The US must do more than find solutions to dealing with its withdrawal from Iraq, and finding ways to reverse the course of the Afghan conflict. It needs to rethink the overall structure of its military posture and strategy in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. This requires the US to address is diplomatic and aid efforts as part of a broad approach to the region, but it also requires a new focus for USCENTCOM and significant changes in the way the US approaches the entire area of operations.
The Burke Chair has developed a summary briefing on what these changes should be, and the key areas that the new Administration and USCENTCOM commanders should examine. This briefing is entitled USCENTCOM and the Future: Establishing the Right Strategic Priorities and is available on the CSIS web site at: http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/081117_uscentcompres.pdf
The brief highlights several obvious priorities: the need to create successful political accommodation and create a stable and secure Iraq, the need to win the Afghan-Pakistan conflict, and the need to deal with the challenge posed by Iran.
The briefing also suggests, however, that the US has broader goals. It must seek a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace with the grim understanding that it may not be successful in the near term. It must recast its approach to the war on terrorism to strengthen cooperation with regional states, while also correcting the widespread impression in the region that the US is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, and sees reform more as a way of creating friendly regimes than of helping local governments and reformers address the underlying causes of terrorism.
The US must broaden its efforts to focus on energy security on a pragmatic basis, understanding that politics may call for “energy independence” but that US dependence on the global economy and real-world US energy needs mean that the US will remain strategically dependent on Gulf petroleum exports for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, the US needs to put far more emphasis on military to military engagement with friendly states in the region, build-up local partners to provide defense and counterterrorism capabilities, and reduce its forward military presence as it withdraws from Iraq. It also needs to be careful not to become overcommitted in Central and South Asia and to avoid being drawn into a 21st Century “great game” and the rivalry between India and Pakistan.
Other recent studies address these issues in more depth:
