Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 13th, 2010:

Amidst all of the (mostly pessimistic) reporting on Afghanistan, one squib caught my eye: Congressman Frank Wolf has sent a letter to President Obama calling for the establishment of an Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group. The proposal is self-consciously modeled on the Iraq Study Group (ISG, aka the Baker-Hamilton Commission), which Congressman Wolf also helped launch.

Wolf’s new letter has not generated a lot of DC buzz yet, but I would not be surprised if it gathered steam this fall when Congress returns from recess. Whether it makes sense to launch such an independent group is a separate matter, and in assessing that question it would be helpful to clear up some myths about the Iraq Study Group.

Wolf initially proposed the Iraq Study Group back in the summer of 2005, at a time of eroding public support for the Iraq mission amidst vigorous elite debate about whether President Bush had a viable strategy or was simply “staying the course” in Iraq. Critics would complain loudly about what the Bush administration was doing — but then recommend back to the administration a course of action basically identical to the one already being pursued (I called this “bushwhacking” in a chapter I wrote on the politics of the war on terror in Lessons for a Long War, a book edited by Tom Donnelly and Fred Kagan). Critics who visited Iraq and heard General George Casey explain the military effort (called the “Casey Campaign Plan”) and heard U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad explain the broader political strategy tended to come back more encouraged than when they went.

Full post here