WASHINGTON — Diplomacy is crucial to achieving long-term goals in Afghanistan because “you can’t kill your way out of an insurgency,” Ryan Crocker, nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told a Senate committee Wednesday.
Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, was pressed by members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is debating Crocker’s nomination, to define what success in Afghanistan would mean.
He responded that one meaning was “governance that is good enough to ensure that the country doesn’t degenerate again into a safe haven for al-Qaida.”
He is no stranger to Afghanistan. In 2002, he helped re-open the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
He has a long history of service in the Middle East. During more than 37 years as a diplomat, Crocker also served as ambassador to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, and Pakistan. He retired in 2009 until President Barack Obama asked him to serve again.
While he was ambassador to Iraq from 2007-09, Crocker was credited in working with Army Gen. David Petraeus to improve counterinsurgency efforts and state-building.
In Afghanistan, Crocker said, “sustainable stability” will require financial and institutional support from other nations after the United States’ expected troop withdrawal in three years.
“Beyond 2014 there will be a requirement for outside assistance from the international community,” he said. “This is not an American problem only or an American obligation.”
One important task in getting an Afghan economy on its feet is supporting the agriculture sector, which accounts for 80 percent of legal employment in the nation, Crocker said.
The United States and its allies are also making progress in handing control of the nation over to its native government, he said. The Afghan police and military are expected to have a combined force of 300,000 people by October of this year, he said.
U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the committee, said Crocker’s nomination comes at a critical juncture in the war.
“If all we do is the current paradigm,” Kerry said, “we’re not going to find a very successful road here.”
Kerry said he expects Crocker’s nomination to quickly move to the full Senate for a vote.
At the start of the hearing, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced Crocker to the committee, saying the diplomat’s “stellar record of service precedes him and speaks for itself.”
Crocker said he was under no illusions about how difficult the task ahead will be.
“If Iraq was hard — and it was hard — Afghanistan in many respects is harder,” he said.