Central Asia

As most of you probably know, over the past few years the U.S. military has been engaged in an extensive internal debate about counter-insurgency warfare. This is partly a debate about COIN tactics and techniques -- in other words, about how to do COIN better -- but the more important debate is about the priority that COIN should receive in U.S. defense planning. Specifically, should the United States continue to focus primarily on preparing for "great power" wars and strive to retain "command of the commons" through air power, naval power, and other sophisticated warfare capabilities, or should it retool for the various small wars that it seems to have been fighting lately? This latter view dovetails with the idea that United States also needs much greater civilian capacity for nation-building, development assistance, and the like.

Unfortunately, most of the attention seems to have focused on "how to do it better" issue, and much less on the desirability of the proposed shift. Those who argue for radical change invariably point to the various wars the United States has fought in recent years -- notably Iraq and Afghanistan -- and simply assert that we need to get ready to do a lot more of them.

Unfortunately, this line of argument ignores the fact that these wars are the result of past American mistakes. The first error was the failure to capture Bin Laden and his associates at the battle of Tora Bora, which allowed al Qaeda's leaders to escape into Pakistan and thus ensured that the United States would become enmeshed in Afghanistan. Had we captured al Qaeda's top leaders then, we could have declared victory over al Qaeda and come home and we would be far less worried about events in Central Asia today. Who would care about a "safe haven" in Afghanistan if Bin Laden had been killed or captured back in 2001?

The second mistake was the foolish decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which led us into yet another costly insurgency. Not surprisingly, those charged with waging that war eventually focused on COIN, because that was the problem they were expected to solve. But the only reason they had to do so was the fact that the Bush administration decided to wage an unnecessary war in the first place.

In short, the current obsession with counterinsurgency is the direct result of two fateful errors. We didn't get Bin Laden when we should have, and we invaded Iraq when we shouldn't. Had the United States not made those two blunders, we wouldn't have been fighting costly counterinsurgencies and we wouldn't be contemplating a far-reaching revision of U.S. defense priorities and military doctrine.

The obvious question is: Does the United States really want to base its military strategy on two enormous blunders?

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What should we make of the news that President Obama is still not happy with the proposed strategy for Afghanistan, and that his doubts are being reinforced by a skeptical report from retired general Karl Eikenberry, who is now the U.S. ambassador in Kabul?

First, I think it's a sign that deep down, Obama knows he has no good options. He’s figured out that the stakes aren’t as great as he may have once thought, that the commitment is potentially endless, that we have no local partner for the kind of centralized, "state-building" approach that remains at the heart of U.S. strategy, and that going all in will commit him to a war we won't win. No wonder he keeps looking for an alternative.

Second, he's painted himself into a corner with his earlier tough talk, and he’s worried that the GOP and FoxNews and various armchair generals will all accuse him of appeasement if he gives McChrystal anything less than what the general asked for, or if he dares to put a time limit on a continued U.S. effort. So all those recent news stories stressing how seriously Obama is taking this and how much he’s grilling his advisors are designed to convince us that he’s looked really, really hard at all the options. The goal is to build support for whatever decision he ultimately makes, even if everyone secretly knows it’s not likely to work.

Third, this is an issue where Obama's instinct for compromise and his natural gift for reconciling conflicting positions is not serving him well. Given the range of problems that the United States is facing at home and abroad, bold action is badly needed. Not the sort of unthinking, shoot-from-the-hip fantasies that drove Bush's foreign policy during his first term, but rather a ruthless, hardnosed set of choices about priorities. Obama did a little bit of that during his first couple of months -- mostly about the economy -- but well-entrenched interests and conventional wisdom began to take over.  

With respect to Afghanistan: it is either a worth a prolonged and costly investment of lives and money or it isn't. Either we go all in -- which in my view is still a very bad idea -- or we should get out. Trying to split the difference on this issue is not leadership; in fact, it is a recipe for failure.

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Corruption now 'dominates and paralyzes the society,' David Halberstam observed. American officials perceived the problems but they could not find solutions. ... The Embassy pressed the government to remove officials known to be corrupt, but with little result. 'You fight like hell to get someone removed and most times you fail and you just make it worse,' a frustrated American explained to Halberstam. 'And then on occasions when you win, why hell, they give you someone just as bad.' The United States found to its chagrin that as its commitment increased its leverage diminished. Concern with corruption and inefficiency was always balanced by fear that tough action might alienate the government or bring about its collapse. Lodge and Westmoreland were inclined to accept the situation and deal with other problems."

Source: George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States in Vietnam, 1950-1975., 1st. ed., pp. 162-63. The Halberstam quotations are from his article, "Return to Vietnam," Harpers (December 1967).

I'm crashing to finish a conference paper on why "wars of choice" last so long (and how to end them), so blogging will be fairly light this week. In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the CSPAN broadcast of a conference on Capitol Hill last week on Afghanistan policy, sponsored by the RAND Corporation's Center for Middle East Public Policy. Most of the speakers were thoughtful and worth a listen, although I was struck by how even the advocates of "staying the course" did not seem very confident of success. The "outside the box" perspective (in other words, disengagement) was represented by Chris Preble of CATO and yours truly. If you're interested in what we had to say, my presentation begins at about 2:35.00 into the broadcast, and Chris is right after me.

Now that Tom Friedman is expressing a few doubts about the Afghan War, David Brooks is ready to take over as cheerleader-in-chief for endless war in Central Asia. In his column today, he claims to have spoken with various "military experts" (without naming any of them, of course), and-surprise, surprise -- all of them channel Brooks' unsupported belief that the only thing that matters in Central Asia is Obama's "determination." There's no analysis, no facts, no weighing of pros and cons, no attempt at cost-benefit analysis, and of course, no sources. Has Brooks bothered to read any of the recent studies of this problem -- including Gen. McChrystal's own assessment -- which make it clear that we face a daunting task? Even those that favor continuing the war understand that victory is far from certain even if we do commit more resources and stay a long time.

This is the kind of "journalism" that gave the Times a black eye over Iraq, and you'd think Brooks (and his editors) would have been chastened by that experience. But I forgot: being a neoconservative pundit means never having to admit error, or apologize for the lives you've helped squander.

The best thing one can say about this piece is that it provides yet another illustration of the behavior that is gradually discrediting mainstream journalism. I read it and immediately thought: "more grist for Glenn Greenwald's mill." Glenn doesn't disappoint.

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I suspect most of the AfPak attention will be focused on the revelations that President Hamid Karzai's brother has been on the CIA payroll, the Taliban attack that killed six people at a U.N. staff house in Kabul, and the bombing that killed more than 80 people in Peshawar. Plus, there are new reports that the United States is going to adopt a strategy that eschews counterinsurgency throughout all of Afghanistan and concentrates on protecting major cities. These are all important stories, because they underscore just how difficult it has been, is, and will be to do social engineering on the lives of 200 million Muslims in Central Asia.

But I want to focus on somewhat broader question today. Yet another justification for continuing the war in Afghanistan is the belief that the Afghan Taliban, al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and groups such as the Haqqani network form a tight ideologically-inspired alliance that is relentlessly anti-American and dedicated to attacking us no matter where we are or what we are doing. In this view, these various groups are "birds of a feather flocking together." This belief fuels the fear that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would produce a dramatic increase in al Qaeda's capabilities, once their Islamic soulmates provided them with territory, recruits, and other forms of support for attacks on the West in general and the United States in particular.

Such an outcome cannot be wholly ruled out, I suppose, and well-informed experts like Ahmed Rashid apparently think it's likely. But there are several good reasons to doubt it. The first is that we know that there have been intense frictions between some of these groups in the past, as well as intense divisions between Osama bin Laden and some of his own associates. In his prize-winning book The Looming Tower, for example, Lawrence Wright describes the repeated tensions between Mullah Omar and Bin Laden, which nearly led the former to turn Bin Laden over to the Saudis. The rift was reportedly healed after bin Laden swore an oath of loyalty to Omar, but their interests and objectives are not identical and one can easily imagine new quarrels in the future.

A second reason to be skeptical that these groups are tightly unified by a set of common beliefs or doctrines is the fact that the foreign presence in the region gives them an obvious incentive to help each other. In other words, what looks like ideological solidarity may be partly a manifestation of balance-of-power politics, and these groups' tendency to back each other might easily dissipate once the foreign presence were reduced. Afghan political history is one where diverse coalitions form, dissolve, and realign in myriad ways, and similar dynamics are likely to resurface once the the United States and its foreign allies are gone.

A third reason has to do with the nature of certain types of political ideology. Unlike liberalism, which emphasizes the need to tolerate a wide range of political views, political ideologies that rest on a single authoritative interpretation of "truth" are inherently divisive rather than unifying. In particular, ideologies that call for adherents to obey the leadership because it wields the "correct" interpretation of the faith (whether in Marxism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) tend to foster intense rivalries among different factions and between different leaders, each of whom must claim to be the "true" interpreter of the legitimating ideology. In such movements, ideological schisms are likely to be frequent and intense, because disagreements look like apostasy and a betrayal of the faith.  Instead of flocking together, these "birds of a feather" are likely to fly apart.

During the Cold War, for instance, hawks repeatedly worried about a "communist monolith" and were convinced that Marxists everywhere were reliable tools of the Kremlin. In reality, however, world communism was rife with internal tensions and ideological schisms, as illustrated by the furious Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the deadly battle between Trotsky and Stalin, and the subsequent rift between Stalin and Tito. China and the Soviet Union became bitter rivals by the early 1960s -- on both geopolitical and ideological grounds -- and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam ended another yet another period of illusory communist unity and quickly led to wars between communist Vietnam, communist Kampuchea, and communist China.

Such historical analogies should be used with caution, of course, but in this case the logic is similar and compelling. Islamic fundamentalists rely in part on specific interpretations of Islamic thought to recruit and motivate their followers, and disagreements over doctrine and policy can easily lead to bitter internal quarrels, especially once the immediate need to cooperate against a common enemy is gone. We've already seen amples sign of division within al Qaeda and its clones, and more are to be expected.

This is not to say that global terrorists won't continue to learn from each other, to inspire imitators (much as Marxism-Leninism once inspired a wide array of fringe groups who had nothing to do with Moscow) and they may even provide each other with various forms of tactical support on occasion.  But there are good reasons to question the facile assumption that they are eternally loyal comrades-in-arms, united forever by a shared set of a deeply held politico-religious beliefs. And if there is considerable potential for division among both the leaders and even more among their followers, then a strategy of divide-and-conquer makes more sense than a long and costly counterinsurgency campaign that gives them every reason to stay united.

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I've been out of town for the past 24 hours and unable to blog, but I did want to alert you to a new piece I've written on Afghanistan.  Unlike many of the pundits who are now telling Obama what to do, I think it's actually a rather easy call (assuming, of course, your first priority is the U.S. national interest).  

If you want to know why I think so, go here.

One of the many dubious arguments now being invoked to justify an open-ended U.S. commitment in Afghanistan is the idea that withdrawal will damage U.S. credibility and cause other U.S. clients to doubt our staying power. It's possible that getting out would cause a few weak and vulnerable leaders to reconsider their reliance on the United States, but is that necessarily a bad thing? The United States has been obsessed with maintaining "credibility" for decades, but we tend to forget that our credibility is more our clients' problem than it is ours. That's one of the nice things about being a superpower: even when our interests are partly tied up with the fates of others, most U.S. allies need our support a lot more than we need theirs.

In the case of Afghanistan, we are fighting on behalf of a corrupt and ineffective government that has resisted repeated calls for reform. If we were to stop throwing resources at it and it subsequently collapsed, we would be sending a powerful signal to other U.S. clients around the world. The message? Don't expect Uncle Sucker to back you forever if you can't or won’t shape up. Among other things, it might have a salutary effect on the government of Pakistan, and relieve us of the burden of constantly meddling in their affairs, which only makes us less popular there. (On that front, I'm beginning to think someone ought to filch Richard Holbrooke's passport; the more he visits the region, the more the Pakistani people seem to hate us). 

Instead of signaling a loss of American will, getting out of Afghanistan would remind other governments that the United States is not a philanthropic organization. Americans are willing to support competent and effective leaders whose interests are compatible with ours, but we are not in the business of endlessly subsidizing incompetence. In other words, we would telling friends and foes that we back winners, and we aren't inclined to waste resources on losers. So if you want our help, get your act together.  What's wrong with sending that message?

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