Military

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.

I watched the Frontline documentary on Afghanistan ("Obama's War") Tuesday night, and most of my concerns got reinforced. One should watch most documentaries with a skeptical eye, because skilled filmmakers can easily slant the story by omitting any footage that doesn't fit the impression they are trying to leave and by shaping the story in ways that reinforce a particular conclusion.

Nonetheless, the presentation didn't offer much grounds for hope, and even the on-screen advocates of a continued U.S. effort (Gen. Stanley McChrystal, AfPak envoy Richard Holbrooke, CNAS President John Nagl, etc.) didn't sound very encouraging. I think McChrystal and maybe even Holbrooke know they've got a loser on their hands, and were operating in damage-limitation mode. As others have noted, the on-screen interviews with Pakistani officials made it clear that they are playing a double-game here; they've been in bed with the Afghan Taliban for years and are even less reliable partners than the Karzai government, no matter how much aid we dump on them. To believe we can eke out something resembling "victory" in these circumstances is like believing one could drain the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon. And watching the footage of U.S. Marines attempting to do the impossible made me admire their dedication and raw courage and resent like hell the strategic myopia that sent them on this fool's errand.

Remember that the main justification for our counterinsurgency campaign is the "safe haven" argument: We must defeat the Taliban to prevent Al Qaeda from regaining a sanctuary there. A recent presentation by Richard Barrett, coordinator of the United Nations' Al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee, suggests that this may not be much of a problem (h/t: John Mueller).

Money quotes (from pp. 17 and 23 of the PDF file):

p. 17: "If I could just talk a little bit about Afghanistan and al-Qaida, the link between al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban is a historic one but not a very strong one, in my view. The Afghan Taliban have their own objectives. And their objectives are to take power in Afghanistan. Essentially, it's a local issue for them. Al-Qaida can join the party; fine, they can help them, but to a certain extent, al-Qaida doesn't help them because if – and I think Mullah Omar's made this very clear – if they take over in Afghanistan, they want to consolidate their power. They don't want to be kicked out again like they were in 2001. And to consolidate their power, they don't want al-Qaida hanging around. They want to be able to say we are a responsible government; we're not going to support anybody who meddles in the business of our neighbors or in other international countries or partners.

Well, you might say well, they'd say that anyway; why wouldn't they – why shouldn't they say that? But I don't think they lose a lot if they don't say that. They don't gain a lot by saying it and they don't lose a lot by not saying it. So I think that we could possibly think that we might take them at the face value – that they would not automatically allow Afghanistan to become a base for al-Qaida…"

p. 23: "I'm not sure that if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan that they would necessarily welcome al-Qaida back in great forces, particularly if al-Qaida was going back there to set up camps to train people to mount attacks against other countries. I think the Taliban must calculate that had it not been for 9/11 they'd still be empowering Kabul now today, that no one would have come to kick them out. It was only 9/11 that caused them to lose power. So you know, they lost all that time, and if they get back they perhaps don't want to make that same mistake again."

If the Frontline report was mostly accurate and Barrett is mostly correct, there are no good strategic reasons to wage a costly counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. It's no more the "good war" than Iraq was, and Obama is deluding himself if he thinks he can achieve a meaningful victory there.

Postscript: If Obama wants a more promising strategy -- and Lord knows he should -- he should take a look at Robert Pape's op-ed in today's New York Times. Readers here know that I'm in favor of the "offshore balancing" strategy that Pape outlines, and not just in Afghanistan. I believe we will eventually head in that directon, but as Winston Churchill once noted about America, only after "trying all the alternatives."

If you ever questioned whether Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was bad for the United States and for Israel too, you ought to ponder Turkey's decision to suspend a multinational air-force exercise last weekend. Why? Because it's a prime example of how pursuing the goal of "greater Israel" -- which means retaining control of the West Bank and Gaza and preventing a true two-state solution -- is undermining U.S. and Israeli interests.

Here's the background: For the past decade or more, Turkey has been Israel's closest ally in the Muslim world. It has bought a lot of weapons from Israeli defense manufacturers, permitted the Israeli Air Force to conduct military exercises over Turkish airspace (which is especially valuable given Israel's small size), and been an effective mediator between Israel and some of its adversaries. It was by all accounts a very valuable relationship.

Unfortunately, Israel's assault on Gaza back in December and January appalled many Turks and embarrassed the Turkish government, which had been helping facilitate back-channel negotiations between Israel, Syria, and Hamas. Turkish anger at Israel's behavior led to the infamous spat between Prime Minister Recip Erdogan and Israeli President Shimon Peres at Davos in January, and opposition to the proposed air exercise -- which would have involved U.S., Israeli, Turkish, and other NATO forces -- had been growing in recent months. In particular, critics argued that Turkey's armed forces should not be collaborating with the same air force that had pummeled the defenseless Gazans last winter.

Last weekend, Turkey announced that it would not permit Israel to participate in the planned exercise, with the Foreign Ministry explicitly invoking the situation in Gaza as justification. (There's a story in Ha'aretz today suggesting it was really a dispute over arms shipments, but that's frankly pretty hard to believe). The announcement led Israel's ever-compliant U.S. patron to declare that it would not participate either, which in turn led other NATO states to withdraw too. So the exercise was "postponed," and it remains to be seen whether the dispute will be resolved and the maneuvers rescheduled. Meanwhile, Turkey and Syria held a successful diplomatic meeting earlier this week and announced a wide-ranging series of agreements, publicly pledging to "build a common future." Ha'aretz reports that the two countries will conduct military exercises in the near future as well.

Now step back and consider how we got here. A good relationship with Turkey has been a major asset for Israel and strong Israeli-Turkish relations are good for the United States (which is an ally of both countries). The United States, Turkey, Israel, and other NATO countries benefit from joint military exercises. But because Israel continues to occupy the West Bank and Gaza and refuses to allow the Palestinians to have a state of their own, it faces continued resistance from groups like Hamas, including the firing of rockets at Israeli towns. And because Israel's leaders believe that disproportionate force is the only way to deal with that resistance, the result is Operation Cast Lead, where the IDF lays waste to Gaza and kills a lot of innocent civilians. And this inflames public opinion in Turkey (and elsewhere), thereby placing a valuable strategic relationship at risk.

Israel's defenders often claim that it is a major strategic asset for the United States, but Israel's pariah status within the region reduces its strategic value significantly. It explains why Israel could not participate in the 1991 or 2003 wars with Iraq, and why it is difficult for Arab governments who share Israel's concerns about Iran to openly collaborate with Israel or United States to address that issue. And make no mistake: The occupation is now the main barrier to Israel's full acceptance within the region, as the 2007 Arab League peace plan makes clear. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were resolved and Israel had normal relations with the Arab world, then the United States would not pay a diplomatic price for backing Israel so strongly and Israel could join forces with us (and with other regional powers) when common challenges arose. Ending the occupation would also safeguard Israel's relations with countries like Turkey, instead of undermining them. In addition to its obvious human costs, in short, the occupation is a strategic liability for Israel and the United States.

Barack Obama spoke the truth when he said that a "two-state solution is in Israel's interest, the Palestinians' interest, America's interest, and the world's interest." Unfortunately, the U.S. president's actions to date have not brought that goal any closer. In the meantime, those who continue to oppose any effort to use U.S. leverage to bring about a two-state solution are unwittingly harming the two countries they care about most.

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The debate about the strategically myopic policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has resurfaced again, sparked by a revealing article in the October issue of Joint Force Quarterly. President Obama told the Human Rights Campaign meeting on October 11 that he would end DADT, but he didn't say when. National Security Advisor James Jones clarified matters by saying Obama would end the policy "at the right time." Oh good. What a relief that must be to gay men and women who are already serving, or those that would like to. It's nice to know that ending an unfair and counterproductive policy is on a strict timetable. I just hope Obama doesn't start talking about a "roadmap," because then we know nothing will change.

I have nothing to add to my earlier comments on this issue, but I'm pleased that the author of the JFQ article apparently agrees.

President Obama has reportedly ruled out a major reduction in U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and is still mulling over the military's request for more troops. The LA Times says he's looking for "middle ground" here, which would be consistent with Obama's decision-making style. In this case, however, it's the worst of a set of bad options. If things eventually go south (as I believe they will), he'll get blamed for not giving the commanders enough to do the job and for incurring additional costs to no good purpose. Yet this approach also means he won't the credit for taking a bold decision to cut our losses and get out. Does the phrase "stalemate machine" ring any bells?

Meanwhile, I've been reading the unclassified version of McChrystal report over the last few days, and it's reinforcing my doubts. It's admirably honest about the magnitude of the task, but after describing all the reasons why winning will be very difficult, it makes a rather breathtaking leap to the conclusion that a different strategy and adequate resources can turn things around (while prudently warning that "no strategy can guarantee success"). 

This got me thinking.

Imagine that the situation in Afghanistan were exactly what it is today -- a corrupt government in Kabul with dubious legitimacy, the Taliban gaining strength, al Qaeda's leaders still hiding out in northwest Pakistan, etc. -- except that the U.S. military wasn't there. And then ask yourself: would you be in favor of sending 100,000 or so American soldiers to fight and die there?

My views on this subject are clear, so feel free to discount what follows. But I doubt we would be having a serious debate about sending a large number of troops to Afghanistan if we weren't there already. Instead, we would be treating Afghanistan the same way we treat most failed states. We'd express our concern, offer modest amounts of humanitarian assistance, we'd let the U.N. do its best, and if we thought al Qaeda was operating there, we'd go after them with special forces and Predators or other military assets. Just look at how we are currently dealing with Somalia or Yemen or Sudan and you get an idea of how we would be dealing with Afghanistan if were we not there already.

And notice that the scenario I've posited is actually more favorable than the one we are actually in. In this counterfactual, Kabul is losing on its own, whereas in reality, Kabul is losing even though there are 100,000 or so foreign troops already trying to help, at a cost that far exceeds the entire GDP of the country. At this point, nobody should be under no illusions about how hard this really is.

Of course, one can argue that the simple fact that we are already there fundamentally alters the strategic calculus. We wouldn't intervene if we were starting from scratch today, but some will say that allowing ourselves to be defeated by the Taliban will have disastrous effects on our reputation and encourage bin Laden & Co. to believe they are winning.

Robert Kaplan takes this line in an op-ed in today's New York Times, arguing that "an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight."

This is an familiar line of argument, of course, even though the best scholarly studies of reputation and credibility have found that past behavior doesn't have much effect on future credibility. Be that as it may, one could just as easily argue that U.S. credibility will be damaged far more if we squander another trillion dollars in Afghanistan and end up with a degraded and demoralized military and a population that is truly sick of overseas involvements.

Nonetheless, the main thrust of Kaplan's piece is well worth pondering. He points out that while the United States is doing the heavy lifting in Afghanistan, the chief beneficiaries of success will be China (and to a lesser extent Russia and India). He notes that past empires declined "by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions." And his conclusion is right on the money: "history suggests that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and airpower from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others."

Needless to say, that's not an argument for "seeking the middle ground." That's an argument for getting out as quickly and prudently as we can.

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I've blogged a lot about Iran and Afghanistan over the past few months, but I've been remiss in not highlighting an important connection between the two issues. As Spencer Ackerman noted a few days ago, U.S. Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal offered this intriguing comment during his remarks at IISS headquarters in London last week:

Iran, of course, being, you know, in such proximity to Afghanistan and having significant influence inside Afghanistan, is a big player. They, in my view, they have a lot of very positive influence inside Afghanistan, some of it cultural, some of it financial, just things that any neighbor would have to try to build the stability. I think that if Iran takes a very mature look at a stable Afghanistan and support the government of Afghanistan, then we'll be -- we'll be in good shape. If they were to choose not to do that, and they were to choose to support insurgents, I think that would be a significant miscalculation.

I don't think this comment was an idle remark by McChrystal. What he's telling us is that Iran could be a positive influence in Afghanistan, and that it could also be a real hindrance to our efforts. And that means that an attack on Iran would make our situation in Afghanistan even worse than it is already, because Iran would have both the capacity and the incentive to retaliate.

There's no love lost between Iran and the Taliban, in part because the Taliban murdered ten Iranian diplomats in Mazari Sharif back in 1998. But Iran does retain some influence there -- as McChystal points out --and they would undoubtedly be looking for some way to pay us back if we were foolish enough to strike them. McChrystal is probably aware that advocates of a hardline approach to Tehran have a lot of clout in the Obama administration, and that plenty of other voices -- such as GOP Senator Lindsay Graham -- continue to wave the big stick even as negotiations get underway.

So McChrystal's seemingly innocuous remark might actually be something of a pre-emptive strike against those who keep suggesting that our only approach to Iran is preventive war. If so, then this might be another illustration of Richard Betts's argument in Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, which showed that at least in the U.S. context, civilians are often a lot more bellicose than the uniformed military. In any case, I hope Obama is paying attention.

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According to Section 603 of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Department Reorganization Act, the president must submit an annual report to Congress outlining U.S. national security strategy. This requirement has produced a number of timeless literary classics, such as the Clinton administration's 1995 "National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement" (a glowing paean to democracy, institutions, human rights, and other liberal ideals), or the Bush administration's 2002 "National Security Strategy of the United States of America," (a portentous bit of bombast mostly remembered for its justification of preventive war).

Academics like me normally love such exercises, in part because it conforms to an idealized view of what the policy process should be. First, the administration identifies vital U.S. interests, and then sketches the various intermediate objectives that must be met in order to advance or protect them. Then it lays out the specific policies it intends to follow to achieve these goals, and then (supposedly) goes ahead and implements them. The whole exercise is also consistent with the appealing notion of democratic accountability, because Congress can ponder the administration's priorities and plans and decide not to fund policies it doesn't like. Grand strategic pronouncements of this sort are also an obvious opportunity to communicate intentions and priorities to the outside world.

We scholars also like these documents because they give us a chance to aim our intellectual firepower at a fixed target. Dissecting written arguments is something we've been trained to do since graduate school, and giving an academic an official statement of "national security strategy" is like putting a seven-course meal in front of a gluttonous gourmet. We can dissect the underlying assumptions, identify the theoretical underpinnings that are supposedly shaping policy, compare and contrast this year's version with earlier reports, and look for contradictions, gaps in logic, or other shortcomings. Plus, these reports make a great teaching tool; they are the bureaucratese that has launched a thousand class discussions. If your job involves teaching and writing about U.S. foreign policy, in short, you should be grateful that Goldwater-Nichols forces every administration to produce something new to feed on each year.

Of course, you shouldn't assume these reports actually tell you what the administration is going to do. They are often drafted by committee, or by some hired pen, and the president may not play much (any?) role in the process. More importantly, foreign policy always involves adapting to actions or events that one doesn't anticipate, and no government can ever stick to its strategic vision with complete fidelity. Even so, these statements are usually worth reading, if only to get an idea of an administration's basic inclinations, or at least what it thinks it is trying to accomplish.

The Obama administration hasn't offered us its version of our "national security strategy" yet, and despite everything I just said, I'm beginning to wish they weren't compelled to do so by law. For one thing, I suspect it will look a lot like the Clinton administration's versions, and consist of a long "to-do" list drawn from familiar liberal interventionist dogma. But more importantly, this is one of those periods where the main features of U.S. grand strategy may not be easy to talk about openly and honestly.

In simple terms, what Obama seems to be attempting is a wide-ranging process of selective retrenchment. This is hardly surprising, because the Bush administration got us badly overcommitted and refused to raise taxes to pay for it. So Obama is getting us out of Iraq, and appears to be rethinking his approach to Afghanistan. He's making constructive concessions to a number of potential adversaries (such as Russia), in order to gain their support on more pressing issues (such as Iran)  He's telling his Secretary of Defense to rein in defense costs, emphasizing diplomacy at every turn, and letting everyone know that Uncle Sam isn't going to solve all the world's problems all by itself. He's not retreating to Fortress America, of course, but he and his team aren't swaggering around saying that America is the "indispensable nation" either.

Given the mess he inherited from Bush and the need to repair America's public finances, this approach makes eminently good sense.  But when you're s great power engaged in a process of retrenchment, you probably don't want advertise that fact in your official statement of "national security strategy."  If you do, you'll just get a lot of flak from hardliners, who still haven't figured out that the previous eight years was mostly a disaster and that U.S. resources aren't infinite. And a few minor adversaries may decide to test your limits, and you'd rather not have to waste time responding. Spelling things out explicitly might also make some Americans nervous, because they've gotten used to America being #1 and they've forgotten that the best way to stay there is to get others to do the heavy lifting instead of trying to do it all ourselves.

Obama should stick to his present course -- as subtly and quietly as possible -- and when it's time to fulfill that Section 603 requirement, he should ask his advisors to write up a strategy statement that does not spell out what is really going on. And if they can make it sufficiently boring so that nobody pays much attention, so much the better.

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Writing in today's New York Times, columnist and armchair warrior David Brooks offers a spirited defense of the war in Afghanistan. In addition to being an unrepentant hawk with a miserable track record, Brooks is fond of citing academic literature to give his punditry a faux intellectual veneer. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to read these works very carefully.

In today's column, he cites a recent study by political scientists Andrew Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli of the University of North Texas (available here at FP), which supposedly shows that "counterinsurgency efforts that put population protection at their core have succeeded nearly 70 percent of the time." But political scientist Alexander Downes of Duke University, who is a much more careful reader than Brooks, points out on a private list-serve what the article really says (my emphasis):

Unfortunately, Brooks engages in some very selective citation to support his argument in favor of fighting on in Afghanistan.  Enterline and Magagnoli collected data on 66 cases in the 20th century in which "a foreign state fought a counterinsurgency campaign to establish or protect central-government authority."  The overall winning percentage for the state actor is 60%, but only 48% after World War II. The statistic that Brooks cites is that if the state actor switches from some other strategy to a "hearts and minds" strategy during the course of the war, their winning percentage increases to 75% (67% after World War II). 

But Brooks omits two further important findings from Enterline and Magagnoli's article. First, if the state actor switches to a hearts and minds strategy, the average conflict duration after the change is nine years. Switching to some strategy other than hearts and minds generates an average duration after the change of five years. Second, no state that switched to a hearts and minds strategy after fighting an insurgency for eight years (as the U.S. has in Afghanistan) has ever defeated the insurgency.  In other words, if history is any guide, the U.S. can expect to continue fighting in Afghanistan for nearly a decade and still not be able to win.  That's a pretty different message than the impression that Brooks conveys."

Or as another correspondent of mine put it, "wouldn't the relevant statistic be the number of foreign empires that have successfully occupied Afghanistan and installed their preferred government? That research is much less difficult to do. The answer is 0 for three if we count the Soviets, the British (who actually tried it twice and failed both times), and perhaps Alexander?"

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