Iraq

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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There is grim news from Baghdad: A twin suicide truck bombing of two Iraqi ministries has left over 130 dead and wounded more than 500. It is the largest such attack in all of 2009 and a reminder, unfortunately, that the oft-heralded "surge" was not the success that its architects and advocates like to claim. 

As my FP colleague Tom Ricks noted in his book The Gamble, the "surge" was a partial tactical success that succeeded in bringing casualty levels down. (I say partial, because we still do not know how much of that success was due to the surge itself, and how much was due to changing circumstances within Iraq, most notably the ethnic separation created by earlier violence and the realignment of some key Sunni groups who were repelled by the wanton violence perpetrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq.) 

The larger strategic objective of the surge was political reconciliation among the main contending groups within Iraq. There have been a few encouraging signs in recent months, but yesterday's bombing is another brutal indication that that goal remains unmet. Among other things, this means that pro-war pundits who invoke the purported "success" of the surge in Iraq in order to justify major troop increases in Afghanistan are not to be trusted, especially when they are the same geniuses who helped get us into Iraq in the first place.

Barack Obama inherited two losing wars from his incompetent predecessor.  If he's not careful, he'll still be fighting (and losing) both of them when his first term ends. And neither will be "Bush's war" at that point; Obama will own them both by then. 

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If I were President Obama (now there's a scary thought!), I'd ask some smart people on my foreign policy team to start thinking hard about "Plan B." What's Plan B? It's the strategy that he's going to need when it becomes clear that his initial foreign policy initiatives didn't work. Obama's election and speechifying has done a lot to repair America's image around the world -- at least in the short term -- in part because that image had nowhere to go but up. But as just about everyone commented when he got the Nobel Peace Prize last week, his foreign policy record to date is long on promises but short on tangible achievements. Indeed, odds are that the first term will end without his achieving any of his major foreign policy goals.

To be more specific, I'd bet that all of the following statements are true in 2012.

1. There won't be a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel will still be occupying the West Bank and controlling the Gaza Strip. More and more people are going to conclude that "two states for two peoples" is no longer possible, and that great Cairo speech will increasingly look like hollow rhetoric.

2. The United States will still have tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan. Victory will not be within sight.

3. Substantial U.S. personnel will remain in Iraq (relabeled as "training missions"), and the political situation will remain fragile at best. 

4. The clerical regime in Iran will still be in power, will still be enriching nuclear material, will still insist on its right to control the full nuclear fuel cycle, and will still be deeply suspicious of the United States. Iran won't have an actual nuclear weapon by then, but it will be closer to being able to make one if it wishes.

5. There won't be a new climate change agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

6. Little progress will have been made toward reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world. The United States and Russia may complete a new strategic arms agreement by then, but both states will still have thousands of nuclear warheads in their stockpiles. None of the nine current nuclear weapons states will have disarmed, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is still unratified three years from now.

Other achievements that we won't see include the balancing of the federal budget, a major revamping of global financial architecture, reform of the U.N. Security Council, a significant increase in the size of the State Department or the foreign aid budget, or the completion of new trade round. I'm not even sure we will have closed Gitmo or ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" by then.

Assuming he wins re-election, therefore, President Obama is going to be looking at a foreign policy "to do" list with remarkably few boxes checked off. And somebody ought to start thinking about this possibility now, because wise statecraft ought to anticipate the circumstances one is going to face a few years hence, instead of focusing solely on what's in the in-box today.

So what's Plan B? I'm still wrestling with that issue myself, but here's a quick sketch of some of the fundamental ideas. Plan B begins by recognizing that the United States remains the most secure great power in modern history and that most of damage we have suffered recently has come from scaring ourselves into foolish foreign adventures. It means rejecting the belief -- common to both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists -- that virtually every global problem requires an American solution and "American leadership." It acknowledges that social engineering in complex traditional societies is something we don't know how to do and probably can't learn, but it takes comfort from the fact that it is also a task that we don't have to do. It accepts that there are a few bad guys out there that do need to be confronted, captured, and sometimes killed, but understands that the more force we use and the heavier our footprint is, the more resistance we will ultimately face. And yes, Plan B understands that sometimes bad things will happen to Americans, and there is nothing we can do to completely eliminate all foreign dangers. Get used to it.

Plan B means playing "hard to get" more often, so that other states don't take us for granted and so that they bear a greater share of common burdens. It means exploiting balances of power and playing divide-and-conquer, instead of trying to impose a preponderance of U.S. power on every corner of the globe. It prizes the individual freedoms that are the core of American democracy -- freedoms that are threatened by a steady diet of foreign wars -- and it recognizes that other societies will have to find their own way toward more pluralist and participatory forms of government, and at their own pace. It seeks to maintain armed forces that are second to none but eschews squandering lives or money on peripheral wars that are neither vital nor winnable. It rejects "special relationships" with any other state, if by that one means relationships where we support other states even when they do foolish things that are not in our interest (or theirs). 

And Plan B proceeds from the belief that other states will be more likely to follow America's lead if they look at us and like what they see. America used to dazzle the world by offering up a vision of opportunity, equality, energy and competence that was unimaginable elsewhere. The danger now is that America is increasingly seen as a land of crumbling infrastructure, mountainous debt, uninsured millions, fraying public institutions, and xenophobic media buffoons. Over the longer term, getting our house in order back home will to a lot more to shore up our global position than conducting endless foot patrols through the Afghan countryside.

Postscript: Some smart observers -- such as Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic -- have a more favorable view of Obama's performance to date. They discern a trademark style in Obama's cautious and reflective approach to most policy issues: he sets forth general goals, waits to see how others react, gauges the limits of the possible, and then decides on a course of action. There's probably something to this view, and surely the patient examination of alternative policy options makes more sense than relying on one's "gut instincts" and then stubbornly refusing to admit the possibility of error.

Whether one relies on calm deliberation or a president's entrails, however, the proof of any approach to policymaking is its ability to deliver tangible results. And here the jury is still out. My concern is that Obama has yet to use American power -- in either its hard and soft forms -- in ways designed to shape the calculations and actions of both allies and adversaries. Where Bush erroneously believed that the United States could simply dictate to the rest of the world, thus far Obama seems unwilling to wield American power against stubborn opponents or withhold U.S. support from recalcitrant allies. His speeches are a valuable tool, but ultimately others need to know that there is resolve and purpose and tangible actions behind them. Sometimes foreign policy is like community organizing -- i.e., you're trying to herd diverse groups to work together for a common goal and your task is to overcome suspicions so that the common ground can be seized. But at other times it's more like a gang war. And when it's the latter, you have to take names, draw lines, and use the power at one's disposal to get the outcomes you want.

Think about it this way: how many foreign leaders are now grateful because the United States has backed them and their prospects are improving, and how many governments are now worried because the United States is successfully using its power to undermine or thwart them and force them to rethink their positions?

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Not my favorite line from last night's speech, but it still caught my eye....

...the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years - less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration.

Keep that in mind when your local school district is forced to cut a few more programs or lay off a few more teachers, when your car hits another pothole on a bridge that needs repair, when your public transit system cuts service or raises fares, and when the federal budget deficit continues to rise. Stupid foreign policy decisions don't just cause problems overseas; they undermine our quality of life here at home. And as I said once before, it remains a puzzle why the GOP is eager to tax us to pay for ambitious social engineering projects in faraway lands, yet loathe to fund programs designed to benefit Americans here at home. It's equally puzzling (to me at least), why Americans have gone along with this idea. So far.

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It is easy to understand why Paul Wolfowitz dislikes "realism." On the most significant foreign-policy decision since the end of the Cold War -- the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- the realists who opposed it were right and Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war were dead wrong. No wonder he begins his article by saying that this "is not the place to reargue the Iraq War." I'd try to exclude Iraq from discussion if I were him too, because that tragedy demonstrates the virtues of realism and the follies of Wolfowitz's own worldview.

On the whole, Wolfowitz's discussion of "realism" in the Sept./Oct. issue of FP is about as accurate as his 2002 estimates about the troop levels needed to occupy Iraq and the overall costs of the war. He implies that realists are uninterested in moral issues and claims "there is a serious debate" between realists and their critics regarding the peaceful promotion of political change. But this is a caricature of realist thinking and a nonexistent debate, and it is telling that he never offers any evidence to support his description. The only "realists" he bothers to mention are Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and he never quotes or cites other prominent realist scholars or policymakers. Having decided to expose realism's alleged limitations, in short, apparently he couldn't be bothered to do some research and read what they had to say.  

What do realists believe? Realists see international politics as an inherently competitive realm where states compete for advantage and where security is sometimes precarious. So, realists emphasize that states should keep a keen eye on the balance of power, which makes them wary of squandering blood or treasure on needless military buildups, ideological crusades, or foolish foreign wars. Realists cherish America's commitment to democracy and individual liberty, but they know that ideals alone are no basis for conducting foreign policy. They also understand that endless overseas adventures will inevitably provoke a hostile backlash abroad and force us to compromise freedoms at home.  

(Continue reading...)

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I'm clearing off my desk today and working on the opening lecture for my graduate IR theory course, so I'm not going to try to write a detailed commentary. Instead, let me take this opportunity to pass on a few pieces that caught my eye, on a wide array of subjects.

1. From the S Rajaratnam School in Singapore comes an optimistic assessment on the status of the Pakistani Taliban. According to Khuram Iqbal, the Pakistani Taliban have failed to gain popular support, and show no signs of becoming an effective mass movement (akin to Hezbollah in Lebanon). Instead, they are increasingly seen as a narrower terrorist group, reinforced their unpopularity. While they remain a problem to be dealt with, fears that the Pakistani state was on the verge of collapse or that the entire country might be "Talibanized" seem to have been greatly overblown. (Juan Cole: take a bow).

2. There is a fascinating article by Richard Oliver Collin in the latest issue of International Studies Perspectives, entitled "Words of War: Iraq's Tower of Babel." It is a careful analysis of the extraordinary degree of linguistic diversity and fragmentation in Iraq, and it underscores how ill-prepared the United States was to try to occupy and govern the place. Money quote from Collin's conclusion:

It cannot be argued that enhanced language proficiency in Arabic and Kurdish would assure military victory for the United States in its conflict with the various Iraqi insurgent groups.  Language capability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for triumph in war and diplomacy. The evidence does strongly suggest, however, that American inability to create a basic communications capability has contributed importantly to the failure of the United States thus far to resolve its Middle Eastern problems at some minimally acceptable level ... Can this historical trend be changed? There is no reason to believe that the present spate of Middle Eastern difficulties is going to be the last chapter in America's involvement in the Middle East ....

The United States historically has attempted to pursue a policy of intense involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, sometimes diplomatic and sometimes military, but without a concomitant commitment to understanding the region's culture, religion, and particularly its languages. Since American foreign policy in the Middle East policy has never been more than sporadically successful, an argument can be made that Washington needs to match its military investment with a serious commitment to language and area studies. Language lessons are cheaper than tanks, and if America's linguists were good enough, the United States might not need quite so many tanks."

Note: he says linguistic competence is "necessary but not sufficient," so please don't assume that training some more linguists would suddenly give us a magical capability to reorder other countries at low cost.

3. If you're just now trying to catch up on the situation in Afghanistan (and why haven't you been reading the AfPak Channel here at FP?), a good short introduction is Thomas Billetteri, "Afghanistan Dilemma," CQ Researcher, available here. (Full disclosure: I'm quoted a couple of times, but so are lots of other people with varying views.) Billetteri takes no position on the policy choices facing us, but the piece is an excellent introduction to the issues.

4. I've also just finished a fascinating paper by two economists from the Universidad de los Andes, analyzing the effect of Plan Colombia on the production and distribution of drugs (e.g., cocaine). The analysis is fairly technical and some of the math is beyond me, but it's clearly a serious attempt to determine the impact of different policies and how the different actors involved (the U.S. and Colombian governments, the drug growers, the drug smugglers, etc.) interact in a strategic fashion. Among other things, the authors (Daniel Mejia and Pascual Restrepo) show that although Plan Colombia's drug eradication efforts have reduced the amount of acreage under cultivation by nearly 50 percent, actual cocaine production has decreased by only 11 percent and the prices of coca leaf, coca paste, and actual cocaine have remained fairly stable. Why? Because growers responded to eradication efforts by adopting more productive cultivation techniques, thereby producing nearly the same amount of cocaine from smaller amounts of land. 

They also demonstrate that the Colombian and U.S. governments have conflicting interests in pursuing the "war on drugs." Specifically, the Colombian government benefits far more from every dollar spent on eradication efforts (i.e., against drug production) because that takes money away from the growers (and thus the insurgency). By contrast, the United States gets a larger "bang from the buck" from drug interdiction (i.e., against drug trafficking) because the main U.S. interest is in trying to keep cocaine out of the United States. Here's a summary of their main findings:

We find, among many other things, that a three-fold increase in the U.S. budget allocated to Plan Colombia would decrease the amount of cocaine reaching consumer countries by about 19.5% (about 60,000 kg). We also estimate that the elasticity of the cocaine reaching consumer countries with respect to changes in the amount of resources invested in the war against illegal drug production is about 0.007%, whereas the elasticity with respect to changes in the amount of resources invested in the war against illegal drug trafficking is about 0.296%. In other words, if the main objective is to reduce the amount of drugs reaching consumer countries, targeting illegal drug trafficking is much more cost effective than targeting illegal drug production activities.  However, if the objective is to reduce the cost of conflict in Colombia, targeting drug production activities is more cost effective .... Furthermore, we find that the optimal allocation of resources from the point of view of the U.S., whose objective is to minimize the amount of cocaine reaching its borders, implies that all the U.S. assistance to Plan Colombia should be for the war against drug trafficking.  From the point of view of Colombia, whose objective is to minimize the total cost of internal conflict, the optimal allocation would imply that all the U.S. assistance for Plan Colombia should go to finance the war against drug production."

I'm sure one can raise questions about their analysis, but this is the sort of work that really ought to be informing the debate over whether Plan Colombia is working and how U.S. assistance should be allocated. 

Happy reading!

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With the level of violence rising and the Kurds pressing for a level of autonomy that borders on independence, can we finally dispense with the myth that the 2007 "surge" in Iraq was a success?

The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. force levels in key areas, forging a tactical alliance with cooperative Sunni groups, and shifting to a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasized population protection. This aspect of the surge succeeded, though it is still hard to know how much of the progress was due to increased force levels and improved tactics and how much was due to other developments, such as the prior "ethnic cleansing" that had separated the contending groups.

The second and equally important goal was to promote political reconciliation among the competing factions in Iraq. This goal was not achieved, and the consequences of that failure are increasingly apparent. What lies ahead is a long-delayed test of strength between the various contending groups, until a new formula for allocating political power emerges. That formula has been missing since before the United States invaded -- that is, Washington never had a plausible plan for reconstructing a workable Iraqi state once it dismantled Saddam's regime -- and it will be up to the Iraqi people to work it out amongst themselves. It won’t be pretty.

With the passage of time, the "surge" should be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to staunch the violence temporarily and let President Bush hand the problem off to his successor. Hawks will undoubtedly try to pin the blame on Obama by claiming that we were (finally) winning by the time Bush left office, in the hope that Americans have forgotten the strategic objectives that the "surge" was supposed to achieve. It's a bogus argument, but what would you expect from the folks who got us in there in the first place?

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By Ivan Arreguîn-Toft

"Peace with honor." This was the Nixon administration's euphemism for disengagement from South Vietnam, a place where corruption and incompetence had long doomed any hope of victory; even a victory as modest as the simple negative objective of preserving the political independence of tiny South Vietnam.

Today marks the first of a series of disengagements of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, as U.S. armed forces withdrew from Iraq's major cities and moved to take up blocking positions along likely infiltration routes into these same cities. The hope -- and it is little more than that -- is that in the time remaining between today and 2012, U.S. forces can manage to prevent a collapse of Iraq's fragile political independence and achieve what eluded them after 1973: peace with honor in Iraq.

The good news is that from the accession of General David Petraeus to command to the present, it is now fair to say that the "honor" part is not in question. In Nixon's time "honor" meant "no obvious defeat." Yet the honor of U.S. conduct in Vietnam remains a point of extreme controversy to this day. Many historians have argued that most U.S. armed forces in Vietnam de-civilized and de-soldierized: becoming viscous, drug-impaired war criminals. Others remember many who served with restraint, professionalism, and honor in the deepest sense of the word. To be fair, the weight of evidence pushes toward the barbarism side, but the truth is we will never actually know. Today, notwithstanding Abu Ghraib and five years of faith-based strategy, diplomacy, and politics during the Bush administration's tenure, "honor" once again means self-sacrifice and right conduct.

Since 2007, when U.S. strategy shifted dramatically in Iraq, U.S. armed forces have been dedicated to protecting noncombatants and by that means creating the crucial space for politics to resolve the underlying issues that lead young men to take up arms in the first place. Assaults against "evildoers" remain important, but have been conducted in a much more careful, methodical, and systematic fashion; and never, one must add, at the expense of Iraqi civilians. In short, U.S. armed forces can no longer be defeated in Iraq. The U.S. public understands that its new presidential administration is committed to pursuing more modest political objectives in Iraq with more effective tools than armed force. As a result, U.S. armed forces are preparing to leave Iraq in good order.

In fact, the mere physical presence of U.S. armed forces -- which in the main were never designed as an occupation and transition force -- had become (and remains) the single biggest obstacle to the achievement of a stable, prosperous Iraq. U.S. armed forces understood this as early as 2005. Their core concern then (as now) was that they not be blamed for "defeat" in Iraq. In this goal they have succeeded, largely due to unflagging public support and sympathy, and their tireless efforts to resolve the contradictions between what their experience and professionalism told them on the one hand, and the often foolish demands of their civilian leadership on the other hand.

The departure of U.S. armed forces from Iraq has another, less obvious benefit. Currently, most commentators believe that a U.S. withdrawal will signal a victory for Iran and fast-forward Iran's penetration of Iraqi politics. On the contrary. U.S. departure will remind Iraqis -- who with the exception of its Kurds and regardless of religious affiliation are virtually all Arabs -- that Iranians are Persians. Iran is likely to have as much luck bossing about the Iraqis after a U.S. withdrawal as China did bossing about the Vietnamese in 1975.

But there is bad news as well. After it became obvious that self-defense could not stand as a justification for the invasion, conquest, and occupation of a distant sovereign state, Americans turned to the positive objective of aiding Iraq's transition to a stable, democratic state; with the understanding that "democratic" meant "like us." This would protect us from terrorism, high oil prices, and just make us feel good. It wouldn't hurt Israel either. But nothing like that is even a remote possibility. What follows progressive U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will look very much like what preceded its intervention in 2003. Within a decade, expect to see the consolidation of a top-down authority structure (very much like that in today's Russian Federation), like as not dominated by Shii factions. Expect this consolidation of power to be attended by fighting between the Shii-dominated center and Iraqi Kurds and Sunnis, as well as extreme tension between Iraq and its neighbors: Sau'di Arabia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Israel.

In the end, success in Iraq -- one could hardly call it "victory" -- may come down to simply engineering a soft landing: a return to the way things were in 1980, when the United States was allied with an unpalatable but stable Iraq against an even more unpalatable and more dangerous Iran. Of course, that's if we're lucky.

Ivan Arreguîn-Toft is an assistant professor in the History and International Relations Department at Boston University and author of How the Weak Win Wars.

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