Matt Yglesias

The Power Problem

I wanted to take a moment to recommend a new book by Chris Preble, the top foreign policy guy at Cato, called The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. The book’s got a good explanatory subtitle, but to briefly sketch the thesis Preble argues that our over-large military establishment isn’t just a waste of money, but actually harmful to our security. The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders. If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium. But the large military spawns a grandiose strategic concept that winds up writing checks that even a gigantic military can’t cash.

I think this analysis is dead on. My prescription would not be quite as radical as Preble’s. I think the main flaw with it is that he doesn’t take his own analysis seriously enough—for a variety of reasons, it’s just not going to be the case that America suddenly decides to abandon its aspirations to play a global leadership role. Under the circumstances, I think it’s important to try to think of plausible ways for us to play that role in a constructive way rather than a self-defeating and destructive one, rather than just kind of saying from the sidelines that we should abandon the whole thing. That said, my own views are sufficiently far outside the mainstream that I hardly see any point in quibbling with people who would exercise even more military restraint than I would.

The video of a recent event that Preble did with my colleague Larry Corb and The American Conservative’s Scott McConnell is also worth watching. It shows that the coalition of people calling for a serious rethink of American strategy and defense spending priorities—a group in which I would include myself—is as ideologically diverse as we are ineffective in actually getting our way. Barack Obama’s taken a lot of good steps so far, but realistically the gap between the change we need and the change we’re going to get remains pretty big.

Is Restraint Unpopular?

Ilan Goldenberg writes that one reason academic realists have become marginalized in policy debates is that politicians think a policy of restraint isn’t politically feasible:

These days the realist perspective is all but non-existent in Washington. A large part of that has to do with the fact that their ideas are so politically unpopular that they are simply dismissed out of hand as unrealistic. Many realists have come to the conclusion that as an unfettered unipolar power the United States will inevitably overextend itself and scare others into aligning against it, and thus over time weaken itself. The best prescription for this is retrenchment that includes dramatic reductions in military spending and the reduction of our presence around the world – very politically unpopular ideas.

These two formulations are slightly different, and I think it’s important to distinguish between them. The public doesn’t tend to have detailed views on foreign policy issues, but it’s generally sympathetic to the idea of more restrained foreign policy. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs does a regular biannual survey of the American public, and the 2008 edition found “that a strong majority of Americans (63%)
want the United States to play an active part in world affairs” but also that “as Chicago Council polls have found in the past, Americans do not want to play the role of world policeman, with 77 percent believing the United States is playing this role more than it should be.”

There can, however, be other kinds of political impediments besides public opinion. The congressional politics of a restrained defense budget are terrible, because the main projects are deliberately located in the districts of the key committee members. The incentives of the news media tend toward amplifying hysteria and overreactions when specific incidents emerge. Presidents tend to be biased toward foreign policy activism because they can play a more unrestrained hand in that field than they can on their domestic issues. And virtually all the key interest groups working on national security policy do so in order to advocate a forward-leaning posture.

And beyond all this, elite opinion in the United States is much more gung-ho about foreign involvements of various kinds than is the public at large. So there’s a lot going on besides popularity. And foreign policy is hardly the only issue on which that’s the case. Big-time politicians have pretty good reasons for not making single-payer health care the core of their domestic policy agenda, but those reasons aren’t really about what’s “popular,” they’re about what’s possible in a constrained system.

Pakistan and “Strategic Rents”

This great Peter Juul post on Pakistan at the Wonk Room points me to this fascinating Newsweek article from January 2008 which introduces me to the concept of “strategic rents.” I think it’s a great way of thinking about some of the pathologies afflicting the US-Pakistan relationship. They argue that much as you tend to see a “resource curse” in areas where politics becomes about trying to control the rents from oil wells or diamond mines, that in Pakistan you see an analogous problem of strategic rents:

Rents paid for natural resources are bad enough. But “strategic rents”—earned by a country for its role in the foreign policies of other states—are even more damaging. Military aid by definition entrenches the militaries that get it, making them less responsive to civilian control. Pakistan’s military has grown enormously powerful over the years, resistant to democratic checks and highly entrenched in every aspect of the country’s commercial, civil and political life. From banking to insurance, cereals to cinnamon, the military’s presence and influence can be felt everywhere. Strategic rents have also helped radicalize Pakistan, since some of the Saudi aid money for jihad in Afghanistan has gone instead to fund extremist madrassas in Pakistan itself.

Strategic rents are also susceptible to manipulation. Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for example, has consistently avoided foreign criticism and kept the money coming by arguing, essentially, that while he may be imperfect, the alternative—the Islamists—is far worse. To support this case, Pakistan’s leaders have resorted to trickery at times. For example, according to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, prior to last year’s confrontation at the Islamabad Red Mosque, the government stood by idly as militants poured into the compound—though it could have easily flushed them out in the early days—in order to highlight the Islamic “threat” Pakistan supposedly faced, and the need for more aid.

I was at off-the-record event with various knowledgeable players last week when some related issues came up. The point one speaker was making is that it just doesn’t seem to be the case that the Pakistani elite sees the region the way we do. And the hard question for policymakers is whether they really think they have any way of getting Pakistani elites to change their mind about this. As Peter writes:

We (the principal) are counting on the Pakistani government (the agent) to accomplish something in our interests, while the Pakistani government has its own conception of its interests and strategic objectives. This problem leads to the Pakistani government using our military aid to further its own strategic objectives. Hopefully, the refocus on civilian development and governance assistance will more directly address the problems that allow militancy to flourish in Pakistan. But unless the Pakistani government decides that militancy is a threat to the state itself and acts accordingly, our civilian aid won’t have the impact it could.

I think that part of this is that not only do we need clever ideas, but we need to show some willingness to walk away. As long as the Pakistani security establishment thinks we’ll never walk away, then any kind of conditions we try to impose on our aid just become a challenge to try to get around. There needs to be some kind of sense that we might get really fed up and take our toys home. At the same time, there needs to be some sense among the general public that we’re genuinely interested in improving their lives and not just in trying to buy permission to launch air strikes.

Non-Turnarounds on Afghanistan

Starting in 2002-2003, many Americans were opposed to the war in Iraq. And over time, that group grew to include more people. Since opposition to the war was pretty broad-based, war opponents including people with a great diversity of views on foreign policy and national security questions, including some people on both the right and the left who are very strongly opposed to foreign military operations writ large. All of which is fine. What’s not fine, I think, is the way that a lot of my colleagues here at the Center for American Progress are now finding themselves accused of hypocrisy or some sort of opportunistic turnaround for not thinking the same things about Afghanistan as some of their fellow opponents of the war in Iraq. This item from Justin Raimondo at The American Conservative caught my attention in particular since it mentions me by name:

The Center for American Progress, a liberal-Left think tank that sheltered many foreign-policy analysts who opposed the Iraq War and was beginning to develop a comprehensive critique of global interventionism, has recently issued a report on Afghanistan that includes a number of short-term, medium-term, and long-term (ten-year) goals, including among the latter:

* Assist in creating an Afghan state that is able to defend itself internally and externally, and that can provide for the basic needs of its own people.

* Prepare for the full military withdrawal from Afghanistan alongside continued diplomatic and economic measures to promote the sustainable security of Afghanistan.

Simply substitute Iraq for Afghanistan, and what we get is the war policy of the Bush era. That the center is run by John Podesta, who served as Obama’s transition chief, is perhaps explanation enough for the complete turnaround. One wonders, however, if the center’s more anti-interventionist scholars, such as Matthew Yglesias, whose popular blog has attracted a substantial audience, will be forced to toe the new line—or be forced out.

As I’ve said before there’s no need to find an “explanation” for the “turnaround.” The authors of CAP’s recent report on Afghanistan have long held the view that we should send more troops to Afghanistan. This is what they wanted in 2005, it’s what they wanted in 2006, it’s what they wanted in 2007 (and again). This became Barack Obama’s position during the 2008 campaign, and became his policy as President in 2009, but this is a case of Obama coming around to something similar to the CAP view and not the reverse.

Will I be toeing the line? Well, I think Raimondo and I won’t be in complete agreement about this issue, just as we’ve never been in complete agreement about the engagement of American military force abroad. But people are invited to read my posts on Afghanistan and draw their own conclusions. I would say that I’m cautiously supportive of what the administration’s outlined but I’m worried about the logic of escalation and think it’s necessary to put some meaningful benchmarks in place lest we get stuck in a hopeless quagmire.

But on the general subject of “intervention” I think it’s helpful to draw distinctions. This week I wrote one column arguing against folks who want to invade Somalia and another about how the defense budget should be cut. I’ve inveighed many times against the advocates of preventive military strikes against North Korea and Iran. And in general, I’m dubious that the United States should be using force outside of the cases of self-defense, defense of an ally, or a mission authorized through the United Nations Security Council. That makes me a lot less of an interventionist than most of the powers that be in Washington, though still more of an interventionist than many other people. But it’s not a form of hypocrisy; it’s a different opinion. Both the legal status and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan are different from the situation in Iraq.

Building a Pirate-Fighting Navy

The annals of defense contracting are full of horrendous mismanagement and cost overruns. They’re also full of hulking, pointless systems that have little to do with the military’s modern-day missions. When critics are lucky, these two issues go hand-in-hand, as with the F-22. But sometimes they come apart. The Littoral Combat Ship, for example, has been a disaster as a program in terms of screw-ups and cost-overruns. But the basic idea of a small, fast, modular ship that can operate in very shallow waters does seem genuinely useful.

When Noah Schachtman asked Gates about the LCS the other day, Gates basically just said the capabilities are really useful. I pressed him on what, exactly, was so appealing about it and he specifically cited pirate-fighting, telling me “You don’t need a $5 billion ship to go after pirates” and, indeed, the high cost of a ship might dissuade you from risking it against a relatively trivial enemy.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that at the end of the day. But as Schachtman point out, it certainly is true that the Navy we have is not well-suited to the doctrine we’ve adopted in terms of anti-piracy missions, while the shift to the LCS would leave us with forces that were better-suited to that policy. My view is that ultimately if you want to tackle the pirates issue, you need to do it on land. Which, in practice, means we probably don’t want to tackle the pirates issue and shouldn’t let this specifically concern play too large a role in our thinking. But LCS has other kinds of appeal as well and on the whole I’m equivocal about it.

Sestak, Korb Support Gates/Obama Defense Reforms

One big political problem with the Gates/Obama reform defense budget is that it cuts a lot of programs near and dear to the hearts of the military-industrial complex and their tame dogs in congress. Thus a lot of talk about how Gates is “gutting” the military. But another problem is that Gates actually isn’t cutting spending so his reforms don’t open up a bonanza of new money for tax cuts or social spending that libertarians or liberals get all that excited about.

That said, Brian Beutler notes that retired Admiral Joe Sestak, now a member of congress, is ready to champion the Gates reforms. And Larry Korb, who’s been waging the battle against bloated defense spending since the end of the Cold War, observes that this budget really is a key step in the right direction.

I would urge progressives who are having trouble getting themselves excited about this fight to recognize two points. One is that it really is nice to reorient a given quantity of military spending in more useful directions even if it doesn’t lead to cuts in the headline number. But the other is that if you ever do want to see further-reaching reform, we need to pass something like this budget first. It’s a key political test of whether it’s even possible to defy what the defense contractors and the joint chiefs want. If that does prove possible, then in years to come many things are possible, including a long-term trajectory that has defense declining as a percent of GDP. If it’s not possible then nothing is possible, and no future president will tackle it.

Prioritizing Pakistan’s Stability

Steven Walt questions the proposition that the threat from al-Qaeda justifies “a costly, long-term engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The point I strongly agree with here is that it’s not a good idea to overrate the importance of “safe havens” in terms of al-Qaeda’s ability to cause harm to American interests or American civilians. The evidence suggests that such havens are neither necessary nor sufficient to carry out substantial terrorist attacks.

It’s also difficult to know exactly how to phrase this, but one really does need to keep in mind that as morally appalling as the perpetrators of things like the Madrid or London attacks are, the actual harm done by such attacks is pretty modest in the scheme of things. More lives could be saved by investing dollars in improved highway safety than by military operations in Central Asia. And more important than that, the most important countermeasure we can adopt against vulnerability to a Madrid-scale attack is to increase our society’s psychological resilience in the face of terrorism. The biggest risk posed by the prospect of a bomb going off in Grand Central Station is not that it would kill people (though it would), it’s that it might alter the behavior of millions of people throughout the country’s largest and most economically important metropolitan area in counterproductive ways. The whole region’s transportation network might become semi-permanently more sluggish in response to new fears and security measures in a manner that would, day by day, year by year, sap the country of some of its economic vibrancy. And any attack anywhere might be a further punch in the gut to consumer and business confidence and plunge us deeper into recession. But you don’t, ultimately, fight this kind of stuff by “taking the fight to the terrorists,” you fight it by getting the public and elite opinion leaders alike to recognize the national security importance of not freaking out.

In strict security terms, meanwhile, the biggest threat from the Afghanistan/Pakistan area is not that a “safe haven” will exist somewhere in the hills, it’s that the Pakistani state might collapse in a way that risks the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Even here, I don’t think it’s helpful to try to keep people up at night with stories about a nuclear weapon finding its way into the hands of a terrorist who smuggles it into the United States. The more plausible nightmare scenario is that India feels compelled to take some kind of “preemptive” military action that leads to the deaths of millions of people in that part of the world.

But either way, preserving and enhancing the efficacy of the Pakistani state should be the key priority. Contrary to Walt, I think this probably does both justify and require “a costly, long-term engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But it has implications for our priorities. In particular, unilateral American military strikes inside Pakistani territory seem to me to be a serious destabilizing factor in Pakistan. I wouldn’t want to systematically rule out ever launching such an attack, but doing it routinely, as we now appear to be, is creating serious risks even while everyone admits that it doesn’t provide a long-term solution to the issue it’s designed to solve. This is something that I think we need to start thinking much more carefully about.

Noth Korea Scare Stories

William Broad reports for The New York Times:

North Korea failed in its highly vaunted effort to fire a satellite into orbit, military and private experts said Sunday after reviewing detailed tracking data that showed the missile and payload fell into the sea. Some said the failure undercut the North Korean campaign to come across as a fearsome adversary able to hurl deadly warheads halfway around the globe.

That’s a pretty strange turn of phrase. North Korea was trying to appear fearsome via its missile launch. But the launch failed. Which certainly does undercut its effort to appear fearsome. So why the “some said” structure? In part, it’s the crappy conventions of political journalism. But in part it’s the fact that the US conservative movement has for some reason decided that it makes sense to team up with Kim Jong-Il in an effort to get people to overestimate North Korea’s strategic capabilities.

Joe Cirincione has a nice piece that puts this in the appropriate context. The DPRK is breaking the rules and should be punished, but this is much more an issue of rule-breaking than it is an objective threat.

Gates Pushing Back on Iran War Fever

Recently, we’ve seen a bit of a renewed outburst of Iran war fever. First, several powerful House Democrats signed a letter telling the Obama administration that any diplomatic approach to Iran had to produce results very quickly or else it should be abandoned in favor of punitive measures. Then Bibi Netanyahu told Obama that unless diplomacy produced results in a few months that Israel would strike away. And CFR Senior Fellow, Bush NSC veteran, and Iran-Contra crook Elliot Abrams tried to assure us that the Iranian people would welcome airstrikes.

Steve Clemons observes that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is offering some pushback:

Mr Gates said he does not expect Israel – which believes the US estimate for when Iran could develop a nuclear weapon is too sanguine – to take military action this year.

“I guess I would say I would be surprised…if they did act this year,” said Mr Gates.

As he was sworn in as the new Israeli prime minister this week, Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the greatest danger to Israel was Iran’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons. But asked whether Iran would cross a nuclear “red line” this year, Mr Gates said: “I don’t know, I would guess probably not”.

“I think we have more time than that. How much more time I don’t know,” said Mr Gates. “It is a year, two years, three years. It is somewhere in that window.”

Of course the question still arises of what happens if Gates’ assessment of Israeli intentions is wrong. Will the United States lean strongly against Israel launching an attack that could have a dire impact on American interests and will likely not do much beyond ensure that Iran develops a nuclear weapon in the near future? We have, in principle, a lot of leverage over Israeli policy. But at the same time, Israeli preferences speak very loudly on Capitol Hill.

Breaking With “War on Terror”

I wrote this morning that dropping the language of a “war on terror” is actually a pretty important step. Turns out that New America fellow Nicholas Schmidle made this case for the On Day One project:

Full disclosure: My making one of these On Day One videos wound up with me winning an iPod Nano, so I’m just part of the Big Global Governance conspiracy.

The Inevitable Triumph of the Neocons

Robert Farley expresses skepticism that Bill Kristol’s new Foreign Policy Initiative is going to succeed:

For one, not many people seem to be buying into the efforts of neocons to distance themselves from the Iraq War. Second, the Iraq War hasn’t become notably more popular; it still seems to be widely regarded as a misstep, with the only serious discussion being on how disastrous the mistake was. Finally, the information infrastructure is different; because of the efforts of “Mad” Matt Duss, Stephen Walt, and others, the launch of FPI has been greeted as much by mockery and derision as fear and respect. Bill Kristol is a 20th century guy lost in a 21st century world…

I think that’s way too optimistic. The commanding heights of the information economy remain incredibly friendly to neocon perspectives. Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Charles Krauthammer are still all there op-edding away at The Washington Post. The Council on Foreign Relations is staffing up with neocons, adding Elliot Abrams to its arsenal. The Very Serious People at the Brookings Institution remain more likely to collaborate with neocons than with, say, Stephen Walt. And the FPI’s unveiling was validated by the attendance of Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and John Nagl, head of CNAS the left-of-center national security think tank of the moment. Basically, neoconservatism continues to be the mainstream voice of right-of-center national security—the perspective that establishment-oriented institutions feel compelled to shower with respect. The odds of a Republican president getting elected within the next 12 years are extremely high, and the odds of such an administration being heavily influenced by Foreign Policy Initiative ideas strike me as good.

In terms of Iraq, think about it this way. If things continue to be fairly calm for a few years, that will “prove” that the surge “worked” so we should be glad that the doves didn’t manage to ruin things back in 2007 and 2008. And if things don’t remain calm, that will also “prove” that the surge “worked” until the doves came along to ruin things in 2009 and 2010. If the military-industrial complex were to suddenly vanish over the next couple of years, or cease to be interested in subsidizing the generation of ideas that serve to justify maximalist levels of defense spending, then neocons might go away. But why would that happen?

The Importance of “GWOT”

Yesterday, the Obama administration’s never-ending back and forth over whether or not they’ve stopped talking about a “global war on terror” took a new twist as Hillary Clinton said there’s no policy against “war on terror” but the administration isn’t saying “war on terror.” To which Chris Bowers had a sober-minded, sensible reply:

Now, a different question is, does it really matter that much? The answer in this case is probably not. Not only had the term become a bit of a bankrupt joke that holds little currency with people either in this country or abroad, but the real question is whether President Obama will continue the various policies associated with the GWOT. Secret prisons, declaring people “enemy combatants,” torture, vastly increased defense spending, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, Iraq and Afghanistan troop deployments, etc. Beyond a name, the “war on terror” was a series of horrific policies. To end the “war on terror,” you can’t just drop the name. The administration must drop the policies, too.

This makes sense, but I don’t think we should underplay the importance of words in shaping these kind of policies. If you’re fighting a “war on terror” then of course the Department of Defense is going to be the lead agency and getting serious about the “war on terror” will imply large increases in defense spending. By contrast, it’s easy to make the argument that a government that believes that “terrorism” is its most important security problem shouldn’t be spending lavishly on advanced fighter aircraft. It’s obvious that you can’t stop a terrorist with a nuclear attack submarine, and it’s equally obvious that if you want to fight and win a “war” you need to spend more on the military. Similarly, everyone understands that you can’t hold people indefinitely without trial or evidence. And everyone also understands that the president has special “war powers” that let him do stuff that would normally be illegal. The FBI catches terrorists, the Army fights wars.

So, yes, to change the policies you need to change the policies. But it’ll be much easier to make progressive arguments about specific policies if we can get out of the “war on terror” concept and return to talking about terrorists and terrorism with normal language. “War” is a word, not a policy, but it’s a word with specific legal and policy implications. It’s one thing to say that counterterrorism considerations led the United States to get involved in a war in Afghanistan, but another thing to say that the war in Afghanistan is actually one “front” in a larger “war on terror.”

How Important Are “Safe Havens”?

The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Beitullah Massoud, has threatened to strike Washington, DC with a terrorist attack. But while everyone takes Massoud’s threat to the stability of the Greater Hindu Kush area seriously, nobody seems to take his threat to do this very seriously. As Spencer Ackerman says “It’s difficult to see how Beitullah Massoud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has the capability to launch attacks against the U.S.”

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that this points to what I think is a serious conceptual flaw in the administration’s thinking—this heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to deny al-Qaeda a “safe haven” in Afghanistan or Pakistan. As Andrew Exum observes, it’s not at all clear that a “safe haven” is necessary to carry out a terrorist attack:

Thus, [European governments] are wary of their Afghanistan operations leading to greater unrest in their own immigrant communities, being as likely to look to the suburbs of Paris and London for terror plots in utero as they are to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. The foiled 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, for example, was allegedly plotted almost entirely within the confines of my old neighborhood in East London. And while some terrorists–such as Mohammed Sadiq Khan, who is believed to have masterminded the 7/7 bombings–traveled to Pakistan and trained in militant camps, the common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical “safe haven.”

And as per Spencer’s point, not only is a safe haven not necessary, it’s not sufficient either. A safe haven in the mountains in Central Asia doesn’t let you carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. You need an attacker physically located in the United States, in possession of explosives that are also physically located in the United States, in order to attack the United States. The danger is of a terrorist being here or else in someplace like Western Europe or Canada from which it’s easy to get into the United States. Recall that key action in the 9/11 plot took place not just in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg and the best governance initiative in human history is not going to make Afghanistan as orderly and prosperous as Germany. The attackers went to flight school in America; you can’t learn to pilot a jumbo jet in the mountains. Clearly “al-Qaeda has a safe haven” is worse than “al-Qaeda does not have a safe haven” but orienting our national security policy around the goal of denying safe havens is not going to achieve what we’re looking for. And as Exum explains, it could easily lead to dangerous overreach:

The emphasis on destroying “safe havens” also establishes a tricky rationale for our presence in Afghanistan. Even if we succeed in spreading effective governance to southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, are we then prepared to go to wherever the transnational terror groups relocate? Are we prepared to clear out the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon? Or provide governance to the Horn of Africa? The new Obama plan is a dangerous precedent. If the reason we are staying in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda the use of safe havens, where are we going next?

I think that’s right. You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world’s land area. We should be especially wary of it given that effective physical control of U.S. territory didn’t actually stop the 9/11 attackers from traveling throughout the country, learning to fly, hijacking airplanes, etc. Absent al-Qaeda acquisition of a nuclear weapon (and they’re not going to find one in Kandahar), the main way al-Qaeda can threaten the United States is by baiting us into implementing costly and unworkable policy responses and some of the “safe haven” rhetoric seems to be pointing us in that direction.

Iraq’s Still Unreconciled Political Conflicts

CAP’s Brian Katulis offers his take on what the past weekend’s crack in the edifice of sectarian relations in Iraq:

The stated goal of the surge, according to the Bush administration, was to reduce violence in order to help Iraq’s political factions bridge their divides over power, but that has simply not occurred in a meaningful way. Iraq remains plagued by enduring political divisions, as I argued last September in a paper on Iraq’s political transition after the surge.

A key tactic used in the Iraq surge could essentially be likened to what was done in the run-up to the current financial and banking crisis in the United States—steps were taken to make things look better than they actually were, while real problems lurked beneath unaddressed. A day of reckoning must at some point occur, because the structural imbalances of power in Iraq will naturally address themselves, as sure as the force of gravity that keeps us all sitting in our chairs. The inexorable force in Iraq is demographics. Iraq is a Shia-majority country now governed by Shia factions, with nominal participation by Sunni forces. This represents a fundamental shift from the balance of power during decades of Saddam Hussein’s rule, which ended nearly six years ago. Ever since his regime’s ouster in 2003, the fundamental story has been one in which Iraqis adjust themselves to the new reality of Shia rule in Iraq.

This weekend’s incident was the first crack in a shaky foundation constructed by the 2007 surge of U.S. troops—a foundation that largely glossed over long-standing political rivalries. And frankly this tension between the central government and these independent militia groups is less dangerous than the growing tensions between Arab and Kurdish factions in northern Iraq.

As if often the case in Iraq, one can read this two ways. The potential deterioration in the situation could be used as a pretext to backslide on the Obama administration’s commitment to abide by the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement and leave Iraq. Alternatively, you could see the continuing unstable nature of the Iraqi polity as a reason that we shouldn’t be endlessly optimistic about the idea that tens of thousands of U.S. troops can stay in Iraq safely. Personally, I’m inclined toward the second reading. But the point is about larger strategic vision—some see it as in American interests to maintain a large military force in Iraq come what may; others, the people who are right about this, see that idea as contrary to our interests. Either way, it’s useful to recall that despite “surge” triumphalism, the bulk of the underlying issues in Iraq remain unresolved.

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.

Elliot Abrams Thinks Iranians Will Welcome Us As Liberators If We Launch Unprovoked Airstrikes on Their Country

Given that Elliot Abrams was a high-ranking Bush administration official and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, I think we can conclude that neither substantive policy failure nor a record of illegally lying to congress is going to derail his career. He is all-but-certain to return to office more powerful than ever. Thus, I’m going to hope for the sake of the country that this argument he made during a debate on whether or not we should bomb Iran represents dishonesty rather than stupidity:

We are not talking about the Americans killing civilians, bombing cities, destroying mosques, hospitals, schools. No, no, no – weʹre talking about nuclear facilities which most Iranians know very little about, have not seen, will not see, some quite well hidden.

So they wake up in the morning and find out that the United States if attacking those facilities and, presumably with some good messaging about why weʹre doing it and why we are not against the people of Iran.

Itʹs not clear to me that the reaction letʹs go to war with the Americans, but rather, perhaps, how did we get into this mess? Why did those guys, the very unpopular ayatollahs in a country 70 percent of whose population is under the age of 30, why did those old guys get us into this mess.

Throughout the decades-long history of air power, arguments of this form have been made time and again by people who overestimate its strategic efficacy, and it’s never been true. Nor does it seem at all likely to me that it would be possible for the United States to engage in a thorough demolition of Iranian nuclear facilities without killing some civilians. But even if casualties were limited to Iranian military and intelligence personnel and to scientists and technicians working on the nuclear project, I don’t really see why we’d expect the Iranian population to regard that with equanimity. If Iranian agents were to blow up an American military base, I don’t think the American public would just say “well, fair enough”; we’d be pissed. And it’s in the United States—not Iran—where powerful elements of the national security establishment muse openly about launching unprovoked unilateral military attacks on other countries.

This all comes to me via Justin Logan who observes that it’s likely neither stupidity nor dishonesty but rather the toxic blend of the two known as self-deception, “If you’re interested in these type of arguments, I’d encourage you to pick up a copy of Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire. These sorts of arguments are literally straight from the pages of Myths, a book where Snyder attempts to generalize the “myths” that empires endorse as they overexpand.”

Obama Fights the Logic of Escalation in Afghanistan

I think there’s a good case to be made for something resembling the Obama administration’s approach to Afghanistan. The problem, however, is that it might not work. And I worry that if we run into problems, the administration will find itself caught up in the logic of escalation, which holds that if the initial effort to pour more resources in failed, then we need to pour even more resources in. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s smart to make an effort to put the kind of resources into Afghanistan that we should have sent in years ago. But if 12-18 months from now it’s not working, we need to scale back our goals not further escalate. That’s why I was glad to see Obama talking about benchmarks on Friday, and very glad to read this from Amanda Terkel:

Today in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Obama underscored this point. He pointed out that the reason he has increased troops in Afghanistan is because levels there are “greatly underresourced.” However, he is not going to “simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation.”

Watch the clip:

He says specifically that “just because we needed to ramp up from the greatly underresourced levels that we had doesn’t automatically mean that, if this strategy doesn’t work, that what’s needed is even more troops.” I think that’s exactly right. There’s reason to believe that this will work, but if it doesn’t work we don’t want to keep trying the same thing. This is very heartening stuff. I still wonder if this kind of clear thinking will hold up once we’re deeper into the situation, but for now the thinking is clear and that’s important.

America’s Comprehension Porblem

Here’s a very important quote that Spencer Ackerman got that has implications well beyond issues in our policy toward Pakistan:

Some in the administration are skeptical that the Pakistanis will meet their commitments under the new strategy. “You have people there who just lie to our face, like Zardari, who just lies to us,” said one official who requested anonymity, referring to the Pakistani president. “Honestly, I don’t believe there’s a war going on in the tribal areas. The Pakistanis tell us that, but they’re just baldfaced lies.” The official believes that U.S. diplomats in Pakistan accept Pakistani claims of maximal warfighting efforts at face value: “They don’t speak Urdu, they don’t speak Pashto, and they eat it all up.”

This sort of thing is, in my view, really the achilles heel of the American imperial project. The economic and military might of the United States gives us enormous power to influence events in distant lands. But having a lot of ability to influence events is unlikely to achieve anything useful unless you actually understand what’s happening. And when we get involves in things like the internal politics of Pakistan, or political reform in Egypt, or wars in the Horn of Africa, and so forth we’re dealing in situations where the level of understanding is incredibly asymmetric. If you go to pretty much any country in the world, you’ll find that educated people there know more about the United States than you do about their country. Nobody at highest levels of the American government speaks Urdu. Or Arabic. Or Amharic or Somali or Pashto or Tajik.

Lots of people at high levels in the Pakistani government speak English. President Zardari can deliver a speech in English and his staff can write one for him. If they want to figure out what’s going on in the U.S., they have a vast bounty of media outlets to peruse to gather intelligence. And year-in and year-out Pakistan cares about the same smallish set of countries—Pakistani officials are always focused on issue in their region and issues with the United States. Our officials dance around—the Balkans are important this decade, Central Asia the next, Russia and the Persian Gulf flit on and off the radar, sometimes we notice what’s happening in Mexico, etc.

In other words, in a straightforward contest of power between the United States and Pakistan, we can of course win. But in a scenario where we are trying to manipulate the situation in Pakistan in such-and-such a way and Pakistani actors are trying to manipulate the situation for their own ends, the odds of us actually outwitting the Pakistanis are terrible. They’re in a much better position to manipulate us than we are them.

Note that during the FDR and Truman years, American elites were generally more familiar with Europe than European elites were with the United States. I think that’s an important element in understanding why the institution-building of that era largely worked.

Declare Victory and Go Talk to Your Favorite Reporter

Bill Gertz yesterday:

On the one side were Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, who argued in closed-door meetings for a minimal strategy of stabilizing Afghanistan that one source described as a “lowest common denominator” approach. [...] The other side of the debate was led by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy for the region, who along with U.S. Central Command leader Gen. David H. Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for a major nation-building effort.

The Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton faction, according to the sources, prevailed. The result is expected to be a major, long-term military and civilian program to reinvent Afghanistan from one of the most backward, least developed nations to a relatively prosperous democratic state.

Also yesterday, Marc Ambinder reported precisley the opposite:

The new bearing reflects Vice President Joe Biden’s imprint. He has been arguing internally for a more focused counterterrorism mission rather than a larger, more complex counterinsurgency mission, which would involve significantly more American resources and troops.

I would say that the white paper is actually a document you could sort of read either way. The quantity of forces involved, however, suggests to me a more “Biden” approach. That said, if the account of the factions is correct than operational implementation of the strategy is in the hands of people—Holbrooke and Petraeus—who lean toward a maximalist vision.

Obama Administration Goals in Afghanistan

One important question that’s been kicking around in Washington is how will the administration define its goals in Afghanistan. Now fresh in my inbox from the State Department is the answer:

Achieving our core goal is vital to U.S. national security. It requires, first of all, realistic and achievable objectives. These include:

• Disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.

• Promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people and can eventually function, especially regarding internal security, with limited international support.
• Developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces that can lead the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism fight with reduced U.S. assistance.
• Assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan and a vibrant economy that provides opportunity for the people of Pakistan.
• Involving the international community to actively assist in addressing these objectives for Afghanistan and Pakistan, with an important leadership role for the UN.

I think this falls somewhere between what those pushing for a paring-back of goals have had in mind and what the neocons pushing back against that talk have been saying. Of course, the neocon adoption of maximalist objectives in Afghanistan is a bit of an after-the-fact phenomenon since back in the winter of 2001-2002 this was the crew that pushed, successfully, for us to ignore Afghanistan in favor of a senseless war in Iraq. So for the past seven years we’ve been adrift in Afghanistan without real policy objectives of any kind.

Afghanistan Strategy to Include Meaningful Benchmarks

I think it won’t come to news as anyone to learn that the Obama administration’s plan for Afghanistan will include the dispatch of additional American military forces. I know not everyone is enthusiastic about that kind of escalating effort, but it is worth recalling that the total number of American troops in Afghanistan will be rising to only about 60,000—that’s much less than were in pre-surge Iraq. Indeed, it’s actually close to some of the high-end estimates for the number of so-called “residual” forces that are supposed to be left in Iraq after the American military has “left.” Under the circumstances, I think skeptics of grandiose American power projection—a group in which I’d include myself—would be better off pushing to curtail or eliminate these “residual” deployments of Iraq, which really make no strategic sense, rather than worrying about the small influx to Afghanistan for which I see a reasonable case.

Two developments that were less clearly going to happen, but which I find welcome if the Times’s description is correct are that the administration “for the first time set benchmarks for progress in fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban there [i.e., Afghanistan] and in Pakistan.” This is crucially important. For one thing, I think clear benchmarks actually make short-term success more likely since they focus the mission on objectives. But more importantly I’ve been worried for months now that Obama’s plan might get the administration caught up in the vicious logic of escalation, where you start escalating because you think there’s a chance it’ll work, and then if it doesn’t work all you can do is keep on escalating. I think the odds of the multi-modal influx of military forces, civilian development and governance experts, and money working are pretty good. But any honest person is going to have to concede that this is uncertain ground and that our fortunes depend in part on the actions of people we can’t control. It’s important to have some policy offramps, some points at which we might conclude that we can’t achieve our biggest goals and need to radically scale back.

The other interesting point is that “officials said he planned to recast the Afghan war as a regional issue involving not only Pakistan but also India, Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian states.” This is exactly right. As I was saying yesterday you have to at things through some very American-tinted lenses to see a “regional” consisting of Pakistan and Afghanistan somewhere on the map. Pakistan’s “regional” outlook is all about India, and Russia and China see Afghanistan as existing in a “region” of Central Asian states that border them. America’s interests in Afghanistan are narrow and a little bit idiosyncratic—relating to the contingent fact that Osama bin Laden took his operation there about a decade ago—but there are also enduring facts of geography and culture that shape other countries’ responses.

The Governance Problem in Pakistan

I was saying earlier that if we want to see Pakistan’s ISI not undermining what we’re doing in Afghanistan that we would need to do something that changes their regional calculus regarding India. Patrick Barry says this misses some governance issues:

But just critical as a factor in explaining why ISI factions continue to bedevil the U.S. is Pakistan’s civilian government’s inability to exercise authority over the military. Even if there were better relations between Pakistan and India, you would still have to face the reality that neither the government nor the Military is able to prevent ISI elements from collaborating with insurgents who have come to threaten not just Afghanistan, but also Pakistan itself.

This is fair enough. But I think that in many ways it loops back to the regional situation. The outsize role the military plays in Pakistani society is closely linked to Pakistan’s long-running conflict with India. A Pakistan that didn’t see the struggle with India as of paramount importance wouldn’t just turn its a large and powerful military establishment in a direction that’s more favorable to our policy objectives, it actually wouldn’t need such a large and powerful policy military establishment.

Incidentally, when I observe that turning Pakistan’s regional calculus around would be integral to achieving maximalist American goals in Afghanistan, I mean that not-so-much in the spirit of saying I think Richard Holbrooke needs to work ’round the clock to accomplish that but rather in the spirit of raising doubts about the feasibility of maximalist goals. This is, after all, the land of “If India builds the Bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry—but we will get one of our own.” Pakistan is very committed to its position on the Kashmir issue, and thus to the conflict with India, and has been for decades.

Pakistani Intelligence Still Helping Afghan Insurgency

Great report in The New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt about Pakistani intelligence’s continued support of insurgent groups in Afghanistan:

The support consists of money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance to Taliban commanders who are gearing up to confront the international force in Afghanistan that will soon include some 17,000 American reinforcements. [...] In a sign of just how resigned Western officials are to the ties, the British government has sent several dispatches to Islamabad in recent months asking that the ISI use its strategy meetings with the Taliban to persuade its commanders to scale back violence in Afghanistan before the August presidential election there, according to one official. [...]

But the Pakistanis offered a more nuanced portrait. They said the contacts were less threatening than the American officials depicted and were part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan for the day when American forces would withdraw and leave what they fear could be a power vacuum to be filled by India, Pakistan’s archenemy. A senior Pakistani military officer said, “In intelligence, you have to be in contact with your enemy or you are running blind.” [...]

Little is publicly known about the ISI’s S Wing, which officials say directs intelligence operations outside of Pakistan. American officials said that the S Wing provided direct support to three major groups carrying out attacks in Afghanistan: the Taliban based in Quetta, Pakistan, commanded by Mullah Muhammad Omar; the militant network run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; and a different group run by the guerrilla leader Jalaluddin Haqqani.

I think the failure to address the point about India is probably the key failure of our posture in the region. However much the war in Afghanistan may be termed a “necessary war,” the United States has the option of leaving the region. Pakistan does not. It will always be between Afghanistan and India. A responsible Pakistani official’s first concern is bound to be with India. Consequently, the main objective of Pakistani policy in Afghanistan will always be to secure Pakistan’s interests vis-a-vis India. And the Pakistanis have been consistently convinces—for years—that a stable Afghan government headed by anti-Taliban elements is not consistent with those interests. Unless Richard Holbrooke can conjure up some way to change that larger regional calculus, it’s difficult to see how we can achieve an ambitious set of goals in Afghanistan

OMB Un-Disavows “War on Terror”

One interesting sub-plot thus far in the Obama administration has been the not-quite-official disavowal of the term “war on terror.” This saw another flair-up recently when a civil servant named Dave Riedel emailed Pentagon officials to tell them “OMB says: ‘This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” But according to Brian Beutler, when Peter Orszag was asked about this he distanced himself from the distancing saying “I’m not aware of any communication I’ve had on that issue. It was a communication by a mid-level career civil service.” Brian observes:

So GWOT it is. That doesn’t mean the Riedel email didn’t go out, though, and some (me, for instance) wonder if some at the Pentagon might stick with the supposedly new moniker (Overseas Contingency Operation) leading to some amusing confusion on the Hill.

This has been a problem for the government for some time, and to such an extent that even George Bush was willing to admit error. “We actually misnamed the war on terror,” Bush said in August 2004. “It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.” Touche.

I think this is a more important issue than people realize. Names of programs matter. The fact that the Future Combat Systems project is named “Future Combat Systems” allowed John McCain during the campaign to try to get people to believe that Barack Obama had some kind of blanket opposition to funding future combat systems, rather than opposition to a specific boondogglish program. Similarly, it sounds and feels a lot more reasonable to say that Pentagon requests for money to use in overseas contingency operations need to be weighed against other priorities than it does to question funding requests aimed at winning a “Long War” or a “War on Terror.” Completely non-military endeavors have often tried to leverage the term “war” into increased funding (War on Poverty, War on Drugs) but obviously this works a lot better for the military which is in the business of fighting wars.

But reducing the world’s exposure to terrorists is neither an enterprise with a defined beginning and end, nor is it mainly a military undertaking. “War on Terror” and “Long War” thinking distort our policy approaches, distort our budgetary priorities, and encourage the problematic idea that we need to fight a hazily defined “global counterinsurgency” and can’t afford to think about the costs of doing so.

The Virtue of Unfought Wars

Michael Cohen makes the excellent point that it’s necessary to get U.S. strategic thinking outside the “counterinsurgency vs. big army” dynamic that has us—or, rather, the military and military-affiliated organizations—stuck debating whether in the future we should be fighting a lot of counterinsurgencies or fighting a lot of conventional wars against medium-sized countries. As he puts it with admirable brevity:

In the end, perhaps the focus of the US military and American foreign policy, writ large, should be to avoid counter-insurgencies — AND AVOID CONVENTIONAL CONFLICTS.

Quite so. Obviously one doesn’t want to rule out the use of military force as a matter of principle, and a country of our wealth and size can easily afford to maintain significant military capabilities. But it still makes much more sense to be dedicating time, attention, and resources to avoiding U.S. involvement in significant hostile military operations. Gian Gentile observes, against the counterinsurgents, that “A North Korean march on Seoul will not be a fight for hearts and mind.” No, it won’t. But a North Korean march on Seoul is a scenario we can almost certainly avoid. And since South Korea has twice the population of North Korea and five times the GDP, our strategy should be based around the idea that the South Koreans can and should be shouldering the bulk of the responsibility for coping with this scenario.

Some U.S. participation in South Korean defense is, I think, a good idea but this is primarily about stabilizing the overall situation in northern Asia and reducing the likelihood of conflict not that there’s some pressing need for us to be gearing up to refight the Korean war. In general, it’s the wars you don’t fight that tend to do you the most good.