S. withdrawal by six months, so that U.S. forces did not leave during the height of what is known in Afghanistan as “fighting season,” might have given the ANDSF more time to prepare to defend Afghanistan’s cities. Although given how swiftly Afghan government forces were swept aside, this now seems doubtful to me.

Finally, from an operational standpoint, the U.S. has invested billions of dollars in Afghanistan to attempt to build up a military that functions in ways that resemble how a NATO army operates, with air power and advanced weaponry. Such a military depends on extremely complex behind-the-scenes logistics arrangements. In Afghanistan, these logistics systems depended heavily on U.S. contractors, who also began withdrawing from the country after President Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal. Many of the aircraft in Afghanistan’s air force, for instance, were grounded because they lacked parts needed for repairs or routine servicing. One of the lessons of the defeat of the ANDSF is that building a foreign country’s military also requires developing indigenous logistics capacity.

Troops had been drawn down to about 3,000 and negotiations that excluded the Afghan gov’t were conducted with the Taliban during the Trump administration. Could Biden, realistically, have rewound the clock–bringing more troops back? Was Biden pushed into a tough corner?

Although the withdrawal agreement the Trump Administration concluded with the Taliban in February 2020 may not have initiated the death spiral for the Afghanistan government and military, it certainly catalyzed it, as I noted above. It did put the Biden Administration in a tough position; the only option would have been to renege on the agreement, leave U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and to seek to renegotiate the agreement. That said, although that may have been a tough position, it was not an impossible one, as evidenced by the fact that the Biden Administration unilaterally changed the agreed upon date by which U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan from May to August.

I’m not a military strategist, so I can’t say whether maintaining a force of 3,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan would have changed the military situation on the ground. But I think if the U.S. had said that it would not withdraw the U.S. military presence until there was a ceasefire and the Taliban and the Afghan government have negotiated a power sharing agreement/end to the civil war, that might have changed the Taliban’s political assessment about how to proceed. I stress that this only “might” have changed the Taliban’s thinking. The fact that the Taliban has been fighting for twenty years suggests that the group was very determined to regain control of Afghanistan and re-establish its vision of life for the Afghan people.

I understand that Russia and other countries have negotiated agreements to ensure the safety of their embassies and diplomatic staff so that they can continue operations in Kabul. Have the Americans done the same? If not, how significant will that be for the future safety of the U.S and the threat of terrorism? Will we have “eyes on the ground” and intelligence sources?

The United States is currently withdrawing all of its diplomatic personnel from Afghanistan and will presumably once again shutter its embassy in Kabul. The U.S. will face a difficult question about whether to recognize the new Taliban regime that will be installed in Afghanistan, and if so, whether to resume diplomatic relations and re-open its embassy. If the Taliban regime pursues the policies that characterized its period of rule in the late 1990s, particularly the severe repression of women and girls, I doubt the U.S. will re-establish relations. Even if the U.S. did re-establish diplomatic relations, it is inconceivable that the Taliban would permit the United States to maintain the large intelligence and security presence we have had in Afghanistan over the past two decades. So, we will not have the ability gather intelligence on the ground or to conduct military operations against any terrorist threats that emerge in Afghanistan.

The Taliban has pledged that it will not allow Afghanistan’s territory to be used by terrorist groups that seek to conduct hostile operations against foreign countries. Although the Taliban learned in 2001 about the potential costs to it of harboring such groups on Afghanistan’s territory—namely, being overthrown by the U.S. and its NATO allies—there are obviously reasons to question the Taliban’s promise.

Is there anything Biden can do now to minimize the damage?

The Biden administration does not have much leverage at this point. The administration will presumably signal to the Taliban that it will closely monitor its conduct with respect to preventing its territory from being used by terrorist groups and its performance on human rights issues, including the treatment of women and girls. Should the Taliban perform poorly on these issues, the U.S. could try to secure sanctions against the Taliban regime through the Security Council; after all, the Council had imposed sanctions on the Taliban in the 1990s in response to its providing a safe haven to Osama bin Laden and its violation of human rights, particularly discrimination against women and girls. Today, however, it is unclear whether Russia and China, which are likely to seek stable relations with the Taliban government, would support such sanctions. That means the U.S. would probably be limited to unilateral sanctions as a way of signaling disapproval of, and seeking to change the behavior of, a prospective Taliban government.

Brett McGurk, former presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat ISIS, joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss the last minute foreign policy moves, including the decision to draw down the number of troops in Afghanistan, that President Trump is saddling the incoming Biden administration with.

Watch interview at MSNBC

The United States must at some point depart from Afghanistan and bring this costly “forever war” to a conclusion. With over 2,400 U.S. servicemembers killed, many more wounded, and nearly a trillion dollars spent to date, America’s leaders are under an obligation to design and execute a plan that stops a decades-long hemorrhaging of American blood and treasure.

Read the Rest at War on the Rocks

On Monday, The Washington Post published an extensive analysis based on documents containing interviews with more than 400 people involved in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The papers show not only that U.S. policy under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump failed to bring peace and modernization to Afghanistan, but also that policymakers were aware that such an outcome was unlikely — all while emphasizing progress in public.

Read the Rest at Washington Post

Note: This piece originally appeared at Lawfare.

Many analysts, practitioners, and scholars are skeptical of the efficacy of drone strikes for counterterrorism, suggesting that they provide short-term gains at best and are counterproductive at worst. However, despite how widespread these views are, reliable evidence on the consequences of drone strikes remains limited. My research on drone warfare and U.S. counterterrorism—some of which was recently published in International Security—addresses this issue by examining the U.S. drone war in Pakistan from 2004 to 2014. Contrary to the skeptics, I find that drone strikes in Pakistan were effective in degrading the targeted armed groups. And, troublingly, they succeeded in doing so even though they harmed civilians.

Three Key Findings

I have conducted research in Pakistan and the United States over the last few years, gathering new qualitative data on the politics of the war and its effects on the two main targets, al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban. I have also evaluated detailed quantitative data on drone strikes and violence by al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban. This research offers three important findings.

First, the U.S. drone war was damaging for the organizational trajectories of al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban. I found that after the United States surged its surveillance and targeting capabilities in 2008, both groups suffered increasing setbacks; they lost bases, their operational capabilities were reduced, their ranks were checked by growing numbers of desertions, and the organizations fractured politically. These effects appear to have persisted until 2014. In a related paper, my University of Michigan colleague Dylan Moore and I show that during the drone program in the Waziristan region, violence by the two groups fell substantially.

Second, the U.S. drone war disrupted al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban not just by killing their leaders and specialized rank-and-file members, but also by heightening the perceived risk of being targeted. Across a variety of empirical materials, including some collected through fieldwork, I found that both groups were direly constrained by the fear—a constant sense of anticipation—of drone strikes, which crippled routine movement and communication. In addition, leaders and rank-and-file jihadis regularly viewed each other with the suspicion of being spies for the drone program, which contributed to their organizational fragmentation.

Third, the notion of increased recruitment for al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban due to civilian harm in drone strikes is questionable. In the local battlefield, I did not find evidence of any tangible increase in recruitment. Interviews with some surviving mid-level members of al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban negated the impression that the groups benefited from a stream of angry recruits. Instead, a recurring theme was that they experienced desertions and manpower shortages because of the stress of operating under drones. To the extent that new recruits were available, both groups struggled to integrate them in their organizations because of the fear that they might be spies for the drone program.

Beyond Pakistan?

The U.S. drone war in Pakistan is a crucial case of U.S. counterterrorism policy, but it is one of many other campaigns. The U.S. government is waging such campaigns in Yemen and Somalia, and considering an expansion in the Sahara. In my work, I identify two factors which are important for the dynamics evident in Pakistan to hold generally.

First, the United States must have extensive knowledge of the civilian population where the armed group is based. The counterterrorism force needs such knowledge to generate intelligence leads on their targets, who are often hiding within the civilian population. This comes from detailed population data sharing by local partners, large-scale communication interception, and pattern-of-life analysis of target regions from sophisticated drones.

Second, the United States must be able to exploit available intelligence leads in a timely manner. As members of targeted armed groups consistently try to escape detection, most intelligence has a limited shelf life. The capability to act quickly depends on the bureaucratic capacity to process intelligence, decentralized decision-making for targeting, and rapid-strike capabilities like armed drones.

In Pakistan, the United States met these criteria with an abundance of technology and high-quality local partner cooperation. Starting in 2008, the United States mobilized a large fleet of drones and surveillance technologies to develop granular knowledge of the civilian population in the targeted regions. Despite deep political rifts on the conflict in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency obtained extensive covert support from Pakistani intelligence against al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban, which enabled it to regularly locate targets. With ample targeting authority and armed drones operating from nearby bases, U.S. forces were able to exploit available leads.

In Yemen, however, the United States has struggled to develop knowledge of the civilian population and act on available intelligence. My interviews with U.S. officials and a leaked government document suggest that, until 2013, U.S. forces did not sustain aerial surveillance of targeted regions, the Yemeni state’s capacity in support of operations remained poor, and the targeting rules were stringent.

Implications for U.S. Counterterrorism Policy

The U.S. government’s preference for drone strikes is motivated by the desire to prevent attacks against the American homeland. My research suggests that the drone program has the potential to inflict enough damage on the targeted armed groups to upset their ability to plot and organize attacks in the United States.

The United States also deploys drone strikes to manage jihadi threats to allied regimes. In such cases, the political value of strikes depends, in part, on the capability of the local partner. An effective drone deployment can go a long way in providing a necessary condition for restoring order. But the local partner must ultimately step up to consolidate state control.

For example, President Obama’s drone policy degraded al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban, securing the American homeland and substantially reducing the threat to the nuclear-armed Pakistani state. The Obama administration’s policy was sufficient because the Pakistani state was relatively capable and could build on the gains made by U.S. counterterrorism strikes. Indeed, Pakistan’s ground operations, although contentiously timed, consolidated those gains.

In contrast, in today’s Afghanistan, the U.S. government cannot rely on instruments of counterterrorism alone. U.S. officials realize that just degrading the Afghan Taliban and the Islamic State is unlikely to stabilize the country. The Afghan government remains so weak that it will struggle to consolidate territorial control even after substantial degradation of its armed foes.

Finally, a key limitation of counterterrorism strikes is that they cannot alleviate the ideological appeal of jihadi actors like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Strikes cannot substitute for efforts at countering online jihadi propaganda and de-radicalization. Thus, they should not be seen as a silver bullet that can defeat armed groups operating from safe havens and weak states.

Civilian Protection and Drone Strikes

Civilian harm in U.S. counterterrorism remains a vital challenge. While moral objections to civilian casualties are a powerful reason to reconsider drone operations, my research suggests that strategic concerns, like a surge in local violence or increased recruitment of targeted organizations, are not. In Pakistan, for example, drone strikes harmed civilians while also undermining al-Qaeda and Pakistan Taliban. Similarly, the U.S.-led counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria was very difficult for the civilian population, and yet also inflicted losses on the Islamic State.

If civilian casualties do not affect the strategic outcomes of counterterrorism campaigns, then the U.S. government must be convinced to protect civilians for purely moral reasons. How responsive might the U.S. government be to such appeals? It is unclear. The Obama administration was not transparent about the use of drone strikes. Under President Trump, the lack of transparency has worsened. Concerned policymakers and human rights activists must continue to push the U.S. government to be more transparent and to protect civilians caught up in counterterrorism campaigns.

Russian leaders are grappling with difficult and complex foreign policy choices on Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. and NATO military exit, a Stanford expert says.

"Russian policy in Afghanistan is at a crossroads, with worsening relations with the West looming against the background of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict," wrote Kathryn Stoner, a Stanford political scientist and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, in a new article in the journal Asian Survey.

The Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s left haunting memories in the minds of Russian policymakers, "who have no interest in being trapped again in a war they can neither afford nor win," wrote Stoner in the article, titled "Russia’s 21st Century Interests in Afghanistan: Resetting the Bear Trap."

The Soviet-Afghan War from 1979 to 1989 was called a "Bear Trap" by some Western media, and thought to be a contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Power vacuum perils

Stoner said that as the U.S. pullout deadline approached in December 2014, Russia was critical of the arguably hasty retreat of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Some troops remained behind in an advisory role.

As she described it, Moscow's leaders thought a sudden power vacuum would leave a variety of threats within Afghanistan – weapons proliferation, corrupt police, a rising drug trade and radical Islamists, for example.

Of the latter, recent news reports indicate the Islamic State group has established a presence in Afghanistan; Russia has urged the United Nations Security Council to stop its expansion.

"On the ISIS vs. Taliban question," Stoner said in an interview, "it is a question of the lesser of two evils, of course, from a Russian perspective."

For Russia, she said, the Islamic State group may be more undesirable than the Taliban in Afghanistan because they are attempting to recruit young Russian Muslims to their cause, which could breed homegrown terrorists who return to Russia with the group's message and training.

"The other issue is that although Afghanistan was brutally ruled under the Taliban, it was more stable than it is currently. Still, neither group is pro-foreigner or pro-Russian especially," she added.

As Stoner wrote, in the interest of stability Russia has expressed possible support for moderate rank-and-file Taliban to be included in the Afghan government.

"Russian leaders point to the fact that heroin trafficking was less under the Taliban than in the past five years under the U.S./NATO coalition," noted Stoner, adding that narcotics were reaching the Russian population.

Meanwhile, Russia is exploring the possibility of moving additional troops to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as re-equipping those countries' armies to provide a "defensive zone in Central Asia against Afghan radical or narcotics incursions into the Russian heartland," according to Stoner.

The ideal Russian scenario in Afghanistan would have been for President Hamid Karzai to stay in power and a government of national reconciliation formed with moderate Taliban, she said. That scenario, however, has failed, and Russia will have to cope with an Afghanistan without Karzai.

Choices and a crossroads

Stoner believes Russia is faced with three choices. One is to return to its 1990s policy and support an updated version of the Northern Alliance as a way to create a northern buffer zone that protects its Central Asian allies from any incursions from Afghanistan.

The second is to cooperate with the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and perhaps a moderate Taliban, in governing Afghanistan.

"The latter strategy could have the advantage of reducing narcotics trafficking, but it risks allowing Afghanistan to again become a haven for radical Islamic terrorists," said Stoner.

Russia clearly does not want another front to open in its war on radical Islam – the Chechen conflict has already produced enough grief for the Russian population and its leadership, she noted.

A third option for the Russians, according to Stoner, would be to continue some degree of cooperation with Western forces in creating a protective zone around Central Asia. The problem for the Russians is that this might bring about a "counterbalancing strategy on the part of China, which would not fit with Russia's strategy."

Besides, it's a long shot, she added, as Russia's renewed conflict with the West over Ukraine has deeply damaged its ability to  cooperate with Western powers in and around Afghanistan.

"There are few reliable indications of which path Russia is likely to choose," wrote Stoner. "One can discern elements of each scenario in Russian statements and actions in Afghanistan."

She explained that Russian leaders want to reassert their country's prominence on the global stage.

"In many ways, Russia is resurgent internationally. It has emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union not as the superpower it was, but as a formidable regional power that cannot be discounted," said Stoner.

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia seeks to command the respect of the international community, though it can no longer rely on brute military force. Rather, it must today depend on adroit diplomatic or strategic moves to "act as facilitator or spoiler in many parts of the world," she wrote.

This Russian resurgence, she said, has played a role in its policy choices in Afghanistan since 2001. "It wants influence, but not ownership, in Central Asia, and ultimately in Afghanistan," she wrote.

As a result, Russia will act on the margins of the Afghanistan issue, leveraging its power to protect its own security interests in Central Asia.

"Russia has much to lose and little to gain by doing much more. For this reason, Russian policymakers are in the awkward position of not having wanted the Americans to come to Central Asia, but now, not wanting them to leave," she wrote.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.