Matthew Yglesias » CAP, Iraq, and Afghanistan

Mar 30th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

CAP, Iraq, and Afghanistan

I don’t want to put words into any of my colleagues’ mouths or presume to speak for CAP/AF as an institution, but this John Nichols item bothered me:

In a no-holds-barred critique of groups that earned their reputations as critics of the rush to invade and occupy Iraq, Stauber argues that the Obama administration has effectively co-opted some of the nation’s most high-profile anti-war groups.

And here’s Stauber:

John Podesta’s liberal think tank the Center for American Progress strongly supports Barack Obama’s escalation of the US wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is best evidenced by Sustainable Security in Afghanistan, a CAP report by Lawrence J. Korb. Podesta served as the head of Obama’s transition team, and CAP’s support for Obama’s wars is the latest step in a successful co-option of the US peace movement by Obama’s political aids and the Democratic Party.

CAP and the five million member liberal lobby group MoveOn were behind Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), a coalition that spent tens of millions of dollars using Iraq as a political bludgeon against Republican politicians, while refusing to pressure the Democratic Congress to actually cut off funding for the war. AAEI was operated by two of Barack Obama’s top political aids, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, and by Brad Woodhouse of Americans United for Change and USAction.

I don’t think Obama’s agenda in Afghanistan, or the report on Afghan policy that Larry Korb wrote with Caroline Wadhams, Colin Cookman, and Sean Duggan should be above criticism. Indeed, the report differs from Obama in several respects—it calls for more troops than Obama—and neither it nor the administration’s policy perfectly mirrors my thinking. I know various people in the building have various different views on this.

But the implication from Nichols and Stauber that this is part of some insidious Obama-led plot to “co-opt” people is pretty unreasonable. Quite a bit before Barack Obama ever proposed withdrawal from Iraq, Korb and Brian Katulis and others at CAP were calling for withdrawal from Iraq and more troops for Afghanistan. Eventually, Obama came to adopt a similar position. And all through the campaign Obama consistently called for an influx of additional troops to Afghanistan. And Korb’s papers for CAP have, consistently, been calling for the same. From 2005’s “Strategic Redeployment” to 2006’s “Strategic Redeployment 2.0″ to 2007’s “Strategic Reset” and “The Forgotten Front”. That’s his position. You can assess the arguments on the merits, and take issue with it if you want, but “withdraw from Iraq and send more troops to Afghanistan” is a policy he was supporting long before it became conventional wisdom in the Democratic Party, it’s not something CAP cooked up to help Obama “co-opt” anyone.

Comments
14

Filed under: Afghanistan, National Security,

14 Responses to “CAP, Iraq, and Afghanistan”

Don Williams Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
1)This is the SAME meme that Fox has been promoting — that Afghanistan = Iraq.

2)Why doesn’t someone smack the shit out of these assholes and point out that :

a) Al Qaeda attacked the US and killed 3000 Americans whereas
b) Saddam Hussein did not

3) So the distinction between attacking someone who has already killed your countrymen vice an imaginary threat.

Also (c) That Bush/Cheney left Bin Laden out there
Njorl Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I’m pretty sure that people at both political extremes clearly remember Barack Obama promising to disband the military.
janinsanfran Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
it’s not something CAP cooked up to help Obama “co-opt” anyone.

Sure it is. CAP is giving the Afghan war cover. Since Obama has adopted their position (mostly), this set of wonks are giving Obama cover. Why does he need cover? Because a majority of Democrats are sour on U.S. power projection, otherwise known as militarism.

Obama will have to show “progress” pretty quickly in Af/Pak or a wider majority will get sour.
Max424 Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
At 8:47 on 9/11 war plans should have been laid out on a conference table so cool heads could contemplate a full scale absorption of Afghanistan.
Instead Bush continue his kiddy conference and Cheney retreated to his White House bunker to await the full scale Soviet missile strike that was no doubt imminent.

Then they really started to fuck up.

There are no strategic parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Iraq and Vietnam were wars of choice. Make the parallels there.
joe from Lowell Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Wingnuts are so incapable of understanding military issues beyond the question “Should we get da bad guyz or not?” that they cannot conceive of anyone else thinking in different terms.

“Hey! Yoo guyz didn’t wanna get da bad guyz in Irak, but now you wanna get da bad guyz in Afganuh-stan! Hippocritts!”
Richard Steven Hack Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
The problem with supporting an escalation in Afghanistan is that by most experts that war is already lost.

Not to mention that there is ZERO evidence that had the US poured in 400,000 troops in 2001 and 2002 that the end result wouldn’t have been the same, just accelerated (if the population revolted against occupation sooner) or slowed (if it took longer for the Taliban to organize against the occupation).

Either way, the war is lost now, and the situation will only get worse the more troops are poured in now.

And this is where Matt and CAP are being fucking stupid – to support a losing strategy after a war is lost – just because Obama is a Democratic President and they have some ignorant notion that a mild escalation is going to change matters.

Once again, to even THINK of stabilizing Afghanistan, you need to pour in 400,000 troops, throw out everybody in the Afghan government and bring in new people who aren’t warlords or beholding to drug cartels or US oil companies, execute all the warlords in the country, and then pour in 500,000 aid workers and probably $100 billion a year in development aid for the next ten years.

With no guarantee even that would work.

I don’t see such a plan on the Obama agenda.
Richard Steven Hack Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 1:39 am
Here’s a former military officer’s take on the Obama plan:

Yes, We Have No Bananastan
http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/03/30/yes-we-have-no-bananastan/

President Barack Obama’s March 27 announcement of a “new strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan” makes it official. He has no clue what he’s doing in the Middle East. Unless, of course, he’s leading us further down the road to ruin on purpose, in which case he knows exactly what he’s doing and is making an excellent job of it.

Until Obama announced the new strategy on March 27, the closest he had come to expressing a suitable objective was to ensure the Bananastans “cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.”

That’s a lovely-sounding national security goal that, if achieved, would do nothing whatsoever to improve national security. If you can attack the U.S. from a nosebleed seat in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, you can do it from any point between the Marianas Trench and the Sea of Tranquility. Not even the wet brain trust at the American Enterprise Institute would suggest we can grow a force large enough to occupy that much territory.

Obama’s security team rolled out the official objectives on March 27, and they are, to say the least, stupefying. Even more stupefying is the way the mainstream media is describing them. “A dozen officials who were involved in the debate” told the New York Times that the goals did not involve attempts at nation-building. The Times also published the white paper that delineated the strategy’s goals: “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and “developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” and “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan.” That’s not just nation-building, it’s social re-engineering of an entire region. Moreover, the white paper describes these goals as “realistic” and “achievable,” which they most assuredly are not.

Even worse, the new strategy includes further escalation of our Bananastan bungle by 4,000 more troops and officially expands the conflict into Pakistan. We’re watching a train wreck about to happen, fellow citizens – one that will make our onanism in Iraq look like Hitler’s blitz of Poland.
Richard Steven Hack Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 1:43 am
William Lind weighs in:

Another War Lost?
http://original.antiwar.com/lind/2009/03/30/another-war-lost/

Short of divine intervention, nothing can turn Afghanistan into a modern, prosperous, democratic state. Pigs will not only fly, they will win dogfights with F-15s before that happens. The most Afghanistan can ever be is Afghanistan: a poor, backward country, one where the state is weak and local warlords are strong, plagued with a drug-based economy and endemic low-level civil war. That is Afghanistan at its best. Just achieving that would be difficult for an occupying foreign power, whose presence assures that war will not be low-level and that no settlement will be long-term.

In fact, even the minimalist objectives reportedly urged by Vice President Biden are not attainable. We cannot deny safe haven in Afghanistan for the Taliban, because the Taliban are Afghans. They represent a substantial portion of the Pashtun population. The most we can hope to obtain in a settlement of the Afghan war is the exclusion of al-Qaeda. That is a realistic strategic objective, because al-Qaeda is made up of Arabs, i.e., foreigners, whom the Afghans dislike the same way they dislike other foreigners. The Taliban’s commitment to al-Qaeda is ideological, and the right combination of incentives can usually break ideological commitments.

Instead of a pragmatic, realistic approach to attaining that limited objective, it seems we are committed to a quixotic quest for the unattainable. Again, that guarantees we will lose the Afghan war. No means, military or non-military, can obtain the unattainable. The circle cannot be squared.

Here we see how little “change” the Obama administration really represents. The differences between the neo-liberals and the neocons are few. Both are militant believers in Brave New World, a globalist future in which everyone on earth becomes modern. In the view of these ideologues, the fact that billions of people are willing to fight to the death against modernity is, like the river Pregel, an unimportant military obstacle. We just need to buy more Predators.
Richard Steven Hack Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 1:52 am
Juan Cole weighs in:

Obama’s domino theory
The president sounds like he’s channeling Cheney or McCain — or a Cold War hawk afraid of international communism — when he talks about the war in Afghanistan.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/03/30/afghanistan/

President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting “al-Qaida” in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories.

Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble.

He acknowledged that we deserve a “straightforward answer” as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. “So let me be clear,” he said, “Al-Qaida and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. “And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban,” he said, “or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, “The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan,” and warned, “Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.”

This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the “Taliban” is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded “Taliban” only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or “killing” it.

The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban. The Afghan government has 80,000 troops, who benefit from close U.S. air support, and the total number of Taliban fighters in the Pashtun provinces is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Kabul is in danger of losing control of some villages in the provinces to dissident Pashtun warlords styled “Taliban,” though it is not clear why the new Afghan army could not expel them if they did so. A smaller, poorly equipped Northern Alliance army defeated 60,000 Taliban with U.S. air support in 2001. And there is no prospect of “al-Qaida” reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States. If al-Qaida did come back to Afghanistan, it could simply be bombed and would be attacked by the new Afghan army.

While the emergence of “Pakistani Taliban” in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a blow to Pakistan’s security, they have just been defeated in one of the seven major tribal agencies, Bajaur, by a concerted and months-long campaign of the highly professional and well-equipped Pakistani army. United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied last summer to the idea that al-Qaida is regrouping in Pakistan and forms a new and vital threat to the West: “Actually, I don’t agree with that assessment, because when al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, they had the partnership of a government. They had ready access to international communications, ready access to travel, and so on. Their circumstances in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and on the Pakistani side of the border are much more primitive. And it’s much more difficult for them to move around, much more difficult for them to communicate.”

As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they “kill” it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public.

Obama’s dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the “killing” of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an “al-Qaida” victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president’s views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington’s justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.
strasmangelo jones Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I don’t think Obama’s agenda in Afghanistan, or the report on Afghan policy that Larry Korb wrote with Caroline Wadhams, Colin Cookman, and Sean Duggan should be above criticism.

And yet, you’ve never criticized either of them.

Indeed, the report differs from Obama in several respects—it calls for more troops than Obama

Which is to say, CAP is to the right of Obama on Afghanistan. Hooray for American Progress!
strasmangelo jones Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 1:14 pm
And as for this idiocy from Don Williams:

a) Al Qaeda attacked the US and killed 3000 Americans whereas b) Saddam Hussein did not

Tattoo this backwards on your forehead, Don: Al Qaeda is not Afghanistan. Neither is al Qaeda the Taliban. America was not attacked by Afghans; America was not attacked by the Taliban. America was attacked by al Qaeda, and that ship sailed a long time ago. At this point all the United States is doing – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan – is creating more terrorists. But apparently it’s going to take another six years of war, and another slaughter of countless innocents, for so-called “progressives” to realize that you can’t solve every problem by bombing it into the ground.
joe from Lowell Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 2:45 pm
and that ship sailed a long time ago

Nice metaphor. Now, put it in concrete terms:

Al Qaeda was driven out of Afghanistan, and its operations broken up, by an American military intervention in Afghanistan, which is ongoing, and which you decry, even as you attempt to use the central fact of that intervention – the routing of al Qaeda out of its Afghan home base – as an argument against that very intervention.
Max424 Says:
April 1st, 2009 at 4:13 am
Doesn’t matter who attacked who and where who has gone now. The United States was going into Afghanistan no matter what and its forces were going to get stuck there.

We all knew that.

Our only option now, other than pouring in everything we got left, is to station 20-30,000 elite troops there, ad infinitum, like a crack Roman legion in a hostile province.

What am I saying? Rome. Empire. Man, I’ve changed.

Matt Yglesias

CAP, Iraq, and Afghanistan

14 Responses to “CAP, Iraq, and Afghanistan”

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