Matt Yglesias

Needles in Haystacks

I think we might do a lot of good in the world, and even improve people’s personal decision-making, if we made everyone take a basic statistics class in high school. Certainly both the mammogram dispute and the post-Nidal Hasan resurgence of interest in “profiling” of Muslims is a reminder that most people don’t intuitively grasp the Bayes’ Law point about accurate tests for rare conditions. I’m finding it annoying to watch all these people with no relevant medical or scientific expertise sounding off about who should get checked for breast cancer, so let’s talk about terrorists instead.

Suppose I invent a magical device that can be pointed at a Muslim and say with 90% accuracy whether or not he’s an al-Qaeda operative. Well, if I start waving it around and it starts beeping on one guy, what should we conclude about him? A terrifyingly large number of people are going to say “there’s a ninety percent chance he’s with al-Qaeda! Let’s panic!” In fact, that’s not the case. There are a billion Muslims in the world. A test with 90 percent accuracy is going to mistakenly classify about 100 million of them as al-Qaeda operatives. And al-Qaeda actually has fewer than 10,000 people working for it. I’m going to get something like 10,000 false positives for every actual terrorist I find.

Meanwhile, applying the test to people is going to have severe consequences. The public doesn’t understand this correctly and is going to be put into a wholly unwarranted state of panic about the prevalence of terrorists. People will, of course, demand that those flagged by my machine be subjected to extra-heightened scrutiny. It’s easy to imagine lots of innocent people being mistakenly killed or subjected to discrimination or shunning. And that sense of beseigement and unfair treatment would ultimately heighten tensions between the world’s Muslims and the West, while wasting massive quantities of law enforcement resources chasing basically worthless leads.

Send Troops to Where in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is a big country. So in addition to the question of how many resources should be sent to Afghanistan, there’s the question of where they should go. Recently, the tendency has been to throw additional resources at the parts of the country where things are worse. In his latest Carnegie Endowment report “Fixing a Failed Strategy in Afghanistan”, Gilles Dorronsoro argues that this would be a big mistake. The resources being contemplated, he argues, aren’t enough to win the war in the South. Sending them there would merely guarantee that we also lose the war in the North and the East, without making much progress in the South.

Instead, he prefers to adopt a more defensive posture in the South—securing main cities where the Taliban is disliked—and focus our attention on winning what he regards as the more winnable struggles in the North and East where the Taliban is making gains but isn’t deeply intertwined with local communities. I can’t really assess how true this analysis is, but he certainly seems to make a strong case. This also accords with my sense that the best case for staying in Afghanistan isn’t really scare stories about al-Qaeda but simply the fact that we have something of a moral obligation to help anti-Taliban Afghans defend themselves. That means in the first instance focusing both our troops and our reconstruction money on the places where we’re wanted.

Focusing on What Matters

Yesterday I lamented that U.S. foreign policy lately seems to be unduly focused on backwaters rather than on the countries and regions that really matter. Kevin Drum’s response made me think I wasn’t being clear enough:

I don’t much like the idea of a fixation with either safe havens or COIN driving national security policy, but it’s hard to deny that safe havens really are a problem and that small conflicts against irregular troops really do seem likely to define our future more than big wars against other major powers. And if that’s the case, then we need to deal with it.

I think the sort of COIN vs Big Army debate is basically at right angles to what I’m trying to talk about.

Insofar as we’re just talking about “what should the joint chiefs of staff be thinking about” then it’s true that “fighting wars with major countries” is not the correct answer. But what I want to emphasize is that just because “prepare to fight wars with them” isn’t the thing we should be thinking about when we think about major countries doesn’t change the fact that the major countries are, well, the major ones. If our relationship with major countries is now less military-focused than it was in Cold War days (when preventing the USSR from threatening Europe and Japan was key) that shows that the military is less important than it used to be not that relationships with major countries are less important than they used to be.

Which is to say that even if it’s completely appropriate for planners at the Pentagon to be spending most of their time thinking about “small wars” and COIN, I want the president to be spending more time thinking about China, India, European integration, Japan, etc. than about governance in rural Afghanistan. Now as it happens, my colleague Nina Hachigian co-authored a great book on rising powers with Mona Sutphen who’s now Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House, so hopefully my fears aren’t coming true.

Al-Qaeda in Mali?

An interesting BBC report looks at the possible influx of al-Qaeda affiliates into Mali, the landlocked West African country that’s perennially found on lists of the poorest countries in the world. Which reminds me of something I wrote recently in The National:

Which brings us to the curious fact that the deepening US engagement in Afghanistan is part and parcel of a revolution in strategic thinking which holds that space itself – not lush farmland, but simply space – is a vital commodity over which the Pentagon must hold sway. This is the crux of the “safe havens” issue: the fear that somewhere on Earth there might exist a remote locale in which al Qa’eda can gather without fear of the local police. At first glance, it seems like a compelling argument: America has been hunting al Qa’eda for eight years; a hunted group might seek refuge in a safe haven; therefore we must shut down the safe havens. On reflection, however, this apparently simple objective implies an astonishingly ambitious grand strategy, with boundless costs and little prospect for success. It’s a strange inversion of America’s Cold War priorities, which focused first and foremost on securing the rich industrial territories of Western Europe and Japan, and secondarily on securing access to the oil reserves of the Middle East, while evincing little concern for obscure conflicts in impoverished states.

It’s a sort of ugly turn of phrase, but I’ve tried referring to this as the “backwaterification” of American foreign policy. Instead of paying the most attention to the places that matter most—traditionally Europe, Japan, and the Gulf now joined by China, Brazil, smaller industrialized Asian countriesm etc.—the logic of safe havens is for our focus to drift toward the places that matter least. Places like (no offense to any Maliens in the audience) Mali. The optimistic view of this is that thanks to the events of 1989, the the world in 2009 is a less troubled place than the world of 1969 so things that wouldn’t necessarily have counted as a big deal in the past are now the biggest problems around. The negative view would be that our thinking about international engagement has become so lopsided toward the defense department that we’re now focusing the bulk of our attention on plausible candidates for military intervention (Somalia! Yemen!) while neglecting the parts of the world where the important things are happening.

Anne-Marie Slaughter on Increasing USAID Capacity

Anne-Marie Slaughter, on leave from Princeton to serve as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department where she’s playing a key role in the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review process, was at CAP today to talk about putting the idea of integrated power into progress.

After the event, she sat down with Matt Duss and I for a few questions. He asked her about the perception that under pressure to produce quick results, the U.S. has increasingly shifted development responsibilities onto the Pentagon. She said it was wrong to look at the dynamic exclusively in these terms and that we need to look instead at a multi-decade process that’s led to “the complete hollowing out” of the Agency for International Development:

A huge part of the problem has simply been the complete hollowing out of AID. Not just under the last administration, indeed the last administration increased foreign aid in various ways. But it’s been a twenty, twenty-five year process where the number of employees that AID has has steadily decreased, the number of contract that AID manages has steadily increased. So instead of having an agency that has a whole set of knowledge experts and experts in the field and then also contracts that it manages, you’ve got a small number of people managing a very large number of contracts just without the number of people or the resources that it needs to be the world class development agency we want it to be. So we’re looking very specificially at what AID is going to need in terms of specific sectors in terms of, again, how does it lead whole of governmnet projects both on the grounds but also in Washington.

Of course turning this kind of dynamic around is politically difficult. At the moment, the military is in a high-resource/high-prestige equilibrium. In part because it’s so lavishly resourced, the military is able to do a good job. Having lots of competence makes the military well-respected. And having lots of prestige makes it possible for the military to make politically potent claims on its own behalf. USAID has been, as Slaughter says, in a different place for a long time. One promising sign, however, has been that figures like Robert Gates and others from the Pentagon side have increasingly shown some indication to use some of their clout to help build up AID capabilities as they more and more find themselves convinced that more robust civilian partners are what they’re looking for.

The Devil You Know

Here’s an interesting point from Michael Crowley:

If you’ll recall one of the big foreign policy nightmares circa 2005-2006 was the possibility that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would lead to a destabilizing proxy war between Sunni-led Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. We stuck around and that didn’t happen. But we may now be getting it anyway… in Yemen.

What I think is most interesting about this is the kind of magnetic pull that worst-case scenarios exercise over an ongoing American military operation. With a lot of political capital already invested in the Iraq War, and well over 100,000 American soldiers in the field, the prospect of an Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy war emerging from a post-withdrawal Iraq was taken to be a valid reason for indefinitely continuing the war. But shift the scenario down the road a bit to Yemen, and suddenly it’s not such a big deal. An interesting story, sure. Possibly an unfolding human tragedy. Something to our eyes on. But nobody’s talking about sending 120,000 guys with guns to Yemen to keep the peace.

Cyberwar vs Cyberintelligence

Ellen Nakashima and John Pomfret have an interesting article on China’s exploration of internet-based national security capabilities. But one unfortunate aspect of it is a tendency to run together intelligence activities with warfighting activities.

They open, for example, with the fact that the Chinese government appears to have intercepted confidential emails from the McCain and Obama campaigns and then write this:

American presidential campaigns are not the only targets. China is significantly boosting its capabilities in cyberspace as a way to gather intelligence and, in the event of war, hit the U.S. government in a weak spot, U.S. officials and experts say. Outgunned and outspent in terms of traditional military hardware, China apparently hopes that by concentrating on holes in the U.S. security architecture — its communications and spy satellites and its vast computer networks — it will collect intelligence that could help it counter the imbalance.

“In the event of war” both the United States and China are equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. When the PRC already has the ability to destroy Los Angeles, worrying that in the future they may add the ability to read our email doesn’t make a ton of sense. By contrast, the ability to read email is a perfectly useful peacetime capability for a government that’s perhaps interested in what people’s emails say. But this is more or less on a par with longstanding signals intelligence as practiced by all majors countries—it’s not some kind of new superweapon that neutralizes our considerable military superiority.

Soviet Ink Spots

I don’t think I agree with the analytical conclusions of this item from the Ghosts of Alexander blog assessing the prospects for “A Hybrid Rumsfeld/Soviet Strategy for Afghanistan.” But it’s worth reading, and this map, originally from Gilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present is very interesting in light of apparently ongoing disagreement in policy circles about how many population centers you really need to control to maintain a basic grip on Afghanistan. It shows what portions of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan were under effective government control:

The basic strategy reads pretty clearly off the map. It’s easier to hold cities than the countryside. So you try to put together a string of urbanized areas that leaves you in control of the main ring road through the country, plus via Jalalabad and Kunduz some key routes to the border. But the Soviets couldn’t quite make this work, and some serious portions of the road network remained out of their grasp.

Ambassador Eikenberry Dissents from Troop Surge Consensus

Before being appointed U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry was a Lieutenant-General in the Army. That gives him perhaps an unusual sense of his own ability to make recommendations about military policy in the country. Recommendations that Greg Jaffe, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung are at odds with the idea of sending more troops:

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, senior U.S. officials said.

Spencer Ackerman reports that there’s considerable anger at the way this got leaked to the Washington Post but at the same time Eikenberry’s concerns are being taken seriously and the process seems to have been a bit derailed:

Despite the dissatisfaction with Eikenberry’s apparent leak, according to the staffer, Obama “demanded” an exit strategy for the war “after Eikenberry’s cables.” Certain members of the NSC dialed into the conference from the Fort Bragg, N.C. headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command, which is playing a large if underreported role in shaping Afghanistan strategy. It would appear that much remains fluid in the administration’s strategy debates.

Helene Cooper has a good piece in the New York Times on the related issue that unless the United States is prepared to withdraw under some circumstances we have little practical leverage over Hamid Karzai. I think you can make the case that the alleged need to have Karzai clean up his act is overstated, but I think it’s true that if it’s genuinely necessary to get him to clean up his act then an unconditional commitment to pour more resources into the country is a poor way to produce that outcome.

Taliban and al-Qaeda

Joshua Partlow for The Washington Post reports on various indications that Mullah Omar and his Taliban are looking to distance themselves from al-Qaeda:

The shift appears to reflect Omar’s growing confidence that his group can operate on its own, without al-Qaeda as its patron. “The Taliban have got the expertise, they have got the resources, they have got the momentum,” said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N. Taliban and al-Qaeda Monitoring Team. [...]

“We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others,” Omar said in a written statement in September.

The messages from the Taliban leadership since the spring amount to something of a “revolution,” said Wahid Mujda, a political analyst who was a Foreign Ministry official under the Taliban government. “Al-Qaeda’s path is now different from the Taliban’s path, and they are growing more separated.”

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says that Leah Farrell, former al-Qaeda specialist for the Australian National Police, has a blog that’s “attracting ever-more attention in U.S. defense circles.” That said, I think we can predict here and now that she’s going to stop attracting attention in U.S. defense circles since she thinks we should withdraw from Afghanistan and that al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. forces are a deliberate ploy “forcing a surge in American troop numbers” and creating a situation in which “Mullah Omar’s legitimacy would be jeopardised were he to publicly disassociate from al-Qa’ida and guarantee he would not again provide it sanctuary.”

She’ll stop attracting attention because, as Spencer writes in that very same post, there’s absolutely no constituency for withdrawal of American forces inside the Obama administration. Instead, the debate among civilians runs from “we should stick with the increase in troop levels that Obama has already executed” to “we should engage in large additional increases in troop levels.” And within the uniformed military it seems that everyone wants large additional increases.

I think we really saw this movie in Iraq already. Clearly, there’s a lot of uncertainty endemic to thinking about this kind of issue. What’s not uncertain, however, is that as long as U.S. troops remain in theater, we haven’t “lost”. It’s also clear that you don’t achieve “victory” by withdrawing under fire. Consequently, those considerations will predominate. As I’ve said before, it would be very different if military planners were expected to come up with deficit neutral proposals capable of attracting 60 votes in the Senate—that would end the war in the blink of an eye.

Kaplan: Civil Society Requires Perpetual War

One of the best things about not working at The Atlantic anymore is not counting Robert Kaplan among my professional colleagues. Here’s his take on modern-day Europe:

Europe, having been liberated from nuclear terror at the conclusion of the Cold War, proved unable to muster the gumption to deal with Yugoslavia on its own, or, as the case of Afghanistan shows, to demonstrate much enthusiasm for any great collective effort. Which leads to the question: What does the European Union truly stand for besides a cradle-to-grave social welfare system? For without something to struggle for, there can be no civil society—only decadence.

Thus, with their patriotism dissipated, European governments can no longer ask for sacrifices from their populations when it comes to questions of peace and war. Ironically, we may have gained victory in the Cold War, but lost Europe in the process.

Spencer Ackerman observes that there’s something rather crazy about the view that the Cold War was waged “so that European soldiers would one day become our cannon fodder.” One might further note that it’s not at all clear that the American public has any real desire to sacrifice anything in Afghanistan. It seems to me that one of the key props of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been the consensus on both the right (Bush, The Weekly Standard) and the center (Blue Dogs, The Washington Post) that it’s not necessary to raise hundreds of billions in tax revenue in order to pay for hundreds of billions in war expenditures. By far the fastest way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to ask General McChrystal’s staff to produce a plan to make it deficit neutral and find sixty votes in the senate for his financing plan.

In a larger sense, however, Kaplan is merely highlighting the fundamental difference between neoconservative thinking and thinking undertaken by people with a moral compass. As Alex Massie says, present-day Europe’s state of peace, prosperity, and physical security is a good thing. Neoconservatives, however, see war and death as good things. Irving Kristol told Corey Robin that market-oriented conservatism is too “boring” (”The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”) so you need to inject some death and destruction into the mix to keep things interesting.

The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. But the point is that it’s extremely dangerous to take advice from people with this mindset—they’re not even trying to enhance the country’s security, they’re trying to embroil the country in wars.

Special Ops Commanders Want Large Deployment to Afghanistan

Spencer Ackerman’s reporting on the role being played by Vice Admirals WilliamMcRaven and Robert Harward in the Afghanistan policy debate explains why Joe Biden wound up losing the argument over whether we should try to get by in Afghanistan with a “light footprint” and a narrow focus on counterterrorism. Basically, these are the guys who hold key special forces posts and would be largely responsible commanding counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. And they want to see such efforts embedded within a larger counterinsurgency strategy. Thus you end up with a fairly united front of relevant military players in favor of COIN approach and a substantial additional deployment of forces.

One thing I think this highlights is the limits of conducting this kind of debate more-or-less entirely within the four walls of the military. After all, why wouldn’t the special ops guys want to see as much resources as possible put into Afghanistan? At the end of the day to get a real debate going about the wisdom of going big you need someone in the room who represents a competing claim on the resources at hand. Does it make sense to sustain tens of thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year in order to protect America from a group with “several hundred to several thousand members” and no heavy weapons? Well, I think that depends on what alternative uses of the resources are available. If the meeting also includes someone who needs to worry about the budget deficit, or about health care, or about child nutrition, or preventing bridges from collapsing then maybe this doesn’t look like such a great deal. But if it’s a meeting of uniformed military officers to talk about what’s the best way to handle the situation in Afghanistan, then even the guys who do counterterrorism still see the benefits of a broader approach.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.