It’s remarkable how Obama’s speeches are still Rorschach blots one year after he’s been elected president. Everyone sees what they’d like to see, projecting their hopes onto a president who seems to encourage just that. Judging by the commentary flying about this morning, last night’s speech was no exception. The neocons are elated that Obama has embraced a Bush-like military surge, liberal hawks are heartened that Obama is still committed to a muscular support of American values abroad, and the domestic-focused Left are despairing of their president’s inability to stop a war they feel is sapping their ability to achieve anything at home.

Mindful of the projection problem, I came away from watching the speech with an impression that runs counter to most of the conventional wisdom I’m reading today. I watched the speech with my parents who are visiting from Croatia, and all three of us were pleased by it, even moved in parts. Maybe their presence had some skewing effect on my perception, I don’t know. In any case, some thoughts:

1) This surge is not Bush-like. For one thing, there was no wrong-headed talk of victory. Even more so than in Iraq, the term is meaningless in Afghanistan. What would victory even look like? Obama’s no fool, and he doesn’t think we are either.

Along those lines, state-building as an objective was largely sidelined. The Afghans and their neighbors will have to figure out the contours of the future Afghan state for themselves, and their final arrangement is none of our concern. We’ll try to give them a strong military, which we’ll support for our counter-terrorism purposes, but we won’t get more involved than that. The one time corruption was mentioned, Obama suggested that he would bypass the feckless Karzai government and “support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people.” (Sounds like the McChrystal “Tribes” initiative to me.)

Yes, there’s going to be some applied counterinsurgency going on: cities will be protected from the bearded barbarians, and small-bore agricultural development projects will be shielded from Taliban depredations. But the goal is not to win hearts and minds for a friendly government we’re working to establish, but rather to buy time for the training of the Afghan military. This shift in emphasis is no small matter.

2) The promotion of Western values takes a shellacking. Sorry, liberal hawks, but women will continue to have a vile time in Afghanistan, existing as they do somewhere in between slaves and cattle in the rural hierarchy. Michael Crowley noted the absence of any language pertaining to human rights in the speech, and wondered if we’d be hearing a different speech if we had Hillary Clinton as president right now. I couldn’t think of a better reason to thank our lucky stars that she’s not.

It’s important not to slide into cynicism here, or to lazily elide just how bad the human rights situation is in Afghanistan. The problem is that we’re not doing anyone any good by insisting that the Afghans adopt our modern, emancipated approach. Walter Russell Mead wrote a penetrating post on this conundrum as it pertains to Pakistan a few weeks back on his blog at The American Interest (full disclosure: I work there). It applies double to Afghanistan. As I wrote in the comments:

Throughout the 20th century, Afghanistan’s history has been one of fitful modernizations and liberalizations spearheaded by Westernized elites which have met with varying degrees of pushback, often quite violent, from the rural conservative population.

The situation in Afghanistan is difficult and complex enough without adding these seemingly intractable human rights issues into the mix. The 20% or so of the Afghan population, the very people that reporters and aid workers encounter in Kabul, the people who are broadly most supportive of our efforts to date, will surely feel betrayed by us now. It’s a shame, but it’s unavoidable given the circumstances. Good work on making this hard decision, Mr. President.

3) The retrenching of America. I’m surprised so few people are talking about this, but for me it was probably the most heartening aspect of the whole speech. For the last third or so, Obama explicitly recognized that America’s ability to order the world is finite and limited, and that its still-vast resources are better invested at home than in fools’ errands abroad. “That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own,” he said. Nicely put.

The threat from Afghanistan is real enough, but the right approach is not to treat it as a problem to be solved, but rather as a crisis to be managed. The goal of the escalation in Afghanistan is to disrupt Al Qaeda enough to set up a manageable situation going forward, not to completely eliminate the conditions under which terrorists breed. This strict problem-solving mentality has bedeviled American foreign policy since George W. Bush came swaggering to power, and I’m glad to see it go.

* * *

None of these points actually address whether the plan is a good or workable one. The speech was quite short on operational details, perhaps because revealing some of these details might be disastrous to achieving our objectives. And though Obama committed to a fairly strict withdrawal deadline, a Catholic female friend of mine reminded me that “a commitment to withdrawal should not be trusted; in the heat of the moment he will want to stay until finished.” So we’ll see on the specifics.

Overall, however, this was a substantively new direction for American foreign policy that Obama has articulated. And it’s quite welcome.

Via Spencer Ackerman, I just read John Nagl and Richard Fontaine’s op-ed from two weeks ago:

As the Obama administration debates whether to stick with the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, opponents point to that nation’s flawed presidential election as a reason why this approach cannot work… This argument is badly flawed. Electoral fraud will render our task in Afghanistan more difficult, but it does not make counterinsurgency impossible. On the contrary, a counterinsurgency approach — and not a narrowly tailored mission focused solely on killing or capturing enemies — remains the best path to success in Afghanistan.

Ackerman’s worried by their proposal to effectively bypass the central government. I’m less so. They are being a bit too optimistic about the benefits this will be bringing to the Afghan people, and they’re certainly prettying up what the surge actually achieved in Iraq. Nevertheless, it’s one step closer to accepting that the best we can probably hope to accomplish is a loose confederation of warlord fiefdoms that more-or-less has control over its territory. Setting realistic goals is the first step to some kind of positive outcome to this whole mess.

For a quick survey of the thinking that’s already been done in the field of development studies, as well as several tidy frameworks for thinking about the daunting challenges ahead of us in Afghanistan, you couldn’t do much better than reading Francis Fukuyama’s concise tome State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century.

Being written in 2004, the book seems to be primarily geared towards understanding our options in Iraq. Nevertheless, in the final chapter, Fukuyama broadly outlines the problem of Afghanistan, and it’s none too rosy a picture.

It is not clear, given the low to nonexistent level of stateness in many failed states, whether there is any real alternative to a quasi-permanent, quasi-colonial relationship between the “beneficiary” country and the international community. In a sense, the latter has recreated the earlier mandatory system of the League of Nations period in which certain colonial powers were given explicit charter to govern a given territory on its behalf. The problem with our current system is that contemporary norms do not accept the legitimacy of anything other than self-government, which makes us then insist that whatever governance we do provide be temporary and rule transitional. Since we do not in fact know how to transfer institutional capacity in a hurry, we are setting ourselves and our supposed beneficiaries up for large disappointments. [p. 104]

I suppose it should be stressed here that Fukuyama isn’t taking the activist Max Boot neocolonial stance—that even though we Americans don’t like the term ‘empire’, we should just get on with paternalistic administration of the rest of the world. Rather he’s saying that though the colonial worldview is of a bygone era and is unthinkable today, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that there has been any kind of record of spectacular success in state-building in the post-colonial era.

Alex Massie draws my attention to a Jason Zengerle profile of Rory Stewart at TNR. It’s a good piece, worth reading in full¹. Of course, as is customary in these sorts of articles, Zengerle seeks out a dissenting opinion from COIN booster Andrew Exum.

Matt Yglesias explains the crux of their disagreement:

…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…

A couple of random questions/points expanding on this:

1) Do COIN supporters think that the army is well-suited to doing development work? This is redolent of a sort of universalist bias in American thinking, which assumes that the only thing keeping an individual from flourishing is oppressive circumstance. In Iraq, we had the strong form of this thesis, wherein the removal of Saddam would lead to the rise of a functional, semi-modern democracy in the heart of the middle east. After Iraq, our aspirations for Afghanistan are lower, but the belief in the mechanism remains: if only we can limit violence, good things will happen. Limiting violence is a good thing in itself, to be sure, but it doesn’t causally lead to a stable state emerging. And a stable state in control of its territory is the minimum of what we’re after.

2) Do COIN supporters even know what development is capable of? I don’t claim to know either, definitively, not being a specialist in the field. But my father worked at the UNDP his whole career, and I did a stint at an NGO after college, so I have at least some kind of appreciation of both the ambition of development practitioners as well as the crushing difficulty of actually achieving these goals. Reading the McChrystal recommendations, the following bullet point struck me:

Facilitating Afghan governance and mitigating the effects of malign actors. Success requires a stronger Afghan government that is seen by the Afghan people as working in their interests. Success does not require perfection—an improvement in governance that addresses the worst of today’s high level abuse of power, low-level corruption and bureaucratic incapacity will suffice.

This sounds like the kind of development boilerplate one might see on funding proposals and grant requests. It blithely suggests that even achieving a percentage of perfection is within our reach. I doubt that it is even in the long term. I’m virtually certain it’s impossible in the 12-18 month horizon that General McChyrstal’s report is talking about.

3) We’re not thinking about time horizons correctly at all. Development, as a formalized field, has only existed since after World War II—that’s a bit north of 60 years. During that time, the great successes have been in eradicating diseases like river blindness and polio, and in fighting famines through the introduction of improved farming techniques. Creating good governance in post-colonial tribal societies in Africa, on the other hand, has been depressingly less successful. Surely we’ve all heard that the Afghanistan project will take as much as 50 years to get right. I’d say 50 years is the lowball estimate, even if we as a country were 100% committed to the project and suffered no setbacks in the interim.

Rory Stewart’s Tory conservatism is based on experience of not just Afghanistan, but of development work in general. The COIN proponents’ optimism seems to be based on a can-do American ethos typical of its excellent armed services. While I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the type of thinking that the COIN crowd is doing, I fear that as their star has risen in Washington, their vision has become more maximalist. All problems appear to be nails for their hammer, and all previous failures have been failures of not doing it the right way. But many of these problems, especially but not exclusively in Afghanistan, are fundamentally problems of political (not economic) development, and are devilishly hard to solve by outsiders. It’s folly to assume that a fresh pair of eyes and new determination will succeed where decades of effort have already failed.

I suspect Matt’s always thought that Pakistan is the more important half of the Af-Pak clusterfuck, and today he comes out and says it. I’ve been beating around that bush for a while now too. Recently, however, I’ve been pondering the possibility that too much involvement in Pakistan might be a mistake as well.

I just finished carefully re-reading John Lukacs’ sketch of George Kennan last night and was struck anew by Kennan’s prescient calls to prudence in international relations, his conviction that most problems in the world are by their very nature too complicated to be “solved” in any meaningful way, and his counsel, therefore, that America be extremely selective in its engagements.

Remaking Afghanistan certainly doesn’t reach Kennan’s threshold for American involvement. One is tempted to wonder whether Pakistan does either. It’s not that the stakes aren’t high—nuclear weapons in a failed state are about as high as they can get. It’s that the paucity of our policy options and leverage is matched with a frightful lack of insight as to what’s happening on the ground, which makes the further improvement of our options seem unlikely. Indeed, the situation is so fluid and murky that even Pakistani journalists close to the events seem to be baffled by each new turn. It’s not that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with Pakistan, Kennan might say, but that we should be very hesitant about just “doing something” lest we muck it up more.

Joe Klein reports that Bruce Riedel, head of Obama’s “Af-Pak” strategy review, thinks we should focus our energies on the Pakistan problem:

“Afghanistan pales in comparison to the problems in Pakistan,” said an official familiar with Riedel’s thinking. “Our primary goal has to be to shut down the al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens on the Pakistan side of the border. If that can be accomplished, then the insurgency in Afghanistan becomes manageable.”

That’s music to my ears, as far as it goes. A bit further on, presumably the same source clarifies:

“Obviously, we’re not going to invade Pakistan,” said a senior member of the Riedel review. “We have to convince the Pakistanis to do the job. But we haven’t had much luck with that in the past.”

That is the crux of it, of course: there are no good solutions for Pakistan. Nevertheless, I still don’t see what an attempt at Afghan state-building gets us, except dead soldiers and an even more stretched budget.

Chris Brose, reporting on/from the Munich security conference, writes a long post on Afghanistan. This part caught my eye:

What I heard again and again is that we may have to settle for a counterterrorism-focused mission, but that should be an unfortunate option of last resort, not our going-in policy. Furthermore, we should not allow resources to determine strategy, as this study suggests, which was one interpretation I heard for the administration’s recent statements walking back U.S. goals: The economy’s bad, and we have to do what we can. This gets it backwards. We should determine the optimal outcome we are confident we can accomplish, and then pay for it. After all, we still have a GDP of, what, $12 trillion? If our conception of strategic success is achievable, let’s not hide behind tightening budgets.

Maybe Afghanistan can be part of the stimulus—let’s ramp up for a difficult war! We’ll need more materiel and we’ll need boots on the ground. Those who can’t build Humvees can go overseas.

But seriously, what’s going on here? Let’s grant the somewhat dubious premise that resources shouldn’t determine strategy for the moment. What should our strategy be? A massive state-building project in one of the most primitive and underdeveloped parts of the world? To what end? Is developing Afghanistan an end in itself? Or are we hoping to get a basing arrangement so we can eventually project power into an increasingly chaotic Pakistan when the shit eventually hits the fan there?

Color me skeptical. Some are celebrating the recent Iraqi elections as a vindication of the squandering of vast amounts of our treasure and reasonable amounts of our blood by the Bush administration. I still see it as the strategic screwup of the century, wherein we basically gave up global strategic flexibility for almost six years and counting, as well as bases in Saudi Arabia in order to be denied eventual basing rights in Iraq by a democratically elected government which will probably neither be a close ally nor a friend of Israel. Committing to “solving” Afghanistan, or “winning” there, is to put us on a similarly ill-conceived trajectory.

It’s still early here on the East Coast, but I’d wager Alex Massie’s penned the best quip I’m likely to read all day:

One other thing: “Some of our NATO allies aren’t carrying their share of the military burden”. Well, that’s become the prevailing view and I dare say there’s some truth to it. Some troops probably could do with operating under more robust terms of engagement and all the rest of it. But all of them, regardless of nationality, would be better served by a strategy that had clear and realistic goals. Or to put it another way, if I were a Pomeranian, I’m not sure that it would be head-slappingly obvious to me that Afghanistan is worth the bones of any (or any more) of my grenadiers…

Andrew Sullivan, responding to Christopher Hitchens’ claim that an Obama presidency will mean “more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less”, says:

I can face the idea of a president Obama taking on and finally defeating Osama. In fact, that’s the major reason why I favor his candidacy… . Obama will try to correct the massive stretegic error of the Iraq invasion and pivot Western allies toward a greater focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe that Obama will be able to do this with much less global p.r. blowback than McCain and that the support president Obama will get from our European allies will dwarf McCain’s.

First of all, I should point out that I, too, would welcome a President Obama “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” For what it’s worth, I could face a Honeydew-Beaker Administration “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” (Hey, I wouldn’t even mind if it happened in the next 3-4 months, under Bush, but I get the feeling that happenstance might upset someone…)

What I really wanted to draw attention to is Sullivan’s assumption that Obama will be able to formally and officially expand the Afghanistan problem into an Afghanistan-Pakistan problem with “much less global p.r. blowback than McCain.” Au contraire. I expect there will be more blowback against Obama.

Right now, he can ride high on a wave of global public support, but those thronging masses in Berlin and elsewhere are supporting him because they expect something in return: a massive rupture with Bush-era foreign policy. Since this is inchoate mob opinion we’re talking about here, it wouldn’t do to overanalyze it; basically they want more talk, fewer bombs, and they think he’s the one who’s going to give that to them. Americans, on the other hand, seem more inclined to take him at his word on his promises to get tough with Pakistan (though they still favor McCain on national security issues).

Something tells me that, if it comes to a choice between upsetting Americans’ expectations, and upsetting the world’s, the President of the United States is going to side with…well, the United States. And this is going to cut across a number of issues besides Afghanistan/Pakistan, as Slate pointed out awhile back:

If his diplomats or military advisers told him that the Iranians perceived his willingness to talk as a sign of weakness, he might reconsider his pledge to meet with the Iranian president as quickly as he now promises. Maybe when presented with confidential data gathered by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, he would be less keen to drop all the measures taken by Bush and criticized by the opposition. Maybe his belief that “the United States needs to lead the world in ending this genocide” in Darfur would put him at odds with reality or with some members of the international community. In each of these cases, Obama would suffer the consequences of high expectations. He would be trapped between the desire to preserve his high standing in the world and the need to act in ways that would erode that standing. Of course—his advisers would argue—it is better to have this political goodwill in the first place. But even if that were true, political goodwill should always be handled delicately. Starting modestly and building up is also an option, sometimes a better one if you aim to keep expectations realistic. (This, I think, is the way John McCain would play his cards internationally.)

It’s undeniable that the “get tough on Pakistan” rhetoric is good for Obama’s short-term political interests. The world simply isn’t listening as closely to the candidates’ statements as are Americans, so it’s easier for them to bask in the unadulterated glow of St. Barack. But if Obama wins in November, he may soon come to realize that hell hath no fury like a Berliner scorned.

A quibble with Yglesias on strategy:

Where have we sent our best-regarded commanders? All to Iraq rather than to a theater of more strategic importance to the United States [Afghanistan], where our operation has more legitimacy, and where there’s a real chance we could secure more international assistance with our efforts if we were willing to make them a bigger priority.

Afghanistan was more legitimate, to be sure, and as such would probably get more nation-building support from the rest of the world if America was more engaged. But I’m not sure what Matt’s getting at with regards to strategy. Afghanistan is more strategically significant because… what? We can menace Pakistan’s unruly provinces from across the border?

I’m not arguing by any stretch of the imagination that Iraq was a good idea. But now that it’s been done, I’d say that focusing our attention on it is at least as much of a priority as Afghanistan. An ungovernable, fractured Afghanistan is what we’ve been living with for centuries. An ungovernable, fractured Iraq, with its vast oil wealth, is more unpleasant to contemplate.