Matt Yglesias

What a Legitimacy Problem Looks Like

Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh province in Northern Afghanistan says:

“Karzai is a thief of people’s votes. Democracy has been buried in Afghanistan. He’s not a lawful president,” Mr. Atta said in an interview in his vast rococo-styled office, as turbaned supplicants lined up to petition for his help in resolving court cases and disputes with local authorities.

At the moment, the mainstays of the Karzai government in Afghanistan are the non-Pashto areas of Afghanistan where there’s a great deal of popular hostility to the Taliban. But its precisely for that reason that Karzai, a Pashto, was picked to lead Afghanistan. The view was that such a person would have the most legitimacy in the most contested areas. The risk with what’s now happened in the election is that Karzai will either start to lose his Tajik support and his government will become untenable, or else that to prevent that from happening the government will need to shift all the way in the direction of him basically being a frontman for a Fahim/Dostum Tajik/Uzbek warlord coalition that has no support in Pashto areas.

The Stakes in Afghanistan

Spencer Ackerman has a long-form piece on the evolution of the Obama administration’s thinking on Afghanistan. It includes this telling insight: “To a great degree, Afghanistan is a proving ground for what the United States will ultimately consider the true lessons of Iraq.”

To a great degree, this is what I find to be the most troubling thing about the counterinsurgency approach to Afghanistan. It strikes me as something that’s driven at least as much by a desire to win an argument in Washington, DC about the workability of counterinsurgency as by a thoughtful analysis about the costs and benefits of adopting such an approach. Precisely because of COIN’s ascendant-but-still-uncertain status in the American military toolkit, it’s very difficult for a COIN advocate to say “eh? this would be costly at best and it’s not clear it’s worthwhile.” Ultimately, I’d say I’m more sympathetic to the COIN crowd’s view of the world than to enthusiasts about air power or the need to prepare for naval battles with China. But these kind of intra-military disputes inevitably wind up creating a somewhat warped view of what’s going on in the world.

Reconstruction for the USA

Ryan Avent asks what would happen if for just one year we spent as much on infrastructure investments as we do on the Department of Defense:

With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense? Have a look at this if you’re unsure.

And while the gains to new investments in infrastructure (and not just in transportation) would be large, it isn’t as though we lack critical needs. What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense. Aimless defense spending, on the other hand, may well make us poorer and less secure.

Ryan’s link was to my post comparing America’s 2007 defense spending to other countries:

Under the circumstances, I think it’s clear that the marginal dollar spent on defense has a very low value. And of course though Ryan’s thought-experiment is a fun exercise, you couldn’t build out a national HSR network in one year no much how much money you spent. So the real point would be something like if we took 10 percent of the defense budget and re-allocated that to infrastructure, we could have a national HSR network in ten years. And we’d still be spending over triple what our nearest rival spends.

Something worth noting is that for a hegemonic power suffering from slow-but-steady (but very slow) relative decline, wasting money on national security expenditures actually erodes our hegemony. Meaningful U.S.-Chinese security competition is a generation or two away. By that time, money that was spent in 2009 on fighter planes or nuclear submarines or transportation infrastructure in Afghanistan isn’t going to be doing us any good. By contrast, spending money on preschool in 2009 does improve the U.S.-Chinese balance of power in 2049—investment in early childhood education pays enormous dividends, but it takes a long time to turn tiny babies into productive adults. And transportation is just the same. The construction of heavy rail mass transit in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington was extremely expensive but has paid consistent dividends for decades and if properly maintained will continue to do so forever.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but someone told me he heard a Chinese official tell him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.” I don’t really think we should view that contrast in a paranoid light, but if you do want to take a paranoid view of the American national security situation it makes a lot more sense to worry about that than to worry that someone in a cave might build a bomb.

Pashto Language Ability

A colleague points me to this reporting from Gareth Porter back in April:

But according to an official at the State Department’s Bureau of Human Resources, the United States has turned out a total of only 18 Foreign Service officers who can speak Pashto, and only two of them are now serving in Afghanistan – both apparently in Kabul.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California trains roughly 30 to 40 military personnel in Pashto each year, according to media relations officer Brian Lamar, most of whom are enlisted men in military intelligence.

I don’t think this necessarily needs to hobble our ability to achieve anything useful in Afghanistan. But I do think it illustrates that manipulating Afghan politics is not likely to be America’s strong suit. Foreign politicians usually understand how to manipulate US domestic politics much better than our leaders understand how to manipulate their domestic politics. We have a lot of strengths as a nation, but that sort of thing is not one of them.

Speaking the Language

To move beyond merely rhetorical question-asking, who is the highest-ranking American official who speaks the languages they use in Afghanistan? Moving quickly down the list, it seems that neither the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, nor the Secretary of State makes the cut. Nothing in the background of Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake or Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl (oddly, State and DOD slice up the world differently) suggests that they do. Nor does Richard Holbrooke or Ambassador Karl Eikenberry or General McChrystal (or, for that matter, General Petraeus).

The leading contender that’s been suggested to me is Puneet Talwar, who does Iran-Iraq issues at the NSC and I’m led to believe knows Persian which (going under the name Dari) is used as a lingua franca in Afghanistan. But he works at a different desk. Spencer thinks Vikram Singh, who works for Holbrooke, may be the person I’m looking for.

At any rate, Americans are famously poorly endowed with foreign language ability, and the issue becomes especially acute as our national security policy becomes more-and-more focused on places like Afghanistan and Somalia rather than France and Germany.

Our Knowledge Problem in Afghanistan Won’t Be Solved in One Friedman Unit

Do we need to increase our efforts in Afghanistan or do we lack the sort of partner who can make counterinsurgency work? Maybe stringing things out for another Friedman Unit will resolve the matter:

“We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether he’s doing anything differently — whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said. He insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality surrounding the Obama administration’s own debate on a new strategy, and the request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan, for upward of 44,000 more troops.

Like Spencer Ackerman I’m skeptical. What can you really tell in six months? Karzai knows we’re considering sending more support to his government. He also knows we’re concerned about corruption. So he’ll almost certainly deliver on some kind of anti-corruption measure. But will it be effective? Will it even be intended to be effective? It would be the easiest thing in the world to make a big show of curtailing abuses by one or both of the other Karzai brothers, and then ease up as soon as attention drifts elsewhere.

The good news about this is that I think the significance of creating a corruption-free Afghan central government is being overstated in the American debate. But in terms of creating one, recall that US foreign policy is always at its least-effective when it comes to manipulating the domestic politics of other countries. We have more more than Karzai. And more guns than Karzai. And better satellites than Karzai. But we don’t have a better understanding of Afghan domestic politics than Karzai. On the contrary, Karzai—like most important foreign leaders—probably understands our politics a lot better than we understand his. Karzai, and lots of key figures around him, reads English and can fire up his web browser and see what’s going on in the New York Times or Politico or whatever. What’s the highest-ranking American official who reads Dari or Pashto?

Afghan Public Opinion

Mark Kleiman summarizes some key bullet points from the Asia Foundation’s most recent survey of public opinion:

— In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.

— This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.

—The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

— Insecurity also remains the most important reason for pessimism, cited by 42 percent of respondents. However, the proportion of respondents that highlight insecurity in 2009 has fallen since 2008 when half of respondents (50%) emphasized this factor.

— Insecurity (including attacks, violence and terrorism) is identified as the biggest problem in Afghanistan by over a third of respondents (36%), particularly in the South East (48%), West (44%) and South West (41%). However, concern about other issues such as unemployment (35%), poor economy (20%), corruption (17%), poverty (11%) and education (11%) has increased in 2009 compared to 2008.

I think you can use this data to support a variety of policy conclusion. But it’s striking that the US debate between escalation and scaling-back tends to proceed from a shared assumption that Afghanistan is in a crisis point. But Afghans seem to think things are improving. Note also that corruption, which has been talked about a lot over the past month, rates relatively low on the complaint scale. In terms of unemployment it seems to me that the most helpful thing we can do would be to revise trade policies. Allow the duty free importation of Afghan textiles to the American market. See what it takes to persuade Turkey and India to stop putting such high taxes on Afghan agricultural products.

This kind of thing is very boring to talk about and isn’t amenable to David Brooks writing columns about how the real issue is whether or not Obama is manly enough to demand victory. But it’s really important. Poor labor market conditions make people disgruntled. In stable democracies they vote for opposition parties. In non-stable places they may take up arms.

Conditions Deteriorating in Guinea

In my safe havens piece I wrote that “Broken states, alas, are not all that rare.” This is a difficult point to raise without coming across as glib, but it is the reality. Neither the American public nor the American press has much taste for foreign affairs coverage. We basically see media attention and political controversy attach to either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there’s not the bandwidth to cover both of them simultaneously, much less the whole wide world.

But read, for example, Elizabeth Dickinson’s post about how Guinea’s year-old junta is unraveling:

All the comes at a time when the junta itself is falling apart. Dadis comes across as crazy, drugged, or bi-polar in his interviews and TV spots. He has become increasingly fragile, observers say, as the pressures of patronage and a fractured junta coalition weigh on him.

And fractured the junta certainly is. The group of 30 or so soldiers who came to power, with the backing of about 500 more, make up just a handful of the armies 20,000 forces. Within the high ranks, the most obvious split has emerged between Dadis and his defense minister, General Sekouba Konaté. The latter was an important figure in the military prior to the coup as is largely percieved as the biggest “threat” to Dadis’s rule — an impression codified by the fact that, since earlier this year, Dadis has refused to let his defense minister out of his sight for more than a few moments (they are pictured together above). When Konaté left the country several weeks ago to Morocco (the rumor mill claims he was sent to procure arms), many in Guinea wondered if he would be let back in to the country. His whereabouts now are unknown.

There’s also this Human Rights Watch account of the premeditated murder of protesters in the country, but we can probably safely dismiss that as part of HRW’s vast anti-Israel conspiracy.

Anyways, none of this is to say we should withdraw all our forces from Afghanistan and invade Guinea instead. It’s just that the real humanitarian and security issues involved in weak or fragile states need to be kept in some kind of perspective and our actual policy commitment should be balanced.

America’s Role in Afghan Corruption

Joanna Nathan, who lived in Kabul from 2003 to 2009 working for the Institute for War and then the International Crisis Group, says the United States needs to clean up its own act if we want to improve the corruption situation in Afghanistan:

But before the U.S. administration is in any real position to make demands of the Afghan government, it needs to get its own act together. Over-reliance on expensive private contractors needs to be severely curtailed with the focus put on injecting money through Afghan government systems in a way that strengths local institutions rather than subverts them. The measure of effectiveness needs to be on impact on the ground rather than the sheer amounts poured in. Overarching this must be a cohesive approach across U.S. government agencies as to who is being engaged and ensuring that that no one has impunity.

Up on the 11th floor here at CAP Caroline Wadhams, Colin Cookman, and Christina Misunas recently did a piece on America’s faustian bargains with Afghan warlords that makes many overlapping points.

The Final Frontier

Today in The National I have a new article out arguing that the fear of safe havens doesn’t make a great deal of sense and is part of a lack of strategic priority setting. After all, the truth about Afghanistan is that it’s not so much “the graveyard of empires” as it is simply a place empires eventually realize isn’t very important.

What the piece doesn’t deal with is the idea that a large American military deployment in Afghanistan is necessary for the stability of Pakistan and a broader South Asian security context. I’m not sure whether I think that argument is right or not, but for what it’s worth it strikes me as a much more plausible idea. Which is to say that if it’s true that our efforts in Afghanistan are playing a crucial stabilizing role in Pakistan, then that definitely seems like the kind of thing we should be pouring a lot of resources into. My colleague Brian Katulis has a smart recent take on Pakistan, but it doesn’t really delve into the Afghanistan connection.

Ricks Suggests Obama is Stalling on Afghanistan to Help John Corzine

He doesn’t endorse it, per se, but Tom Ricks sort of uncritically passes on the following fairly serious—and seriously weird—accusation against the White House:

Last but most importantly: Nov. 3, gubernatorial elections in both Virginia and New Jersey. The latter of which is my reasoning why the decision was delayed this long. Corzine is in the fight of his life and Obama is going to piss people off either way. Important special elections also in California and New York.

I’m not going to shift into faux-naive mode and pretend it’s outrageous to even insinuate that the administration thinks about politics when it comes to national security. No doubt the president is aware of the general state of public opinion and thinks about how his decisions on Afghanistan will impact his ability to work on other aspects of his agenda. That said, the idea that a decision is being specifically pushed back until after the election because somehow that will help John Corzine is kind of bizarre.

I mean, there’s not even any reason I can think of for believing that delay is helpful to Corzine. This sounds like a person so eager to dream up insidious motives to attribute to the president that he’s come up with one that doesn’t even make minimal sense. Ricks himself has been sharply critical of Obama’s slow decision-making pace. If he wants to endorse the claim, that the “most important” factor in the delay is a cynical effort to intervene in the NJ gubernatorial election he should say so plainly and back the argument up. If not, he should withdraw it. Just passing this on as an “interesting analysis” from “My book researcher, Kyle Flynn, a two-tour vet of Afghanistan (with extra points for duty in Oruzgan, the Pashtun answer to Arkansas) and now a graduate student at Georgetown University,” doesn’t really cut it.

Effective Leadership

Obviously, this is a serious issue, but I just read Spencer Ackerman explain:

President Obama’s ordering up a province-by-province study to “determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help.”

Mississippi 2008 Presidential Exit Poll

And looking that over, it seems to me that a province-by-province study to “determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help” would be a good idea right here in the USA. Someone can finally do something about, say, Mississippi. It persistently lags on human development indexes, its governor is dogged by corruption allegations, and election results simply break down along ethnic lines and re-enforce entrenched divisions.

A joke, yes. But it’s a reminder that state-building involves a lot of large assumptions about the capabilities of our own public sector institutions. Providing good government is difficult, and providing it in a foreign country can be very difficult.

Hamid Karzai’s Other Brother

With Ahmad Wali Karzai in the news, let’s spare a moment of thought for the other Karzai brother, Mahmoud. As the CAP warlord cheat sheet explains:

Mahmoud Karzai retains a residence in Maryland and managed the family’s string of Afghan restaurants in the United States prior to the fall of Taliban. He currently heads the Afghan Chamber of Commerce. He has been accused of profiting through this position and his family connections, and holds interests in mining, a cement factory, the country’s dominant bank, and its only Toyota distributorship. Hamid Karzai has refused to take action against either brother, saying he has received no evidence, only allegations, against his family members.

It’s been years since I’ve visited either the Cambridge or the Baltimore branch of the Helmand franchise, but it’s worth noting that these are—or at least were—darn good restaurants. It has, however, long been my feeling that the rather extensive wine list tends to undermine the Karzai family’s Islamic cred.

Also note that when you hear about corruption in Afghanistan, we’re not talking about small stuff. The president’s brother heads the country’s chamber of commerce, dominant bank, and main car distributorship and he’s the less corrupt brother!

Afghanistan’s Heroin Problem

It seems to me that the link between the poppy trade and the Taliban in Afghanistan is often discussed in the US in a somewhat confused way. Just because the opium trade is a major source of funding for the Taliban doesn’t mean that cracking down on “the opium trade” hurts the Taliban. If I deal heroin here in DC than a crackdown on “heroin dealers” would be bad for me if and only if I actually get shut down. If, instead, the police shut down other heroin dealers then that’s good for me, the cops have shut down the competition. Now if what they’re primarily concerned with is reducing the overall quantity of heroin dealing in the city maybe they don’t care about that. But if the issue is that some heroin dealers are using drug money to buy televisions and other heroin dealers are using drug money to buy bombs that are used to kill Marines then it would make sense for the cops to be a good deal more discriminating.

And this is basically the situation in Afghanistan. The Taliban gets money from the poppy trade, but it’s not my understanding that they have a monopoly on it. Under the circumstances, crackdowns on non-Taliban poppy farmers or traffickers is a way of enhancing the Taliban’s revenue by choking supply and raising prices. The logic of fighting the Taliban is that we should offer assistance to anyone involved in the poppy trade who’s not involved in funding the insurgency. Think of the US and the Taliban as like rival mafia operations. We want people involved in poppy to pay protection money (i.e., taxes) to Hamid Karzai and to avoid paying protection money to the Taliban. We want to prove that we can protect our poppy farmers/smugglers from the Taliban while cracking down on people who collaborate with the Taliban.

The problem is that formally sponsoring a group of favored poppy entrepreneurs would go against our the policy commitment that we (and other relevant players) have made to keeping heroin illegal.

Rush ‘n Attack

You probably won’t see anyone describe it in these terms, but the proposal for a city-focused campaign in Afghanistan reported by Thom Shanker, Peter Baker, and Helene Cooper in the New York Times strikes me as mighty similar to what the U.S.S.R. eventually settled into in Afghanistan:

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

You probably won’t see anyone describe it in those terms because it sounds bad, but as I’ve said before I think the right way to understand the Soviet experience is to see that the United States could probably make this work. It sort of worked for the Soviets, and they were a much weaker and poorer country facing people who were getting much more extensive external support than our adversaries. But of course you’re still left with the fact that commanders in the region want more resources and would probably keep agitating for more even if you implemented this semi-limited strategy:

But military planners are also pressing for enough troops to safeguard major agricultural areas, like the hotly contested Helmand River valley, as well as regional highways essential to the economy — tasks that would require significantly more reinforcements beyond the 21,000 deployed by Mr. Obama this year.

Politically speaking, if you’re the President what you want to be able to say is that there’s some relatively restrained military policy that’s also “the best” policy. Realistically, though, it seems like a cheaper policy (let’s not worry about the Helmand River valley) actually has some drawbacks relative to a more costly policy. That is, of course, generally the way policy choices work. More generous subsidies make a health care mandate work better, but they cost more money. But it’s a bit alien to a lot of the way we talk about national security policy in the United States. Part of the iterative process between military professionals and civilian political leaders is that the political leaders need to reach conclusions about the importance of proposed ventures relative to other possible priorities. How much does the Helmand River valley really matter to the United States?

Today in Afghanistan News

Tom Friedman says we need a lighter footprint in Afghanistan, offering some arguments I disagree with, but an observation about costs and benefits that I endorse: “China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.”

Meanwhile, as I’ve observed before, Rep Jane Harman (D-CA) is normally a very hawkish Democrat but seems quite skeptical about Afghanistan. She elaborated on her view yesterday talking with Matt Duss:

Stan Collender also did a nice piece on why Fred Hiatt is out of his mind when he thinks that deficits induced by Afghanistan-related expenditures somehow don’t count in the budgetary scheme. Some people worry about deficits because of concerns about their actual economic impact. Others—like, it seems, Hiatt—only like to talk about deficits as a reason for why we should cut Social Security benefits. Other deficit control measures, from the health care bill in the senate to the idea that we should fight fewer wars, are dismissed out of hand.

Meanwhile, Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti, and James Risen report that for all the shiny talk about counterinsurgency the CIA has been running an old-school operation in Afghanistan, paying bribes to Hamid Karzai’s opium trafficking brother “for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.” Leading COIN theorists do not approve but this raises, in a very pointed way, the issue of whether COIN-in-practice stands any realistic chance of resembling the theory and rhetoric.

Is the US Military Presence Driving the Afghan Insurgency?

DOD Photo

Spencer Ackerman on the key issue raised by Matthew Hoh:

The concern about the U.S. presence fueling the insurgency — not for what the U.S. does, but merely for the fact of its existence — was raised by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January, but it has not yet seemed to penetrate most discourse about the war. Gates himself backed away from the critique in September, saying that Gen. Stanley McChrystal convinced him that the U.S. military could mitigate the danger by actively providing for the Afghan people’s well-being. And indeed, McChrystal has tacitly paid respect to the critique, saying in his much-derided London address that jobs programs could do much to deprive the Taliban of foot soldiers who fight because their lack of economic alternatives accelerate their antipathy to the U.S. presence. That approach won the support yesterday of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in his uneasy embrace of a modified version of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. But if Hoh is right, then it’s simply too late for that strategy, as the mere presence of the U.S. military will have reached the “tipping point” that Gates warned about in January.

I think the beginning of wisdom on this is just to flat-out acknowledge that of course our presence fuels the insurgency. If a bunch of Chinese troops showed up in Detroit, decided they were going to bring security and good government to Detroit, installed a new Detroit political leadership, and went about very earnestly trying to solve Detroit’s problems there would be a lot of resistance to their effort. The question is whether their security, stabilization, and reconstruction efforts could be successful enough to on balance improve things.

For our case in Afghanistan I think that the key point is that there needs to be some kind of horizon on our presence. There’s always going to be distrust of a foreign army roaming through your country. In part you can dispel that distrust through good works. But in part you can dispel that through showing people what a post-American Afghanistan would be like and how we’re going to get there. I don’t know if that means a chronologically-boud timetable or a political checklist or what, but it’s got to be something. What you don’t want is to get in the situation of saying, basically, that we can’t leave Afghanistan until first we kill everyone who wants us to leave Afghanistan. For a while our Iraq policy was stuck in that loop, and I worry that our Afghanistan policy may veer in that direction.

Matthew Hoh Resigns

Matthew Hoh seems like just the sort of person a country needs to wage successful counterinsurgency. He was in the Marine Corps, served in Iraq, rose to the rank of Captain and then after leaving the military joined the Foreign Service. He was sent to Afghanistan and became the top civilian official in Zabul province. And he’s quit:

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

This strikes me as fairly similar to the Rory Stewart case and poses tough questions for advocates of a more troops approach.

Is “Fogh” Danish for Kabuki?

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Spencer Ackerman has more on NATO chief and former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s surprisingly definitive statements on Afghanistan policy:

Krasnik has been doing some reporting into Rasmussen’s already-controversial tenure as NATO secretary general, which is barely a year old. “He has bypassed NATO ambassadors on several occasions, discussing budget and Afghanistan strategy with defense ministers and not diplomats,” Krasnik said. “NATO ambassadors accuse him of being ‘out of control’ and ‘over confident’ — that is: not an empty suit looking for the middle ground between the members. ‘He will last 1 to 1.5 years tops,’ as one NATO diplomat told me the other day.”

Interestingly, one of the only NATO ambassadors to support Rasmussen is Ivo Daalder, Obama’s man in Brussels and a Hillary Rodham Clinton ally. “‘Fogh does what he is supposed to do. He is leading the alliance,” Dalder told a Danish newspaper this Saturday,” Krasnik said. That has led to speculation in Copenhagen that Rasmussen’s position comes with at least the tacit approval of the Obama administration. “My feeling is that he wouldn’t take a public stand like this just before the Bratislava meeting without clearing it with the U.S.,” Krasnik said. “One argument here is that Obama needs others than the GOP and army generals to ask for more troops, so why not the NATO-chief?”

Of course if this is kabuki, it’s hard to know what the point would be. It’s not as if Rasmussen is going to move the dial on American public opinion. This may just be a case of a hard-charging, confrontational, ambitious guy who happened to land in what’s normally a very low-key post.

Rory Stewart and Skepticism

Jason Zengerle has a noteworthy profile of Rory Stewart, a fascinating character and Afghanistan expert who’s a leading skeptic of the merits of an ambitious approach to Afghanistan. Stewart’s key points:

Stewart’s plan stems from his strange mixture of pessimism and optimism. On the one hand, he argues that the Afghan central government lacks the strength or legitimacy to actually run the country, nor does he have much faith in the ability of the United States to help it on those counts. “I have some friends in Afghanistan who will say, ‘If the U.S. government is infinitely flexible, capable, superbly informed, able to deliver programs precisely in every rural area, and its soldiers are able to avoid killing anybody and can identify exactly which tribal chief at the sub-district level to deal with, everything will be fine,’” Stewart says. “To which my answer is, ‘That’s a big if, and that’s not how our bureaucracies and administrations work.’” But Stewart also believes that things in Afghanistan aren’t as precarious as some fear. “There’s a certain kind of worst-case scenario view that Afghanistan is like this horrendous nightmare and, if we don’t get in there and sort it out, we’ll have global jihad, we’ll have a completely destabilized region, terrorists will have their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, American credibility will be finished forever,” Stewart says. “And these are not really, I think, fully developed positions.”

Later in the piece, Zengerle quotes Andrew Exum as saying that the counterinsurgents disagree with Stewart because they have a different view of the facts on the ground. Exum tells Zengerle: “I think the first twenty-two pages of the McChrystal assessment of the war in Afghanistan were more grounded in evidence-based reality than Rory’s was.”

Certainly I don’t have any special insight into which Afghanistan expert is right and which is wrong. But it seems to me that the real disagreement here is probably driven by different views about the U.S. military than by different views about Afghanistan as such. Exum believes that the Pentagon has developed powerful new operational doctrines about counterinsurgency that make it possible to achieve things via U.S. military intervention that U.S. military intervention hasn’t traditionally achieved. I read Stewart as being skeptical about that idea—apparently he’s running for parliament as a Conservative in the United Kingdom and as you would expect from a right-of-center politician (but rarely see in the United States) his skepticism about ambitious bureaucratic endeavors extends to skepticism about ambitious bureaucratic endeavors conducted by the United States Department of Defense.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen Going Rogue?

There have been a number of indications of this, but this video NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen posted on his blog seems like the clearest instance yet of the former Danish Prime Minister publicly pressuring Barack Obama to accede to General McChrystal’s troop request:

It’s not clear that this really matters; Rasmussen doesn’t have any relevant formal authority and I’d be surprised if U.S. public opinion turned out to hinge on the views of a Danish politician nobody’s heard of but me. That said, as Spencer Ackerman says it’s a interesting development anyway simply because there doesn’t seem to be any real precedent for this. The way NATO works is that the General or Admiral in charge of U.S. European Command also serves as Supreme Allied Commander, and then a European politician gets the top civilian post. His job is primarily to do cat-herding on the continent and serve as a spokesman for NATO policy, not to weigh-in on live political controversies.

A John Hannah Blog Post I’d Read

Ever since they launched it, I’ve been pretty baffled by Foreign Policy magazine’s “shadow government” blog. The idea of a website dedicated to criticizing the Obama administration’s foreign policy from the right makes a fair amount of editorial sense. But why on earth would you staff such a blog so heavily with discredited members of the discredited Bush administration’s discredited national security team? It’s almost as if FP is taking orders directly from Anita Dunn—”make sure the critical perspectives your audience is exposed to are all presented by the most laughably easy-to-dismiss people you can find.”

That, I suppose, would be a good reason to hire former Dick Cheney national security aide John Hannah as one of your writers.

That said, buried amidst this extremely longwinded Hannah post is a germ of a post I’d like to read. First, the discredited aide to the discredited vice president offers 1,100 words of criticism of the Obama administration. Then there’s an interesting sentence, “None of this, of course, should obfuscate the fact that the Afghan war effort was in dire shape by the close of the Bush administration” followed by 288 more words of material that can—and should!—be dismissed out of hand since they were, after all, written by former Dick Cheney national security aide John Hannah.

That said, since it seems Hannah is prepared to admit that the administration he was part of completely and utterly botched the military response to 9/11—creating a situation in which over seven (!) years after the attacks the situation “was in dire shape”—wouldn’t it be interesting to hear something about why and how that happened? Maybe they should have listened and not invaded Iraq in 2003? Maybe they should have listened and not doubled-down on Iraq in 2007? Maybe better, smarter people wouldn’t have bungled this whole thing?

I Don’t Want The World, I Just Want Your Half

There’s a pretty strong consensus in the West that what’s needed in Afghanistan is not just a reasonably fair runoff election, but a post-election national unity government in which Hamid Karzai shares power with as wide a swathe of non-Taliban opposition as possible. After all, a big part of the counterinsurgency concept is that the theory that elements of the Taliban itself can be persuaded to switch sides and engage in some kind of power-sharing. But here’s Hamid Karzai ruling out a power-sharing deal with Abdullah Abdullah. And here’s Abdullah Abdullah saying he doesn’t want to join a Karzai government:

To some extent I think the problems with the election itself have been overstated as an obstacle to US strategy in Afghanistan. Inability to forge a broader coalition, however, would in my view be a very serious obstacle. One of the main reasons the Taliban was able to rise to power in the mid-nineties was that the non-Taliban forces weren’t able to unite into an effective anti-Taliban coalition.

Denmark in ISAF

Danish Defense Minister Søren Gade with Robert Gates (Denmark MOD photo)

The news that NATO defense ministers are prepared to back a counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan seems a little bit weird given that we’re in the middle of a debate about what to do here in the United States. Something I noticed in Europe was that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of Denmark, actually seemed considerably more hawkish in his rhetoric on Afghanistan than Barack Obama is.

And it actually turns out that Denmark, which until recently was under his leadership, was, in fact, putting more effort into Afghanistan than the United States was. Denmark only has 700 soldiers in Afghanistan of whom 26 have been killed, but Denmark has about as many people in it as Cook County. Scaled up to America’s population this would be as if we had had about 1,400 soldiers killed out of a 38,000-strong deployment. Of course in a war absolute number count and Denmark is still a small contributor. But part of the context for what happens at these meetings is, I think, the fact that NATO’s civilian chief is a guy who was the architect of what’s been, for his country, a pretty major war.

Feaver Flashback

It can’t be said often enough that the decisions the Obama administration is facing on Afghanistan are a direct result of the Bush administration’s exceedingly poor policymaking. I think very few people believed in the winter of 2001-2002 that we’d be sitting here in the fall of 2009 talking about what strategy shifts were necessary to prevent defeat in Afghanistan. The reason very few people believed that is that most people believed the Bush administration could win. Those of us who believed that were proven wrong. So bad on us. But worse on the Bush administration! I find it mind-boggling that the architects of this disaster are so eager to offer backseat commentary on Obama’s handling of it. And yet, here’s Peter Feaver late of the NSC blogging away and Dick Cheney is giving speeches.

At any rate, this might be a good opportunity to revisit Feaver’s March 2004 Washington Post op-ed in which he said that the thing that proved Bush was a good president was his handling of Afghanistan. “Viewed in hindsight, the Bush-Rumsfeld military plan looked brilliant,” he wrote “but at the time it was highly controversial and decidedly risky.” And Bush took the risk! “Would a less stubborn commander in chief have pursued the risky war plan that ultimately toppled the Taliban and put al Qaeda on the run? The record of the ’90s suggests otherwise.”

And yet here we are over five years after that still wondering how to deal with the mess left behind by this “brilliant” war plan.