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.

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.

It’s refreshing to see that intelligent people dealing with facts on the ground in Iraq—like David Petraeus—dismiss “victory” talk as too simplistic. It’s a shame that the Republican party, traditionally the party of cold-blooded realpolitik, has hitched its wagon to the neoconservative project, because it allows the other side to plausibly claim that mere sanity in foreign policy is somehow “progressive”.

NY Times: “Sunnis Agree to End Boycott, Rejoin Iraq Government”.

“Our conditions were very clear, and the government achieved some of them,” said Adnan al-Duleimi, the head of Tawafiq, the largest Sunni bloc in the government. Mr. Duleimi said the achievements included “the general amnesty, chasing down the militias and disbanding them and curbing the outlaws.” … The official government television channel, Iraqiya, appeared to confirm the deal, following a meeting between Mr. Maliki and David Miliband, the visiting foreign secretary of Britain. Iraqiya said the prime minister “said that reconciliation has proved a success and all political blocs will return to the government.”

If this does pan out, it’s not difficult to see that the Democrats are toast come November.

Matt Yglesias has written a good summary of the situation in Basra. Normally this would be an excellent lead-in for me to launch into a longish post about the talk I was at this afternoon at the Brookings Institution, wherein Matt’s general analysis was repeated almost verbatim by a Marine captain, which visibly flustered Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, who were also on the panel.

Alas, I’ve only slept two hours last night, so a longer post is out of the question. I’ll try to do it tomorrow.

Best post of the year. So far, anyway. One winning paragraph of many:

*I wasn’t born yesterday.* I had heard of the Middle East before September 12, 2001. I knew that many of the loudest advocates for war with Iraq were so-called national-greatness conservatives who spent the 1990s arguing that war was good for the soul. I remembered Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter and Michael Ledeen as the knaves and fools of Iran-Contra, and drew the appropriate conclusions about the Bush Administration wanting to employ them: it was an administration of knaves and fools.

I’ve long planned to read Petraeus’ praised counterinsurgency manual, but I just haven’t done it yet. With that said, I openly wonder what COIN orthodoxy says about suicide bombers.

Presumably, by ingratiating yourself with the local populace and ultimately gaining their trust, you will prevent insurgent groups from getting succour from an embittered population which resents your presence in the country. Using Mao’s famous metaphor for insurgent armies being fish swimming through the water of the general populace, you drain the water so the fish can’t swim.

Sounds good when applied to mobile guerilla bands who value their own lives and who occasionally fight real battles, however asymmetrical. But it sounds much less applicable to suicide bombers who have decided to forfeit their lives in advance and who don’t need a vast network of support to carry out their outrage.

I suppose one could hope that a sympathetic population will be able to rat out bomb-making nests and could point out suspicious activity to the authorities before an attack takes place. But the sheer susceptibility of even the most advanced, coherent societies such as ours to the irrational attacks of determined psychopaths suggests to me that past a certain population density, the full cooperation of a sympathetic population becomes much less effective than we’d like to believe.

I mean, what can we possibly do about acts such as these?

From a pure expediency standpoint, this is why Hillary will have so much trouble against McCain (via Yglesias):

And unlike Yglesias, I say this as someone who has more sympathy for Hillary’s foreign policy decisions and team than for Obama’s.

Matt Yglesias posts an article at The American Prospect touting the imperfections of the outcome in Kosovo as a tentative, hedged proof that even well-intentioned humanitarian unilateral interventions are bad news.

He ends his argument thus:

Timely and effective diplomacy can often avert humanitarian catastrophes before they break out at much lower cost than coercive force can end them once they’ve started. And the U.N.’s traditional peacekeeping operations, where parties to a conflict request third-party troops to help monitor and enforce a peace deal, have a solid track record of success but are perennially under-resourced by an indifferent United States. Greater commitment — political, financial, and (when appropriate) military — to these kinds of operations would bring much larger humanitarian benefits than would any hypothetic humanitarian wars.

Sounds good on paper. But in Kosovo’s case, Milošević recognized what current Serbian politicians don’t seem to grasp: Kosovo was ungovernable by Serbia with 2 million Albanians living there. He therefore began expelling them. Given that kind of rationale, it’s hard to imagine that diplomacy without at least some sort of a willingness to back it up with force would yield much.¹

As for parties to a conflict requesting third-party troops to help monitor a peace deal, Milošević had that one figured out too. In both Croatia and Bosnia he would agree to UN troops coming in to help him consolidate his gains on the ground. In Croatia, the UN Protected Areas (UNPAs) stood until 1995 when they were overrun by a Croatian offensive covertly backed by the US. In fact, it wasn’t until the Croatian offensive started to threaten Milošević’s gains in Bosnia that he became more than eager to enter into the negotiations that yielded the Dayton Accords.²

In the Balkans at least, diplomacy not backed up by force and reliance on just the UN yielded terrible results. Matt’s a very smart guy and I look forward to reading his book to see how he addresses these kinds of issues. I don’t doubt it’ll be a thoughtful argument, though I do doubt I’ll agree with much of it.

Horrible:

A 13-year-old boy wearing an explosives-packed vest blew himself up Sunday among a group of tribal leaders in the western province of Anbar, becoming one of the youngest suicide bombers since the U.S.-led invasion, Iraqi police said.

Doesn’t look like the kid had much of a future in this world:

Faiyadh said the boy was the son of one of the five most-wanted leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group that U.S. officials say is led by foreigners.

A child grows up in that kind of environment, is fed revolutionary dogma from an early age, and is therefore easily convinced to die for a cause. Same goes for the parent: once you cross that threshold where the revolutionary goal is everything, you’d sacrifice your own child to achieve it. This is not to justify anything, just a gut check against the tendency to throw up one’s hands in disbelief and plaintively bleat, “What kind of animal would do such a thing?” This is old hat insurgent tactic—beastly but historically unremarkable.

That said, all I can do is hope that somehow, through some turn of events, Al Qaeda in Iraq becomes utterly discredited as an organization and spectacularly and demonstrably fails in all its goals, with the father of this boy ending up in an Iraqi jail, where he endures a long and unpleasant life punctuated by severe beatings, between which he’s forced to ponder the senseless waste he brought about today.