Mr. Blackwill is disguising his master’s voice as a recipe for America. He says:

• "The Taliban are winning, we are losing," he said. "They have high morale and want to continue the insurgency. Plan A is going to fail. We need a Plan B
• "Let the Taliban control the Pashtun south and east, the American and allied price for preventing that is far too high."
• Mr Blackwill believes the US should only seek to defend those areas dominated by Afghanistan’s Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities by pulling out of bases in the south.  Blackwill in The Telegraph.

Blackwill was Counsellor to CFR in 2005. He has also been a Council member for 25 years. Most recently, Blackwill was senior fellow at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, from 2008 to 2010, after serving from 2004 to 2008 as President of BGR International, a Washington consulting firm. Blackwill is also a member of the Trilateral Commission and The Aspen Strategy Group; and on the boards of the Nixon Center.

Robert Blackwill is one of the new Western diplomats who seems to think that the the solution to Afghanistan is in partitioning it.

• As things stand, it seems unlikely the Blackwill/IISS/ASG argument will have much impact when President Obama approaches his December review.
• The word out of Washington is that the administration will stick to its counter-insurgency strategy, notwithstanding Joe Biden’s well-publicised reservations, and will listen to General Petraeus when he asks for a relatively slow drawdown of troops from next July

The conservative papers of Britain and the USA seem to give coverage to Blackwill–who has no credibility in America. However there is plenty of opposition to Blackwill.

• The National Review: A Very Bad Plan For Afghanistan.
• It (Blackwill’s Plan B) is ignorant because Blackwill ignores Afghan culture: Seldom do Afghans lose wars; they just switch to the winning side. Momentum means everything. If we show a lack of commitment, let alone weakness, Afghans, whether Pashtun or not, will jump ship to make accommodation with the other side.
• Blackwill’s plan is immoral.
• The dangers of Blackwill’s Plan B are many. The idea that the Taliban would be satiated with just the Pashtun areas is wrong-headed.If there is a roadmap to reliving 9/11, Robert Blackwill has it. But bad ideas, no matter how prominent their voice, are still bad ideas. NPR – Michael Rubin -

The new US strategy seems to call for a deeper involvement with Pakistan–which seems to hold the keys to Afghanistan. The Guardian is again regurgitating "old wine in new bottle". In an article it has published the Blackwill point of view.

Robert Blackwill, a former foreign policy advisor to both presidents Bush, came to London today to deliver his arguments for a de facto partition of Afghanistan. He made his case in Washington and in the Financial Times earlier in the summer, and appeared in London this afternoon at the invitation of the International Institute for Strategic Studies to rebut some of the criticism his ideas have received, and presumably because his ideas reinforce a similar argument made last week by the IISS itself. The same week, a group of pundits and ex-officials calling themselves the Afghanistan Study Group delivered its own challenge to the conduct of the war.

The timing of all this seem to be determined to a large extent by the approaching US strategy review in December, which is expected to pull British strategy in its wake, and the seeming absence so far of any major challenge to the current counter-insurgency orthodoxy inside the US and UK establishments. In that context, Blackwill is an interesting voice as a Republican arguing for a partial retreat, although he doubtless represents an small minority of the party.

This is his argument as laid down at the IISS this afternoon. The counter-insurgency is failing, and is unsustainable in terms of its cost in blood and treasure ($100 billion a year). It is entirely disproportionate in relation to the original objective of the Afghan mission – to eliminate al-Qaida. Blackwill cites the CIA as said there are 50-100 AQ fighters in Afghanistan, perhaps 300 in Pakistan. He asked: "Is it worth $100 billion to keep them on one side of the Durand line rather than the other?"

On the other hand, he rejected the suggestion that a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, quoting the CIA chief Leon Panetta as asking why should the Taliban negotiate in good faith, if they believe they are already winning.

Blackwill’s proposal is to cede control of the "Pashtun homeland" in the south and east to the Taliban and instead defend the north, west and Kabul with a smaller US-led foreign force of 35,000 – 50,000, which would continue to strike against AQ targets either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

To the objection that the Taliban would simply invite AQ back into its zone of control, he argued that it is just as possible that they would have "learned the lesson" of 2001, and if they did not, "the skies over the south and east would be dark with Predators".

He admitted that it was "tragically true" that the de facto partition plan would be a defeat for women in the ceded area, but said that was not why the US went to war in the first place.

Blackwill said the residual foreign force would be enough to prevent all-out civil war which would inevitably break out if there was a total withdrawal. To fears of the emergence of an irredentist Pashtunistan on both sides of the Durand Line, threatening Pakistan, he responded by saying that the US and its allies could not be more concerned with Pakistani territorial integrity that Islamabad itself.

For some reason, Blackwill declined to answer a question on what happens when a Taliban south fights on under the stirring banner of a united Afghanistan, buoyed by its strategic victory, and by the outrage caused by a strategy heavily reliant on Predators and other air strikes. That would also be a recruiter for AQ worldwide.

Joshua Foust raises the same sort of objections on Registan.net to the Afghanistan Study Group’s (ASG’s) similar proposals.

Gerard Russell, who ran the British government’s outreach to the Muslim world from 2001 to 2003 and who is now based at Harvard, was also doubtful, raises objections as follows:

• Economically the northern side would be dependent on trade with Iran.
• Its roads with the Stans are very poor.
• But it really makes no sense. You’d need to reconfigure the whole Afghan road network.
• It would stoke conflict.
• Iran and Russia will be drawn into supporting the north, and Pakistan into supporting the south, creating a potentially lethal proxy war that would be worse than the civil war of the 1990s, because the stakes will be higher.
• ..I doubt any neighbour will want this – Pakistan in particular dislikes the idea of ethnic separatism, and the central Asian states show little enthusiasm to open their borders with Afghanistan.
• In any event I don’t see how it solves the fundamental problems of leadership which beset both the north and south of Afghanistan.

Advocates of a negotiated settlement also argue that there are ways of scaling down the foreign presence in Afghanistan without handing the Taliban a huge strategic victory and taking the ground away from war-weary moderates in the insurgent leadership who might accept a deal.

As things stand, it seems unlikely the Blackwill/IISS/ASG argument will have much impact when President Obama approaches his December review. The word out of Washington is that the administration will stick to its counter-insurgency strategy, notwithstanding Joe Biden’s well-publicised reservations, and will listen to General Petraeus when he asks for a relatively slow drawdown of troops from next July.

Then again, things could always get even worse, and make Plan B look no so much attractive as unavoidable. The Guardian. Pushing partition in Afghanistan

Is retreating from the south a solution to the stalemate?

There is intense opposition to Blackwill in NATO also.

Brussels, Sept 16 (ANI): NATO has dismissed former American national security adviser Robert Blackwill’s suggestions that a conflict in Afghanistan could be resolved by partitioning the country on ethnic lines and handing over the Pashtun south to the Taliban, saying it was a recipe for civil war.

"The Taliban have national ambitions they have made that clear time and time again," Rasmussen said. "If you want civil war in Afghanistan again, this would be a good way to get it," the Daily Times quoted NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as telling a news conference.

"I believe it’s important to address these proposals early and clearly," he said, pointing towards Blackwill’s proposal.

Rasmussen emphasised it would be a mistake to assume that the Taliban would be satisfied with the Pashtun south, and that Al Qaeda was wiped from Afghanistan, just because its fighters had taken refuge in neighbouring Pakistan.

He also conceded it was not possible for NATO to defeat every last Taliban fighter. "That’s not the idea. But we can keep them under pressure, prevent them from achieving their political goals and train Afghan forces to do the same. And that’s exactly what we are doing," he said.

Blackwill, who was Condolezza Rice"s deputy National Security Adviser between 2003 and 2004, proposed that Afghanistan should be divided on ethnic lines, as it was impossible to defeat the Taliban in their southern heartland or to weaken them sufficiently to force them into negotiations.

"The Taliban are winning, we are losing. They have high morale and want to continue the insurgency. Plan A is going to fail. We need a Plan B… Let the Taliban control the Pashtun south and east, the American and allied price for preventing that is far too high," Blackwill said. (ANI)