The main critique I have of the Obama Administration thus far is one that has been noted by many but which I believe has led him to embrace some seriously flawed policy positions: the advisors who most shape his policy are better at winning campaigns than actually governing and that his policies both foreign and domestic have generally reflected self-serving political calculation over advancing the economic, social and strategic goals of the nation as a whole. In my opinion it seems that the short-term political fortunes of a man who is temporarily occupying the Oval Office and his political allies in Congress have trumped the long-term interests of all Americans in living in a country that is defined by personal freedom, economic prosperity and international security. In my opinion, the result of having an Administration whose governance embodies a permanent-campaign weltanschauung is that politically inconvenient facts that can be glossed over when crafting a 90 second sound bite for use in a campaign debate are ignored, to the country's detriment, when charting the course of actual policy, where such realities become crucially important. What is politically popular and possible to implement, say, in a law passed by a partisan Congress must ultimately bow to the costs and benefits of the legislation in reality, and those who ignore that fact do so at their own peril. Nobody likes the sad fact that some fraction of society has always lived in poverty, but in retrospect you would be hard pressed to find someone who would not foresee the failure of LBJ's Great Society with the benefit of hindsight.

In his speech tonight where he pledged, albeit with some small hedges, to increase troop strength in Afghanistan to take the fight to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and strengthen our alliances both with the barely nominally legitimate government in Kabul as well as the much more geopolitically important regime in Islamabad. By committing more troops to "the good war" in Afghanistan at long last he finally seemed to embrace a policy that comes with no obvious political benefit, and which embodies the fact that sometimes there is no guarantee that a problem that faces our nation is soluble, let alone easily soluble. Presidents must sometimes stake themselves to positions that are fraught with risk of failure, are politically unpopular, and yet represent the best, most viable policy option to take. Until tonight I had not seen Obama tread this obviously much more perilous road, even though both domestically and politically he has had opportunities to tackle problems head on and instead has deferred to politically easy "solutions" that will create problems for the country down the road.

I do not believe that this steely resolve to deal with the facts, no matter how unpleasant they may be has been present much, if at all, previously on the signature domestic and foreign policy challenges his Administration has tackled. Briefly consider, for example, how he has handled his signature domestic issue: reforming health-care policy. It has long been a dream of those in his political base to implement some form of nationalized health-care, or something functional identical, that guarantees health-care as part of the safety net offered to all American citizens--or all American residents, to some. It would seem obvious to anybody in the "reality based community" that extending care to millions of new people who don't get it now regardless of their ability to pay for it must necessarily come at some large societal cost, and that a frank discussion of what that cost will be and how we will pay it would be necessary to responsibly implement such a reform. Be it by decreasing the quality or nature of care generally, increasing the cost that most middle class people pay for that care either directly through higher premiums or indirectly through lower take-home wages or higher taxes, rationing non-emergent care, or some combination of all of the above, a realistic appraisal of the situation would admit that some cost will be borne. Instead, Obama took a hands off approach towards creating what he hoped would be a defining achievement by promising what a man as intelligent as he must have known could not realistically be possible: anybody who had care they liked would be able to keep it, we'd pay for the millions of new people whose health-care would be subsidized solely from cutting out inefficiencies in the current system, and that we'd do all this without increasing the deficit. Basically, we'd get something for nothing in a way no other country does--other countries pay doctors less, have rationing of all sorts of elective procedures, sometimes do not have the latest and most expensive treatments for certain afflictions available for all patients. When you're on the campaign trail promising a painless increase in health-care access to those who currently fall through the cracks is popular and can be relatively harmless if you don't tie yourself to a specific policy; actually promising to implement a policy that is essentially a free lunch--we'll expand health-care access but in a way that doesn't change anything if you like your current set-up and is deficit neutral--is reckless negligence since there is obviously some promise that will not be kept.

Similarly on foreign policy Obama has translated campaign slogans into an incoherent set of policies that are guided by domestic political impulses, seemingly, rather than a cogent geopolitical strategy to advance American interests. Presidential visits to foreign countries have largely come to be an opportunity for highly public, self-flagellating contrition, a belated apologia for George Bush's foreign policy decisions whose diplomatic purpose is unclear at best: no powerful country's history is pretty, and Obama is both not responsible for Bush's decisions and his election represents the fact that the American people had come to reject Bush and his approach to foreign policy. This has meant that he has given speeches whose intended audiences might have thought portended policy changes that were not actually forthcoming. These were political apologies for domestic consumption, a fact that might have been lost, for instance, on Arabs who were initially wowed by the debonair, young, worldly President but who have now become impatient as his initially contrite words have not been mirrored by substantive changes in U.S. policy on Israel. Contrition towards Latin America for Yanqui imperialism, from Monroe to Bush II, apparently, might have pleased the MoveOn.org crowd but it has also emboldened Hugo Chavez and his disciples to no clear benefit to the U.S. Campaign promise rhetoric to support human rights here and abroad has resulted in spite-your-face domestic policies like very publicly rehashing America's unsavory interrogation methods like waterboarding, which again serve no clear purpose in advancing America's interests, while the two most clear cases of human rights violations in Obama's Administration ran afoul of political and pragmatic needs of the Administration. In China there was the need not to alienate our biggest creditor and most disturbingly the political need not to commit a Bush era taboo by demonizing Iran meant the President sat mute even while the Ayatollah's goons cracked skulls to rig an election.

So it was refreshing, after Obama's months-long deliberation over Afghanistan, for him to finally take a policy stance that will not be politically popular that seems basically motivated by embracing the best policy after weighing, realistically, the costs, benefits and interests that our nation prioritizes. Finally, here, is a break with his governing-as-campaign school of decision making. Committing to any policy decision in either direction in Afghanistan would seem to mean running aground his administration on some politically unfavorable island, but he made the correct decision nonetheless, even though it was the more politically toxic policy in the short-term as it angers his anti-war base and puts young Americans in harm's way in what could be a failed campaign.

Going forward with the recommendations from his military advisors and his centrist campaign rhetoric that the Afghan war was "the good war" and that additional troops should be deployed there will anger his progressive supporters--especially since President Obama faces a much more dire and deadly situation for American troops in Afghanistan than Candidate Obama. Taking the suggestions of people frankly less familiar with the situation on the ground than others like Generals McChrystal and Patraeus giving counsel to double down, exemplified by Joe Biden who suggested we might remove our ground troops and fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda essentially remotely, e.g. with drones and cruise missiles, seems like it would have been a completely unworkable strategy. While it might have been temporarily popular for bringing the troops home and certainly would have been sweet nectar to the anti-war left, it almost certainly would have failed so utterly in advancing American strategic interests that all but the most doctrinaire pacifists would eventually have been horrified: think of the ineffectiveness of the Clinton era campaign in the Balkans, except where the target was not Slobodan Milosevic but Osama bin Laden.

Finally, it seems, even though it came with some hedging in the form of a tentative timeline for withdrawal and a politically motivated statement that our troops would very likely start coming home in less than two years, Obama made a decision in the foreign policy realm that is unlike those he has taken on domestic policy. The key difference is that he has stepped up to the plate when none of the options were obviously or immediately good, a situation that the Administration seems to believe exists distressingly little of the time. At home he has not only passed up making hard decisions that would address problems that existed before he took office (wrangling with burgeoning Federal debt) but supported policies that would create new problems that will be kicked down the line to be addressed by some future President who will "inherit" an untenable imbalance of insufficient revenue to fund new growth in entitlement obligations and market distortions (ObamaCare and increased power for unions.) As I outlined above I believe that thus far his foreign policy has been similarly averse to tackling real, difficult problems that offer limited political benefit but has rather been limited to ineffective and largely rhetorical gestures that seem to function mainly as counterpoints to the Bush Administration as opposed to decisions that genuinely advance the U.S.'s interests.

Here, though, as Obama himself said, the status quo on the ground in Afghanistan is not tenable--not just politically, but in fact, regarding American strategic interests to beat back Islamic extremism in those places where it might take a safe haven to attack the U.S. again or to undermine a critical, hugely populous, nuclear-armed ally that faces a radical fringe that threatens to undermine its democratic government, such as it is. Obama's outlining of what our interests are, what the costs will be, and what is reasonably attainable with the military resources we have and can dedicate to this conflict was a perfectly rational way to arrive at the conclusion that the status quo of piecemeal deterioration of our counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan was fine, and frankly I have been astounded that this sort of frank, empirically guided decision making has been so utterly lacking in other spheres, where decisions have been taken for doctrinaire and partisan reasons.

The War on Terror is more important than health-care reform, and I am glad that President Obama has taken a rational approach to Afghanistan that was not guided by what will appease his base. That said, the current health-care reform bills could be hugely destructive and why such a frank accounting of unsustainable consequences, and a reasonable counterbalancing of costs and benefits is not so forthcoming. I think it's too late to hope for Obama to change course on health-care (although it's not too late to reasonably hope that a bill will not pass) and while I still think that drastically reducing Congressional Democrats power would be a very good thing for the country, as 9 painful years of experience have shown that political monopolization of the executive and legislative branches by either party is awful, Obama's Afghanistan policy is, essentially, the correct one.

Labels: obama, politics, war

It's been 8 years now since the singular tragedy where for the first time since Pearl Harbor a foreign attacker killed thousands of Americans in a sneak attack. For the first time since the War of 1812 an external force both visited this kind of carnage on the U.S. mainland and succeeded in destroying iconic symbols of our nation. The combination of the targeting of civilians, the scale of the attack and the modern history of the U.S. where even "total war" never extended to the home front all combined to make the events of that day sui generis.

At the time it seemed that we had reached a point unmoored from any traditional construct of history, foreign policy, even domestic politics. The end of the Cold War had led to a unipolar world where the U.S. and U.S. led international institutions like NATO, the IMF and the World Bank would take the lead and gradually the entire world would abandon liberal democratic values, centrist trade policies and open, mixed economies. The U.S. would maintain its military for rising threats such as China, a resurgent Russia, etc., but diplomacy would steer the world through an era of indefinite peace, where the flash-points would be amenable to negotiation like the disputes between India and Pakistan or China and Taiwan. If rogue regimes acted out broad international consensus would develop to set the situation right, such as during the First Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait. By 2000, the apparent peace dividend was such that even conventional domestic policies were changing in new ways. While Republicans had, since Reagan, abandoned their mantle as deficit hawks, the point was to permit tax cuts, not to expand social entitlements. George W. Bush, however, ran in a climate that's hard to remember now, where "compassionate conservatism" was an idea that at least the press treated with some seriousness (and which was embodied in No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D.) The biggest political issues at the time were whether the Federal Government would fund embryonic stem-cell research as well as the Education and Medicare initiatives; Google was filing a patent for its search algorithm; in the developed world less than 60% of people had cell phones, a figure being rapidly approached by the entire world's population. For me personally, as a 24 year old, 9/11 currently marks about 2/3 of the way into my life, and about half of my life that I consciously remember occurred before and after.

Just to try to define the epoch-making quality of the events of that day, consider the following: by a fluke of luck, an explosive laden van parked in a fortuitously strong point in the structure of the WTC parking garage, one of the towers destroyed on 9/11 escaped annihilation less than a decade before a different method would be successful in destroying it. The death toll from the first WTC attack was tiny in comparison to 9/11, but make no mistake, it was the placement, not the lack of energy in that bomb that made that event only a minor tragedy. In the interim between the attacks on the WTC, American government institutions were attacked in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen with at least a dozen American fatalities in each instance and in the U.S. In the pre-9/11 world direct attacks on U.S. institutions abroad--a troop barracks, two of our embassies and a warship--that killed nearly one hundred Americans and hundreds more citizens of other countries made less of an impression on the average citizen than an Islamist attack aimed at Australian vacationers at a nightclub in Bali that killed 4 Australians, 1 Japanese and 15 Indonesians.

Pearl Harbor is often thought of an analogue to 9/11, and in a very important sense that's true: a surprise attack killing thousands of Americans forced America into a struggle which it had thus far stayed out of. On the other hand the analogy is significantly flawed; World War II was a global military conflict and Washington was involved in providing the British materiel and was far from neutral, unknowing or unaffected before being drawn into the war; whether or not isolationism was a good policy was a subject of impassioned debate. People were arguing against going to war after one country had conquered or pacified virtually all of Continental Europe. On 9/11 the American people had little idea--unlike their attackers--of the geopolitical conflict that had been swirling for (depending who you ask) years, decades, or centuries of which the 9/11 attacks were a piece. Americans were vaguely aware of a history of assassinations and coups in the Islamic world, of the wars and negotiations between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution and subsequent hostage crisis, Iran-Contra and perhaps the Iran-Iraq War, the First Gulf War and perhaps our military presence in Saudi Arabia, but few had an intuitive feeling that these historical events were tied up in some arc, much less some over-arching struggle. Whether such a struggle exists is questionable, but on 9/11 it is clear that our attackers and their sympathizers who cheered in the streets of Arab cities were aware of it very acutely, whereas Americans generally were entirely oblivious.

These facts raise some pertinent questions about the two wars that we have embarked upon since the attacks. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable; while the hijackers were Arabs all but two were from the Arabian Peninsula proper, Al Qaeda has a return address in the incredibly extremist Taliban, the de facto government of Afghanistan at the time. Visiting military action upon the Taliban after it failed to hand over Bin Laden and continued to provide a haven for Al Qaeda was both justified and a political inevitability. However, conditions in Afghanistan at the time obscured the difficulty in imposing sustained military-imposed regime change (especially when a "democracy" must be installed) and this temporary appearance of success prevented us from asking hard questions about what we hoped to achieve by invading Afghanistan. On the surface, this might seem obvious: dismantle Al Qaeda by capturing or killing as many of its leaders and foot-soldiers as possible, and deny it a safe haven in Afghanistan by exterminating the Taliban.

This seemed plausibly easy; when we went in and invaded Afghanistan we did so by allying ourselves with an embattled alliance of ethnic majorities in a small redoubt in Northern Afghanistan--the Northern Alliance--and forging to the southeast. These warriors were in dire straits on 9/11: Less than a week before, Al Qaeda had succeeded in a long-term goal of assassinating their brilliant military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in a suicide bombing, and the coincidence in timing perhaps saved the alliance, as it was disintegrating in the wake of the assassination, rapidly decreasing territorial control, and a worsening military position. For them, the reaction of America was a god-send, and the initial reason why the war seemed such a success was due in large part to their help. Their soldiers, comprised mostly of Afghan ethnic minorities like Tajiks and Uzbeks, put an Afghan face on the initial and apparent destruction of the Taliban, reducing Western casualties, and creating less tension with local civilian population.

Being released from such a tyrannical regime also provided a backdrop of euphoria and optimism upon which the initial impressions of the Afghan campaign as "the good war" were built.

Almost all the benefits afforded us in Afghanistan were completely the opposite in Iraq. Instead of having a ready, indigenous force to do most of the fighting, the "shock and awe" and Humvees rolling up Highway 1 had the appearance of an invasion, not a liberation. While Saddam had been a monster, his wrath had been exercised in full on only a minority of the population. The regime was mainly secular and interested in political enemies, not infidels, and its intrusion into daily life, while evil and tyrannical, was far from the atavistic public executions of the Taliban. While the Shi'a and Kurds were in general probably genuinely glad to be freed from Saddam, the Sunnis probably were not, and even amongst those who disliked Saddam, the unknown of a U.S. military occupation was fraught with risk and must have seemed a grim prospect. While in Afghanistan only a handful of extremely religious Pashtuns presented a hard corps of Taliban "dead-enders," in Iraq a chaotic mix of Baathist holdouts, Sunni hard-liners soon to become allied with international jihadists, and Shi'a militias all provided ready candidates for insurgency and insurrection. Given these starting points, it's almost impossible to understand how 8 years on from the invasion of Afghanistan and 6 and a half years from the invasion of Iraq that soldiers in Afghanistan are now more than 10 times likely to be a combat casualty. Whatever our goal was in invading Iraq--the big lie of their regime posing some imminent threat to the U.S. having been exposed and their having no relation to 9/11--it seems at least plausible that we might extricate ourselves from that country in a situation where security will remain a major concern, but not immersed in civil war, and with a relatively stable regime (for the experiment of a Federalist system in a tribal, multi-factional Arab country.)

The fact that the war-like Pashtuns in the "tiger park" of the Hindu Kush are proving even more difficult to pacify is no surprise to any student of history. Where the British failed twice and the Soviets failed we seek success. But what is that success? Killing Osama Bin Laden? Dismantling the Al Qaeda? The Taliban?

The unfortunate fact is that while in Iraq we are fighting Arabs whose nationals did not attack us, in Afghanistan we are not attacking Arabs, unless they are foreign jihadists, at all. Bin Laden is a Saudi of Yemeni heritage, and the connections of radical Islam spread throughout the Islamic world. Bin Laden's previous patron was the half-Arab half-black-African nation of Sudan, and the Taliban--while made up of Pashtuns itself-- was in large part the creation of a radical faction of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, a body mostly made up of Punjabis who happen to be Muslms. These radical Islamists feel that (like most of Pakistan's army, probably) Pakistans interests are served by an anti-India neighbor in Afghanistan, a state of affairs ensured if they are radical Islamists like the Taliban.

What am I getting at? For all those who say that there is no battle with Islam, that is true, but unlike in World War II we are not fighting a single clique or political entity. Al Qaeda is more like a franchise--radical jihadist terrorism against the West--than it is a single group of individuals. There can be no equivalent to VE day when Bin Laden is killed or captured and the resistance melts away. So we must ask ourselves: what do we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan and Pakistan? I would argue that we are serving our strategic goal of protecting our country by continually disrupting Al Qaeda's ability to organize, organize people and money, because they're too busy scuttling from safehouse to safehouse. This open-ended conflict against a self-renewing, ideological opponent might seem like it parallels Vietnam. But there's a crucial difference: Vietnam, in hindsight, didn't matter. The domino theory was sort of correct... Laos and Cambodia became Communist, but those countries were of little strategic import and eventually doctrinaire Communism failed there and world-wide anyways.

Islamism is not going away and the Al Qaeda brand, given a home, will metastasize and give those who would slaughter each and every one of us a haven from which to plot that slaughter. The initial campaign in Afghanistan may have seemed like it was too easy, in retrospect, and now we are seeing what happens when a group of people who have been at war for damn near 40 years in a row now do when they feel the oppressive jackboot of an invading army--any invading army--and ideology plays a strong role in this too. Whether we like it or not we will face the threat of attack from those who do see history as a narrative where the West in general and America and Israel in particular are villains that have conspired to oppress and destroy Islam, and who in turn must be murdered. We can start rolling up the carpet in Iraq and Afghanistan, but before we do, we must understand this, and be ready to deal with the consequences of those decisions.


However, while we

Labels: politics, war