Obsidian Wings

The Sane Ones

by von

If it wasn't obvious from yesterday's post, my mood regarding Afghanistan has been a bit "Charge of the Light Brigade" recently.  "All in the valley of death rode the six hundred" and all that rot.  I'm not quite that pessimistic, of course.  I think that there is a chance that we'll succeed.  Maybe a good chance, if we define success low enough.  But the problem is that any success we get is unlikely to look like the kind of success that we want.

So my support for President Obama's strategy -- indeed, for an even greater commitment of troops than he authorized -- is not based on the thought that we might "win" this one.  I support the strategy because the alternatives are much, much worse. 

I see a lot of the same resigned support in Andrew Sullivan's post of this morning:

I think this strategy is doomed. But then I think any strategy that does not pledge to colonize Afghanistan, pour trillions of dollars into it and stay for a century is doomed. So why do I end up this morning feeling rather similar to my colleague, Jim Fallows, who simply sighs: 'Well, I hope he's right"?

Here's why. The sanest option - leave now - would leave allies high and dry, prompt domestic cries of surrender, demoralize the military, break a clear campaign pledge, and signal to Pakistan that the Taliban is their problem now. Everything but the latter are worth avoiding.

Sullivan is even more pessimistic than pessimistic me, but, then, he's a English Catholic.  That's a whole different order of pessimism:  He probably views the Charge of the Light Brigade as a delightful romp through a sun-filled valley of flowers.  It strikes me that his definition of sanity, however, is a little strange.  If the leaving Afghanistan now "would leave allies high and dry, prompt domestic cries of surrender, demoralize the military, break a clear campaign pledge, and signal to Pakistan that the Taliban is their problem now," that is not the "sanest option."  

Moreover, Sullivan hasn't even touched on the best reasons why we shouldn't "leave now".  Sullivan notes that "Al Qaeda is based in Pakistan, not Afghanistan."  What he doesn't note is why:  Al Qaeda is now based in Pakistan because we're in Afghanistan.  How long after we leave before they come back?  A lot of ink is spilled on how chaos Afghanistan might affect Pakistan.  That worry is justified.  But Afghanistan also sits near several key energy pipelines.  Even if Pakistan is unaffected by an imploding Afghanistan, the fires may light other vital interests.  And what of the Afghan people?  We can barely deliver social services or improvement dollars now; how are we going to do it when there are no foreign troops providing security?  We can barely find and kill al Qaeda with extensive, in-country support force.  It will be harder -- much harder -- to conduct the kind of special ops war that some on the left prefer without that support.  

True, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are unlikely to topple the Afghan government at the moment.  But the government is weak.  All bets are off should we leave.  We should not be willing to see the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies come back to power.  The danger of another attack is too great; the signal sent is all wrong; the price for 9/11 should be greater.

The situation is bad.  But the costs -- the blood and treasure, lives and lucre -- that got us to this point are sunk.  We can't get them back.  The choice now is between bad and worse.  President Obama leveled with you last night, and he chose bad.  That was the right move.  He deserves your support.

By the way:  A lot of Republicans support Obama's plan, but are pushing back against his deadline for withdrawal in 2011.  I understand the argument against the deadline, but I think these Republicans miss the bigger picture.  There is no popular support for an open-ended commitment, either in the US or abroad. Without a deadline, there is no surge and no chance to convince allies to aid us. Obama's surge does not exist without a deadline.

UPDATE:  What if Obama's surge doesn't work?  What if it gets worse, not better?  My tentative, working answer is:  we lost, then.  Completely.  Like the Russians before us.

And he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year

by von

After his listening tour, it's likely that President Obama will order more troops to Afghanistan.  Not as many as General McChrystal sought some months ago; yet, many enough for one of my compatriots to gnash is terrible teeth, roll his terrible eyes, and generally go Maurice Sendak on ya'll. 

Perhaps Eric Martin is right:  None of us is an expert in this field, a distinction shared with, well, the experts in this field.  Which is to say that there are no experts in the field of complete chaos; the subcontinent; the dispossessed.  There are only a few who know enough to be stupid, and many more willing to pretend (and thus be truly dangerous).   Obama, Biden, Clinton, McChrystal, and Patreaus. There's irony to come in this piece, but I'd add Eric Martin to that list without any: I frankly trust his judgement as much as any of the foregoing. 

But, really, who are we?  Dilettantes, who have no f_cking clue what we're doing. 

I mean that with the greatest respect.  A lot of these folks are smart and know a lot about a lot of things; foxes who are good enough to fake it when they meet hedgehogs.  Smarter, even, than me.  (Heaven forfend!) They're trying, but some problems are a little too hard.  The Brits of the East India Company hedgehogged more of the relevant ley-lines than we'll ever hope to, but still ended up with Midnight's Children.  Who are, sixty years on, still trying to get home.

Midnight's Children.  I've been rambling, but I'll stop here.  The partition of India and Pakistan is the problem that we are dealing with in Afghanistan. The British did the best they could when they beat their hasty retreat from the subcontinent. The Gandhis did the best that they could when they won and then ruled. We did the best we could in Charlie Wilson's War .... but, Wolverines! didn't translate well into Pashtun.

The partition is why Pakistan devotes unGodly sums to not-quite-match its much larger rival in arms.  The partition is the cause of Pakistan's military-industrial complex (correctly diagnosed by Eric, below).  The partition is why Pakistan makes deals with devils of varying kinds, including Talibani of both Afghani and Pakistani descent.  Unity would have been worse, but that don't mean that partition doesn't sweat the donkey balls.  (An old saw that Kierkegaard once invoked whilst reading a Tarot deck.) (I swear!)

You want candid?  I don't think that 34,000 more troops will be enough to fix this.  I think that the 40,000+ more troops requested by McChrystal months ago might have been better, but I still don't think that even this number would've fix this.  

Unlike Eric, however, I think that we have to try. 

Why?  Because the dilettantes -- the ones who agree with me, at least ;-) -- do know more than us.  Because there is still a chance.  Because no one has yet explained how withdrawing from Afghanistan makes Afghanistan stable.  (Where is that whitepaper?  I, and several hundred thousand Afghanistanis, are dying to read it.)  Because no one has yet explained how we fight the Taliban if the Afghani government turns against us (or disappears).  Because, like the partition in the subcontinent, there are fates worse than the status quo. Because there is still a chance. Because the Afghanis and Pakistanis who want us to leave Afghanistan -- who promise us that we'll be loved and admired for doing so -- don't necessarily have our best interests at heart.  Because this was always going to be slow.  Because there is still a chance.  And because we made a promise to the Afghanis, which doesn't get voided just because we'd like so much for it to be so. 

You remember that promise, right?  You probably made it, like I did, sometime in the winter of 2001.  When every day was colder than the last.  When every day was shorter than the last.  When winter climbed up the beaches and you smoked cigarettes in dive bars in Alphabet City and wrote dreadful poetry about winter climbing up on beaches.  (You know you were there, back when you could still smoke in New York.)  You resolved that, this time, we would not just destroy; we would rebuild.  We would try, at least.

Well:  Here's your chance to finally fulfill one of your resolutions.  It's probably the last one, at least for this war. 

Hey, Joe, Where You Going With That Gun In Your Hand? Pt. II

Guest post by Gary Farber.  Gary's home blog is Amygdala, and he invites you to read him there.

[Eric Martin: My friend Gary is going to be pitching in for a couple of days as I adjust to the enhanced parenting techniques that my son is submitting me too.  And yes, sleep deprivation is torture.]

Part I of this two-part post is here.

Pt. II:

First we have to distinguish between the Taliban and al Qaeda. Then we have to analyze what threat either actually presents. And then we have to do a cost-benefit analysis of what's the best course of action. The essential war with al Qaeda, both insofar as al Qaeda remains any kind of organization, and, more importantly, insofar as it remains an inspiration to jihadists, is an ideological war, not a military war. The Taliban now have tried a YouTube channel for propaganda. The best way to fight al Qaeda is to fight their ideology, and we're doing okay at that. From 2008:

[...] These new critics, in concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, have created a powerful coalition countering Al Qaeda's ideology. According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 percent now have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations amongst Pakistanis has dropped to 9 percent (it was 33 percent five years ago), while favorable views of bin Laden in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to 4 percent from 70 percent since August 2007.

We can continue presenting an alternative. Many play up contemporary al Qaeda-Taliban ties, but that's highly questionable, as Gareth Porter writes:

Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? Pt. I.

Guest post by Gary Farber (thanks to Eric Martin, who understandably is busy!  And double congrats to Eric for all that family-makin' stuff he's been doin'!)

Gary's home blog is Amygdala, and he invites you to read him there.

[Eric Martin: My friend Gary is going to be pitching in for a couple of days as I adjust to the enhanced parenting techniques that my son is submitting me too.  And yes, sleep deprivation is torture.]

A post in two parts.  Part I:

On Friday night's PBS Newshour, Tom Bearden gave the following report from Fort Carson: 

 (Audio-only, if you have bandwidth issues.  Click the above link for a transcript.)

I was struck cold.

I've been to that chapel.

I've seen the upended rifle with the soldier's own helmet atop it, and boots beside it.

I've been there for the chilling sound and sight of the honor guards' rifle-shot salute.

I've listened to the bagpipes, and seen the faces of the family and friends, just as we see and hear in this video.

Then it was one soldier's boots and rifle. 

On Friday, it was six at once.

This is the cost of our Long War in Afghanistan.

This is the price our families, and sons and daughters, and parents, are paying.

It's been eight years and a week since American forces began combat in Afghanistan.

It's not easy not being Bush

By Lindsay Beyerstein

It's already a truism that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for being not-George W. Bush. This talking point gets repeated as if it's a witty put down. It's supposed to trivialize the win. The implication is that Obama won just for showing up. On closer examination, winning for not being Bush is a pretty substantial distinction in its own right.

Most commentators implicitly assume Obama won just for what he's done as president or what he promises to do in office. In fact, Obama earned the prize for waging a successful campaign to unseat a ruling party that rejected the rule of law at home and abroad. Remember how hard that was?

Much has been made of the fact that nominations for the prize closed in February, just after Obama was sworn in. Obama did take some of his boldest steps towards peace to date during his earliest days in office. One of his first acts was to order the closure of prison at Guantanamo Bay. That was an courageous act of profound national and international significance. He also quickly repudiated the Bush administration's torture policies and shut down its secret prisons.

If the 2008 election happened in Africa or the Middle East it would seem obvious that an opposition leader who restored the rule of law and set about reintegrating his country into the family of nations would be racking up points towards a Nobel Peace Prize before he even took the oath of office.

Obama Nobel: But what will the wingnuts think?

By Lindsay Beyerstein

The president wins the Nobel Peace Prize and some Democrats are wondering if he should turn it down because it might upset the wingnuts. Marc Ambinder summarizes:

This tracks with one argument I'm hearing and reading from Democrats and others who are skeptical of the prize: it will turn the volume and enthusiasm level all the way to the extreme end of the dial for conservatives -- overmodulating at 110%; the resulting hyperpolarization will hurt Obama's agenda.  (Representative of this opinion: "I think it will feed not just conservative dislike but the growing concern of independents and elites, that he is a man of rhetoric, a work of imagination, but as of now an unaccomplished statesman. The smartest thing he could do is turn it down. It will backfire on him.'")

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel dimension where everything is inverted. Accepting the Nobel Prize makes you look bad? It's narcissistic to accept prizes from other people? 

I am gobsmacked that some Democrats want the president to turn down the prize for his own good. What message would that send to the rest of the world? Something along the lines of 'Thanks, guys, but I'm really all about war'?  

Of course the Republicans are going to freak out. Our guy wins a Nobel Peace Prize after 9 months in office, primarily for tinkering with the worst excesses of the wars their guy started. That's humiliating. Humiliated Republicans lash out, news at eleven.

Afghanistan's Fork In The Road

by publius

It's easy to understand why Obama is delaying a final decision on Afghanistan strategy.  He's come to a major fork in the road -- and each potential choice calls for radically different actions that can't be easily reversed.

Eric Martin can correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama seems to be faced with two rival strategy approaches.  The first is a counterterrorism approach focused on taking out bad guys.  The second is a counterinsurgency approach (COIN, etc.) that focuses on winning the population.

The problem, though, is that each strategy requires dramatically different tactics and resource levels.  A counterterrorism approach in a hostile country probably requires scaling down current troop levels.  Counterinsurgency, by contrast, requires a dramatic increase in troops to be done right.  Neither choice, once taken, can be easily undone.  So deliberation seems right to me.

All that said, one of my concerns with the counterinsurgency approach is simply that too many things have to go right for it to work.  I'm not saying it's impossible, or that it's a ridiculous argument.  It just strikes me as a strategy that carries a very low probability of success given all the good things that have to happen.

First, we have to assume that we can pull this off with less troops than counterinsurgency theory suggests we need.  Second, we have to assume that Karzai's government will not only get their act together, but will be perceived differently (and more favorably) by the actual population. 

Third, we have to assume that we are capable of pacifying the population centers.  Even if we are, though, it doesn't mean we've "won."  The current counterinsurgency approach still assumes that the Taliban will control much of the countryside for the foreseeable future.  The ultimate hope, then, is that our "ink spot" strategy will allow us to eventually expand control out into these areas. 

And we have to achieve all of this without creating new high-profile civilian deaths that inflame the population.  Plus, we have to stay there many, many years -- and spend a lot of money.

And even assuming all of that goes well, we're still not home.  Andrew Bacevich writes:

If we could wave our magic wand today and transform Afghanistan into whatever it is the COIN [counterinsurgency] advocates think they can achieve there, the threat posed by jihadism would still exist and would not even be appreciably diminished.

It just seems hard to adopt a strategy that requires so many things to go right, which even then isn't assured to help our national security.

What Merkel Means

by publius

I've already noticed some cheering in conservative quarters about the sweeping victory of Merkel's center-right coalition.  To the extent we're viewing the German election through domestic political lenses (and, as Americans, that's our God-given right), it's worth keeping relative baselines in perspective. 

As Yglesias notes, much of Merkel's coalition would be considered fairly liberal Democrats on America's political spectrum:

The CDU [Merkel's party] believes in limiting carbon emissions and has no intention of scrapping universal health care or eliminating pensions for old people. Nor do they believe in torturing prisoners and launching unprovoked wars.

Plus, their coalition partner, the FDP (a libertarianish party), is led by an openly gay man.  The idea of a gay person leading any sort of major conservative party in America is just unthinkable -- and probably will remain unthinkable for decades.

For what it's worth, I also agree with Yglesias that Germany seems over-regulated in many ways.  And I think that American free-market Republicans could probably get a lot more done in terms of getting rid of stupid regulations if they weren't joined at the hip with social conservatives.  It's hard to hand over the reins of power to a party when you know it means that Tony Perkins gets to appoint judges and dominate the FDA. 

La Chute

by von

Since my flight got canceled this morning, I suppose that I have time to risk some questions to Publius' post:  "Afghanistan as Therapy".  Publius writes:

[O]n the domestic front, the stimulus saved a lot of jobs -- and helped stop the bleeding.  But the opposition was fueled by an ideological aversion to government.  Opposing the stimulus was the GOP's chance to show that they actually believe in "small government," even if it made very little policy sense. ....

Afghanistan, though, is different.  It's frustrates me on a far deeper level to see people advocate for wars just to make themselves feel better. ....

It's important to remember ... that troops aren't "resources" -- they're real humans, with real families, with real children, and with real friends.  If we're going to escalate in Afghanistan, we deserve to give them defined goals. 

You can play therapy session all day with the stimulus opposition if you want.  But not with the lives of troops -- they didn't sign up to make the Kagan family feel good about themselves.

If I thought that the Democrats went the wrong way on the stimulus, was I playing therapy?

If I believe General McCrystal (and others*) that we are likely to cede Afghanistan to the Taliban unless we commit more combat troops, am I playing therapy?

If I am willing to commit those troops because I think that a fractured Afghanistan will destabilize Pakistan, risking the lives of millions and our own national secutiry, is it because I regard our soldiers as playthings?

Let's say that the answer to each of these questions is "yes".  Let's say that I'm arguing for each of my positions in bad faith.  Let's say the Kagans are as well.  All of us want to risk more young lives not because we think that losing to the Taliban is worse, but to work out some testicular need of ours.  War not merely as therapy, but as our personal porno stash.

How does this counter a single one of the arguments put forward by General McChrystal in favor of more troops?  How does it counter a single argument made by any one of the Kagans, for that matter?  Indeed, how does it counter a single one of the arguments put forward by President Obama last year, when he promised to send more combat troops to Afghanistan? 

It doesn't. 

If armchair psychology is all you've got, you don't have any counterargument at all. 

*Who else agrees with General McChrystal that more combat troops are needed in Afghanistan?  Among others, Spanish Prime Minister (and left-wing) Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Danish NATO Chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen.  Note, too, that these additional combat troops would be part of a coordinated push that involved social and political adjustments to our counterinsurgency efforts.  It's not just putting in more troops (although, obviously, the "therapeutic" aspect of the plan for us warmongers is the "more dead youngsters" part).

UPDATE:  Kimberly Kagan may have an additional objection to the "testes made us do it" argument.  

Afghanistan As Therapy

by publius

One unfortunate aspect of today's political conservative movement is that much of it is defined entirely by opposition -- and contempt -- for liberals.  That's the ideological glue that holds many otherwise inconsistent policies and coalitions together.

Another dynamic is simply that frustrations with the Bush administration led to massive amounts of cognitive dissonance.  In the age of Bush, what exactly did "conservative" mean? 

Enter the new Obama administration.  What's frustrating is not so much the GOP's opposition to everything, but that the opposition seems more about reaffirming ideological views and healing cognitive dissonance than about articulating actual policy disagreements.  In short, conservatives are using opposition to Obama to reaffirm their ideological glue and conservative bona fides -- it's a form of therapy.

For instance, on the domestic front, the stimulus saved a lot of jobs -- and helped stop the bleeding.  But the opposition was fueled by an ideological aversion to government.  Opposing the stimulus was the GOP's chance to show that they actually believe in "small government," even if it made very little policy sense.

But whatever, that's part of the game.

Afghanistan, though, is different.  It's frustrates me on a far deeper level to see people advocate for wars just to make themselves feel better.  With Obama wavering on troop escalations in Afghanistan (good!), the old poisonous Kagan nationalism is creeping back out -- along with the same vague "goals" that generally emerge when wars lose their purpose.  And now we're supposed to raise troop levels just to show how tough we are.

It's important to remember, however, that troops aren't "resources" -- they're real humans, with real families, with real children, and with real friends.  If we're going to escalate in Afghanistan, we deserve to give them defined goals. 

You can play therapy session all day with the stimulus opposition if you want.  But not with the lives of troops -- they didn't sign up to make the Kagan family feel good about themselves.