Winning Afghanistan
The Obama administration has begun a 60-day review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, and the outlines of a debate over how to win there are beginning to emerge. At its heart is a familiar question: how do we define success?
Yesterday President Obama tapped Bruce Riedel, a retired CIA official now at the Brookings Institution, to chair the strategy review. He will work alongside Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to the region, and Michele Flournoy, the new undersecretary of defense for policy (formerly the president of the Center for a New American Security). The results of this review – most significantly the definition of our strategic goals – will be of central importance to how this war is waged and whether we get dragged into a quagmire.
Many preliminary views have already been aired in different quarters. At Obama’s press conference on Monday, he was asked about his strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, or what policymakers are beginning to refer to as “Af-Pak” to emphasize the two states’ interconnectedness. He gave no grand statement of our strategic goals, but he did make this statement, flagged by Spencer Ackerman, that could be an indication of his thinking (emphasis mine):
You’ve got the Taliban and Al Qaeda operating in the [tribal areas] and these border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And what we haven’t seen is the kind of concerted effort to root out those safe havens that would ultimately make our mission successful.
This echoes the words of others in the administration. Vice President Biden, in his speech in Munich, defined the goal in Afghanistan as “a stable Afghanistan that’s not a haven for terrorists.” And Defense Secretary Gates, in a recent congressional hearing, insisted on the need for “modest, realistic goals” in Afghanistan to ensure “an Afghan people who do not provide a safe haven for Al Qaeda.” But “[i]f we set as the goal a Central Asian Valhalla,” Gates said, ” we will lose.”
The essence of these statements seems to indicate that the administration is inclined to limit our strategy in Af-Pak to the rooting out of Al Qaeda, in contrast to a more ambitious agenda of building a functioning democracy. The counterargument to this strategy can be found in these two posts at Foreign Policy’s fantastic new blog, Shadow Government: Notes from the Loyal Opposition, which gathers conservative foreign policy thinkers to comment on Obama’s foreign policy actions. The first of those two posts quotes Gen. Petraeus’s strategic vision for Afghanistan:
First and foremost, our forces and those of our Afghan partners have to strive to secure and serve the population. We have to recognize that the Afghan people are the decisive “terrain.” And together withour Afghan partners, we have to work to provide the people security, to give them respect, to gain their support, and to facilitate the provision of basic services, the development of the Afghan Security Forces in the area, the promotion of local economic development, and the establishment of governance that includes links to the traditional leaders in society and is viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the people.
The second post expands on this sentiment:
Denial of space to terrorists in Afghanistan is a negative goal that must be matched with a positive agenda to promote good governance and the hard and soft infrastructure of development. Former State Department counterterrorism advisor Dave Kilcullen and colleagues make the case here for an Afghanistan policy that combines Gates’ two “no’s” – no sanctuary for terrorists with global reach and no regional war over the spoils of a Balkanized Afghanistan – with the “yes” of building a sustainable system of governance that meets the needs of the Afghan people.
I’m writing this post more for the purposes of defining the terms of the debate than to editorialize myself, but at this stage it strikes me that the more ambitious view of our strategic goals contains a limited degree of truth in the sense that the elimination of a safe haven for Al Qaeda is likely only achievable if the Afghan people are provided with basic necessities and some sort of stable governance. Otherwise we will be perpetually trapped in a situation where we can smack down Al Qaeda all we want but it will always have room to emerge again like a weed.
But the ultimate goal there is still centered on reducing the threat of Al Qaeda, and “basic necessities and some sort of stable governance” is a far cry from insisting on a flourishing democracy. Instead of a formal insistence on democracy, it seems to me we should be working to develop a governing structure that is (1) legitimate in the eyes of the Afghan people and (2) stable. This need not be a democracy, and it allows for a degree of corruption, but it is realistic.
In a couple months, when the strategy review is concluded, we’ll see where the Obama administration comes down on this debate. It’s worth noting that the review itself is extremely encouraging. The Bush administration suffered in both Iraq and Afghanistan from a failure to define clear strategic goals. It appears that the Obama administration is not eager to repeat that mistake.
Comment by JayBandit on 11 February 2009 at 10:24 am:
I’m sure your definition would be something like “if it’s obama’s idea, it is a success…if it was bush’s it must be a failure”.
Comment by Joshua on 11 February 2009 at 5:18 pm:
Jay, that isn’t thoughtful, productive, or clever. Do you have any interest at all in advancing truth? Do you care about the troops or their families enough to learn about the issue and bother thinking for 5 or 10 minutes?
Comment by chrism on 11 February 2009 at 5:49 pm:
Joshua, you don’t care enough about truth to abandon your pathetic partisan drooling over a particular president in favor of objective analysis about anything he, or his administration, does.
Comment by James Prescott on 11 February 2009 at 6:03 pm:
First of all, when people start dropping lines like “advancing truth” or “its time for a change,” its actually time to start worrying. That type of language has the benefit of sounding good but meaning nothing. I think it is about time we stop sounding good and start saying things that can actually be interpreted by someone without an advanced degree in English literature.
Second of all this is not a campaign, Josh, so enough with the think of the children type rhetoric.
Next, where is the susbtance of this post and the comments contained therein? The suggestions provided by the loyal opposition blog and President Obama’s advisors are nothing more than the same old rhetoric that was expressed by Bush II and every president dating back to Reagan. Probably even furthere. The “legitimate government that doesn’t have to be a democracy” is Cold War thinking which is arguably how we got into this situation in the first place and the concept of building more infrastructure is great until we start talking about what infrastructure means in that part of the world. Are we talking about building the equivalent of an Eisenhower Expressway, or is it updating electrical grids? What is good governance? Is the government built upon the Shar’ia? Can Americans ever truly feel comfortable supporting a government built ENTIRELY UPON religion? What is respect? How do the Aghanis define respect? Oh, and how are we going to finance all of that?
None of the comments provided by anyone above provide any sort of substance. These commentors instead rely upon terms which necesitate specific definition, yet they don’t provide it. It is hard to critique a plan that has no concrete measuring stick, no means of comparison. The majority of the contributors to this blog demanded that when Bush was in office. They were right to do so. They should do the same for Obama.
Comment by Brian Pierce on 11 February 2009 at 7:52 pm:
Prescott,
Those are good questions, but those are the questions that come second to defining what our strategic goals are. We have to first decide whether we care about what type of government Afghanistan has before we make actual decisions about what type of government we want. What I’m suggesting is that it’s conceivable that a non-liberal democracy could develop in Afghanistan while still achieving America’s strategic interests – that we need not eliminate corruption and hold provincial elections to achieve our goals. Others would argue that we must work to develop a functioning democracy, otherwise we are betraying our interests and our basic morality. The point is that we have to keep in mind our endgame – do we start withdrawing once we feel comfortable that Al Qaeda is no longer freely operating in the region, or do we stay until Afghanistan has functioning democratic institutions? If we don’t answer that question at the outset, we are going to have trouble down the line.
Comment by James Prescott on 11 February 2009 at 9:00 pm:
These are hardly secondary questions when the entire reason for posing your question hinges on practicality. Is there any question as to whether America would prefer a western style democracy over any other type? No. What we would prefer versus what would we settle for turns on practicality, and practicality is based on the answer to the questions I posed. Therefore, these questions are the ones that should be asked now, cause you can’t answer yours until you answer mine.
Comment by Brian Pierce on 12 February 2009 at 7:32 am:
It’s safe to assume that the more we define our strategic interest based on a liberal democratic government (characterized by regular elections, peaceful transitions of power, separation of powers, civil rights, political and religious freedoms, etc.), lack of corruption, economic development, rule of law, and so on, the harder our job is going to be. It’s true that the practicality and cost of achieving those objectives will influence how hard we push for them. But what will also influence how hard we push for them is whether we consider them intimately tied to our national interest or just something desirable but not particularly relevant to our national interest.
In other words, your questions get at the cost of achieving those goals – and that’s important, and conservatives (including those I linked to) argue those costs are relatively low because (1) the Afghan people are eager for liberal democracy so it won’t be too difficult to achieve it, and (2) for all our economic problems, we are an enormously wealthy country and can afford investing in Afghanistan’s development. But what’s also important are the *benefits* of achieving those goals – do we just get to feel happy that we built a prosperous and functioning democracy, or is our national security and the eradication of Al Qaeda contingent on such a prosperous and functioning democracy? If it’s the latter, then your questions take on an added importance, because the benefits become much more significant and therefore the costs and practicality of the goals become highly relevant. But if we decide at the outset that the benefits aren’t that significant to our national interest, then all we really need to do is recognize that achieving those goals entails some significant cost, which we know it does even if we can debate exactly what that cost is.
Your questions then aren’t secondary, so I was wrong to say that, but they are interrelated to the issues I discussed in this post. The practicality of developing a democracy in Afghanistan is important, but so is the extent to which it’s desirable and beneficial, and you seem to be avoiding that somewhat fundamental question.
Comment by Brandon on 12 February 2009 at 8:12 am:
“I was wrong”
I hear hoofbeats and a distant chorus . . .
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