I thought Obama’s recent speech on Afghanistan was pretty stinky. As I skimmed through it, grumbling to myself, I wondered what Ahmed Rashid would make of it. Answer here, and very much worth reading.
In the lead up to Obama’s decision about what to do about Afghanistan I had drawn some faint comfort from the story that he had supposedly rejected all four of the plans presented to him, and sent his advisors back to the drawing board. I always had the impression that one of the things that made Bush such a wretched decider-in-Chief was that he tended to select only from the options presented to him by his advisors, since he lacked the imagination and the background knowledge to force them to rethink the options they presented to him.
But so much for Obama’s ability to free himself from the conventional wisdom here. His speech was such a disappointment, not just because the arguments were lousy, but because they so clearly failed to really engage the concerns of those of us who feel that an Afghanistan surge isn’t going to help (as Rashid’s post makes very clear). Really engaging the concerns of the other side is the sort of thing that Obama often does very well, so the failure to do it in this case is all the more striking. This makes me worried not just about the decision he’s making, but the process of decision-making that’s getting him there.
I’m not implacably opposed to any sort of U.S. presence in Afghanistan, so long as it’s got a clear exit date. But I don’t see any realistic prospect for success there. I don’t know what most proponents even mean when they talk about success in this context. Even when I do, I really don’t see how the benefits of hanging around (militarily) outweigh the costs, either for the U.S. or for Afghanistan.
I don’t even understand most of the time what people mean when they talk about “the Taliban.” The Taliban movement which consolidated control over a large part of Afghanistan prior to September, 2001, and which was led by Mullah Omar, no longer exists. It has not really existed for years now. Scattered remnants of the original crew remain, but not in a coherent form as a political movement. When people speak now about the Taliban it isn’t clear whether they mean to refer to this original movement, to some remnant of it, to plain old organized crime groups, to disaffected Pashtun nationalists, to disaffected Afghans of any ethnic or religious background, or to something else altogether.
I think this ambiguity is often the result of honest confusion, but it’s worth noting how very useful it is to proponents of the war. The original Taliban movement makes a rhetorically persuasive target. They gave shelter and support to people who attacked us! How could we go wrong making war against them? But when the target morphs into, say, some ill-defined and shifting group of disaffected Pashtun nationalists whose main enemy is the sharing of power with other ethnic groups in the country—well that represents a much less feasible and clearly defined target.
In any case, I think the appropriate response when someone starts talking about “the Taliban” in Afghanistan is to say “Who?“
Steve Laniel | 05-Dec-09 at 11:42 am | Permalink
Since 2001, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have just depressed me so much that I’ve found it impossible to devote any sustained attention to them before literally getting sick to my stomach. I have a limited quantity of emotional fortitude that I can throw at the full range of social problems; I barely have enough to throw at health-care reform, which is where most of my attention goes nowadays.
So I must ask you, as someone who has been paying more attention than I have: is Afghanistan another Vietnam, in the sense of a country that a) really very much wants its independence, b) has been fighting off foreign conquerors for a century, and c) has had the misfortune to be strategically significant?
I guess what I’m asking is: have the government and media been diagnosing Afghanistan as something related to terrorism, when in fact it’s just more colonialism of the sort that we’ve seen over and over again for a century and more?
Chris | 05-Dec-09 at 2:49 pm | Permalink
To be honest, the last six months I’ve sort of tuned out most of the news about Afghanistan. But, fwiw, here’s what I’d say about your a, b and c.
I don’t find that the Vietnam analogy gets me all that far, to be honest. I think Afghans mainly want to be free of the horrors of war. Beyond that, the country is fragmented into a whole lot of parts with very different priorities. It seems to me that trying to get a handle on Pashtun ambitions and grievances is a good place to start though, and I wish that more commentators did that. In any case, I don’t think the problem is that the U.S. is bucking the inevitable and very united tide of popular opinion, as it was in Vietnam.
I’m also not sure Afghanistan is all that strategically significant. Yglesias made the point not too long ago that you could draw the conclusion that Afghanistan is the graveyard of Empires, since Britain and Russia both had so much trouble there. But you could equally draw the conclusion that both superpowers eventually withdrew from Afghanistan because it wasn’t all that significant strategically. (The USSR waited to long, and got bled dry, but was bound to collapse anyway. They never needed to invade in the first place, and once there, the only reason for staying was saving face. Great Britain did just fine by settling for control of what was Northern India.)
The goal simply can’t be to deny radical plotters a sanctuary. There are tons of countries, including Germany, France, Canada and the U.S., and not just Sudan, Somalia, parts of Pakistan, etc., that provide decent places to plot something nefarious.
If this were about neocolonialism (in the sense of territorial acquisition), then I could at least see how current policies might conceivably benefit the U.S. But current policy seems to have more to do with inertia, face-saving, and lack of imagination than what the U.S. has to gain in the region.
To be fair(er), withdrawing is a seriously tricky problem. What if things get worse? How much blame will be laid at the feet of the U.S.? Spending 10 years in a country and then just up and leaving without any improvement at all just plain looks bad. But how do you accomplish that? What does improvement look like? Why has there been so little so far? What will be different this time?
If you can bring yourself to read a bit about this, Steve, I highly recommend Rashid’s book “Descent into Chaos.”
DC | 05-Dec-09 at 2:53 pm | Permalink
“But current policy seems to have more to do with inertia, face-saving, and lack of imagination than what the U.S. has to gain in the region.”
That part does sound like Vietnam.
Chris | 06-Dec-09 at 11:33 am | Permalink
Yeah, that part does sound like Vietnam. But it also sounds like most foreign policy disasters from the beginning of time. My discomfort with the Vietnam analogy had a bit more to do with differences between the political situations in Vietnam and Afghanistan—not that I really know very much about either.
DC | 07-Dec-09 at 9:11 pm | Permalink
You probably saw it but Michael Walzer has a fairly non-committal piece on this:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=314
The line that stands out is this:
“If our generals and diplomats are really trying to do everything right (stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic reconstruction), we should probably support them for a while.”
Chris | 08-Dec-09 at 10:00 am | Permalink
I hadn’t seen that, actually.
“Indeed, I think we have an obligation to do that—and I also think that most of these people would agree (they should be asked).”
They have been asked, you pompous Doofus, and lots of times too. This can be determined with seconds of googling. Here (pdf), for example, was one of the first things that came up.
I actually agree with Walzer that the best you can do for a continued involvement is to stress the moral obligations that followed from the occupation of the country. But it’s typical of Walzer that he doesn’t actually look at the opinions he mentions as an aside, let alone grapple with them (they’re no doubt complex, somewhat contradictory, and difficult to untangle, as group preferences so often are).
Uggggggggggghhhhhhh.
Chris | 08-Dec-09 at 9:04 pm | Permalink
Wow, I’m still irritated at that one line I quoted from Walzer. It just sums up everything that annoys me about him.