postscript: The BFO Awards

May 31, 2012-- 

Perhaps the most useful way to think of this brief comment is as a postscript to what I wrote yesterday. The media reports on Syria today are deeply disheartening––frustrating, really. The basic theme is the realization that the Annan plan has failed, no internal negotiations in Syria are likely to arise at this point, and that the country is tipping toward a sectarian civil war that will ramify into neighboring countries. Well, all I can say is that it sure took them long enough to figure this out.

An accompanying theme refers almost invariably to the lack of palatable U.S. options in the face of this growing crisis. What none of the commentary mentions is that we actually did have some options several months ago, before the crisis reached its current level of potential malignancy.  None of these options was foolproof or risk-free, but there were some (see my suggestion dating from March 6 in this space). The Obama Administration wasn’t interested, in my view more on the basis of narrow domestic political considerations than strategic myopia or cowardice. Once again the apparently unkillable idea that the use of force should always be a last resort, after diplomacy and economic coercion have been tried (even General Demsey is quoted to that effect in today’s New York Times, and he is much too smart not to know better) comes home to roost: Wait long enough in passivity, and many an international security problem will get worse, often to the point that both passivity and relatively painless responses become impossible.

By far the most embarrassing remark quoted in today's papers does not belong to Susan Rice. After all, she must say some of the strange things she says because she is our representative in Turtle Bay, unquestionably one of the strangest places on earth. No, the winner of today's most embarrassing remark is Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough. He is quoted in this morning's Washington Post as follows: “It is our belief--and evidence of this is mounting--that putting monitors into the country is simply not going to stop the violence.”

It is hard to beat that for an all-time super-duper award-winning BFO (blinding flash of the obvious). It's too bad there's no such award. Maybe somebody should invent one. Hey, maybe I just did.

Canceling Assad's Library Card

May  30, 2012 -- There’s an old Booth New Yorker cartoon showing an old man sitting in an armchair cackling while reading the newspaper, and back over his shoulder his wife says to a visitor something to the effect, “George has always enjoyed reading the morning paper, but lately it seems to be frequently accompanied by a graveyard laugh”—or something to that effect. I always thought this was a terrific cartoon, but only lately have I come personally to appreciate the old, curmudgeonly figure in the foreground. This morning’s papers are certainly no exception in their capacity to evoke cackling graveyard laughs from me—notwithstanding my exertions to avoid becoming curmudgeonly.

The Syria headlines, on the front page of both the Washington Post and the New York Times, focus on two developments: Kofi Annan’s meeting with Bashir al-Assad in Damascus, and the decision by the United States and ten other countries to expel Syrian diplomats from their capitals. Let’s take them in reverse order.

Just the other day in this space I wondered aloud what brand of fecklessness the Obama Administration would come up with next in order to maintain the appearance that it’s actually doing something. Now we know, and we did not take to wait long to find out. We have run out of Marxian metaphors to describe this sort of thing, having gone from tragedy to farce to the simply ridiculous so many times that vocabulary now fails us. So let me put it like so: Expelling Syrian diplomats at a time like this is a little like trying to influence a mad serial murderer by threatening to cancel his library card.

When I say “at a time like this”, I refer in part to the past weekend’s Houla massacre. But I also refer to the meeting yesterday between Annan and Assad. Assad stayed in role, denying completely that the Syrian government or Syrian military forces had anything to do with the massacre. Annan rejected Assad’s case, without directly calling him a liar. Diplomats don’t do that. Besides, it was not necessary. It’s important for those who are not experts on Syria and the Arabs to understand what is really going on at a meeting like this. Assad is deliberately lying to Annan’s face, and Annan knows it. Moreover, Assad knows that Annan knows it, and he does it anyway. That is why it is such fun. This is a form of humiliation directed at Annan and everything he stands for. Annan also knows that. In the standard private parlance of the region, I am making you the effeminized victim of a homosexual rape. Assad is essentially saying to Annan and indirectly to all those he represents and who hope for his success, “Sure, I’m lying to you. I’m teasing you. I’m humiliating you. So what are you going to do about it?”

Assad is speaking the language of a bully who has the upper hand, and in doing so he is using Annan to make a point to his own people, to wit:You can trust in the international community, so-called, to save you if you want, but all it will get you is a fresh crop of corpses.

Perhaps it would be instructive at this point to remind readers how Bashir Assad’s father Hafez used to diddle American and other Western diplomats back in the days. Stories could be told at length, but in the interests of the inherent lack of patience associated with the internet, I’ll try to be brief.

Back in 1974, after the dust had settled from the October 1973 Middle East War, U.S. diplomacy strove to separate the warring parties through what were called disengagement agreements. After agreements were reached first between Israel and Egypt and then between Israel and Syria, United States led an effort to convene a Geneva Summit to address the underlying causes of war and lay the basis for peace. In that pursuit, Henry Kissinger and his friend and aide Joseph Sisco made multiple trips to Damascus to lay the framework for the summit. When American diplomats would enter Hafez al-Assad’s presence in Damascus, he would regale them with the history of the Middle East from the day after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden until roughly the day before yesterday. This soliloquy took many hours, during which time tea was served without respite—but no bathroom breaks were allowed. The elder Assad could drink gallons and never even blink. Meanwhile Kissinger and Sisco were tightly crossing their knees and trying to keep their eyeballs from capsizing.

I don’t remember how many times Kissinger and Sisco made the trip to Damascus, but there were several. Sisco made many more trips on his own, and some of the stories he told me years ago, while truly insightful and hilarious, are too long to repeat here. In any event, after hundreds of man-hours of investment, agreement was finally reached on the nature of representation at the summit-to-be—how many delegates, how they were to be vetted by the other parties, the character of Palestinian representation and so forth—all basically shape-of-the-table issues. Then when we thought we had finally gotten all the preparatory ducks in a row, one day a few weeks thereafter—after having issued the formal invitation to the summit—Assad quietly informed Sisco that he had never had any intention in the first place of attending the summit. No one had to say out loud what this meant. We had been diddled, and the elder Assad had no doubt enjoyed himself enormously doing it.

Like father, like son? Not exactly. The father was much shrewder than the son, more appreciative of wit, and a lot less gratuitously murderous. (It used to be said of the leaders of the two wings of the Baath Party that Assad butchered his enemies with regret, and only when he needed to; Saddam Hussein actually enjoyed it and could barely restrain himself whether he saw a need for brutality, or even when he didn’t.)  The other difference is situational. Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s really did not have the upper hand, so he had to use skill to protect his weakness. Bashir al-Assad does have the upper hand right now in the face of American passivity, and so he can discount skill and simply have the sort of fun that bullies like to have. (I hope someone is bugging his private quarters, because the transcripts—if they ever exist in the public domain—are going to make for very interesting reading one day.)

In any event, let me repeat a point I have made several times before in this space: The Annan mission is worse than hopeless; it actually does net harm. It buys time for and provides a useful shill for regime propaganda and intimidation. As we have seen in recent weeks, too, the mere presence of UN observers in Syrian villages can be enough to catalyze violence, giving the regime a chance to kill more people than it otherwise might be able to.

Our government and our intellectual class are filled with people who repeat, mantra-like, the incantation that diplomacy is always superior to force, and that it anyway can do no harm. They appear to be genuinely incapable of understanding the strategic uses of insincere diplomacy by bad actors. I can imagine, I suppose, how young people could indulge this disastrous conceit, simply because they don’t yet have enough experience to know better. But it is truly beyond me how so many otherwise intelligent adults can do so, because this requires willful ignorance. Did every single one of them miss the high school lesson on Munich 1938?

The other big headline in the Washington Post—indeed, one that appears above the Syrian news: “Drone strikes spur backlash in Yemen.” Now just the other day I drew some attention to the potential downside of Predator strikes. I noted the possibility of political backlash, which the Post’s story corroborates so quickly and so perfectly that you might think someone over there read my piece. (Not likely.) Besides, we already have plenty of evidence of Predator political backlash from Pakistan, so the news from Yemen should not come as a surprise to anyone. As I noted the other day, sometimes political backlash is a price one has to pay, and one should want to pay, to ward off imminent danger of terrorist attacks against the United States. Is that the case here? I don’t know; I don’t read that kind of traffic anymore.

As it happens, yesterday’s New York Times carried a long feature storyon the Obama Administration’s approach to the war against al-Qaeda. I would be prepared to bet the rent that this story originated as a premeditated White House leak designed to once again use the New York Times as a platform in the President’s reelection campaign. The President comes across as cold-blooded, deliberative, completely in charge and more than ready to use force in the national interest. This is how the New York Times tries to help elect Democrats to the White House, by characterizing them as tough on national security.

Nevertheless, the story is not a complete softball. Aside from procedural details revealed for the first time about how the Administration conducts itself on these matters, some criticism of the Administration’s track record is noted presumably to give the appearance of balance. One criticism, associated in the article with the Secretary of State, is that the policy is much too short term and shallow in nature; it comes down to a kill list, with the technology having the general effect of pushing aside all other policy considerations. I credit this critique.

Another related criticism, this one associated with former DNI Dennis Blair, is that the administration is in a take-no-prisoners mode. Given the unexpected difficulties of closing GITMO, the President, with the accession of his Attorney General, prefers not to take bad guys alive. So he just pops them with Predators. The article points out that President Obama referred to the targeted killing of an American citizen in Yemen as “an easy call.” I agree with his judgment in this case about the late, unlamented Mr. Awlaki, but even though I am not a lawyer (and have never desired to be one) I can see that this had to be anything but an easy call from a due process perspective. Except, apparently, we now know that, as far as the lawyer-in-chief was concerned, it wasn’t.

And a third criticism, this one directly germane to the Post’s Yemen story, had to do with a CIA counting rule for civilian casualties. The story revealed that all males killed by Predator strikes, whether they are the actual high-value target of the operation or not, are counted as hostiles. The logic is that if you are an adult male in the general vicinity of a bunch of terrorists more or less out in the middle of nowhere, you are up to no good. This assumption keeps civilian casualties very low, which has all sorts of tactical bureaucratic uses.

There are many cases in which this CIA counting rule constitutes a reasonable assumption, it seems to me. On the other hand, I can imagine many situations in which it is not a reasonable assumption—and the nature of the Yemeni landscape and its social-spatial layout strikes me as being often in the latter category. In some ways the place is a lot like the mountainous zones of Afghanistan, and there is no question that we have inadvertently killed lots of innocent people there in pursuit of high-value (and not-so-high-value) targets.

The point of the Post story is that the kind of collateral damage we have caused is helping al-Qaeda recruit in Yemen. We kill bad guys but, by turning them into heroes, generate many more bad guys in the process. (One of Donald Rumsfeld’s most famous “snowflakes” zeroed in on just this dilemma back in 2003, but one would not expect the Post to make reference to it—and it didn’t.) In Yemen, a more purely tribal society than most other Arab countries, the specific dynamic here is that of the blood feud. Somebody kills one of your relatives—and it doesn’t matter a whit whether he is a terrorist or a bystander or something in between—and you are duty bound to take revenge. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula caters to that very deeply anchored social protocol. Of course it’s going to succeed under such circumstances.

Be that as it may, the more one knows about Yemen, the less impressive this argument becomes. A lot of these people don’t need a great deal of help to become radicals. There is plenty of killing going on in the country without the assistance of the United States, and the potential for plenty of blood feuds to get started and to thrive. Yemenis live in the poorest country in the Arab world. It is a country running out of water, with the highest live birth rate, highest infant mortality rate, and highest female illiteracy rate in the region—and in some cases possibly in the world. Yemen is not just a potential failed state; it is an incipiently failed civilization. This is going to send people, any people, to and over the edge. If a bunch of errant Predator strikes doesn’t cause it, something else will.

Of course, I’m not saying that the U.S. military’s killing innocent people in Yemen is always okay as long as a couple of actual bad guys get popped in the process. That’s a judgment call. Sometimes it is okay, and sometimes it’s not. We now know, thanks to the New York Times, that in at least a third of the cases in Yemen, the President himself makes the call. He has been willing to take personal moral responsibility. I find that admirable, to a point. But of course the Post did not draw the obvious analog—that of President Johnson picking individual bombing targets during the Vietnam War, for precisely the same reason that President Obama is picking bombing targets now—because that would not have been flattering to the President. You can compare Obama to JFK or FDR; but, please, not to LBJ.

But really, folks, is there anything about any of this that is flattering? War is dreadful. Possibly the only thing worse is surrender, rampaging cowardice and ignominy. You know, like the Administration’s Syria policy.

Third Time Not a Charm

May 28, 2012-   In recent weeks I have twice written in this space of the Obama Administration’s efforts to cover up its politically motivated spinelessness over Syria with efforts to make it seem like it’s doing something constructive. Using the New York Times as its very willing channel, it first tried to crow over its closer cooperation with the Syrian opposition, and then more recently about the alleged linkage between the Eager Lion exercise in Jordan and concern over the disposition of Syria’s chemical warfare stocks. Now it has turned the same trick a third time, but with a significant twist.

Sunday’s New York Times revealed the Obama White House’s new tack. Since the Annan peace plan has clearly failed, the Administration is now hoping on the Russians to deliver a “Yemeni variant” wherein the Russians talk Assad into leaving, while other senior officials in the government remain to work out a transition with the opposition. Apparently, the President raised this possibility personally with Prime Minister Medvedev, and Medvedev didn’t say “no” (as if what Medvedev thinks and says matters in the slightest on such subjects).

What’s the twist to which I referred above? While the other two recent feints at seriousness at least carry the scent of plausibility, this one is—how to put this?—downright ridiculous, stupid as a board really. Tom Donilon and his NSC Middle East helpers really dropped the ball this time to let the President make such an ass out of himself.

So what’s the matter with this idea? What isn’t?

Let’s just start with the fact, borrowed from the former silliness in thinking the Russian-supported Annan Plan might actually work, that the success of what is a U.S. policy depends on Russia. It is true that Assad may have become a liability for the Russians in recent months, but that hardly means they’re about to dump him to do us a favor. Anything the United States Government wants in world affairs ipso facto becomes in Vladimir Putin’s mind something the Russian government automatically strives to deny. Unless, of course, it can exact a hugely disproportional price from the United States—now what might that be? Something to do with missile defense in Europe maybe? Again? Obama has already shown the Russians that he’ll sell the new NATO allies down the river just to hear a pleasant rendition of “Midnight in Moscow.” So why not an encore? Boy, the Russians sure have a good reason to like re-sets, where we make concessions and they do essentially nothing in return they would not have done anyway in their own interests.

But in this case, I think there’s no deal in the offing. The Russians are not going to lift a finger to harm Assad. If they have a motive even to seem to seriously discuss a Yemeni Variant, it’s just to buy more time for Assad, whose “mopping up” campaign against the rebellion recently included the Houla massacre—the story featured right next to “U.S. Hopes Assad Can Be Eased Out With Russia’s Aid”, right there on the front page of Sunday’s paper. (How embarrassing, if the Administration has the wit about it even to be embarrassed.)

But the real problem with the idea is the extent to which it reflects a complete misunderstanding of the Syrian regime and situation, not to speak, probably, of a complete misunderstanding of Yemen. Over many decades now U.S diplomacy in the Middle East has stumbled for failure to understand the differences and rivalries within the region. To the senior guys in Washington, from the Eisenhower Administration all the way to the current one, they all look alike. One can almost hear the mellifluous voice of Spiro Agnew coming from the grave, as it were: “When you’ve seen one messed up Arab country, you’ve seen ‘em all.”

In Syria, the minoritarian Alawi regime is fighting for its life—literally. The opposition is mainly Sunni, who for centuries prefaced their pronunciation of the adjective “Alawi” with the modifier “filthy.” They don’t like each other. There are no regime elements that could carry on without the Assad clan, especially not after the systematic mass murders of recent months. Most of the non-Assad related or associated by marriage members of the elite are also Alawi, and of the rest very few are Sunnis. Gone are the days when lunatic flacks like former Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas held senior positions in Syria.

In Yemen, by contrast, the leadership competition is tribal and clan-shaped in nature, not sectarian. The former President and the present transitional one and the next one too, I’d be prepared to bet—all Sunnis. There are some very interesting sectarian cleavages in Yemen, to be sure; they just don’t for the time being involve the leadership echelon.

Seeing Syria as ripe for a Yemeni-like transition is a little like expecting a pumpkin blossom ultimately to produce an eggplant. Ain’t gonna happen.

This is not esoteric or arcane knowledge. I taught a Middle East intro course in the winter term to a bunch of University of California-system 19- and 20-year olds. When the course began, most of the students did not even know where Syria and Yemen were. By the time the term ended every single one of them was capable of making the basic distinction between Syrian and Yemeni politics that I just explained. If they can do it, why can’t the President of the United States and his NSC staff do it?


Only toward the very end of the NYT article, in the 18th out of its 20 paragraphs, do the authors—Helene Cooper and Mark Landler—allow the thought that “The biggest problem with the Yemen model, several experts said, is that Yemen and Syria are starkly different countries.” Well, thanks very much for getting around to that.

I can hardly wait to learn what the Administration will trot out next in its Syria policy. Maybe an attempt to put some new life in NASA by proposing to send Bashir al-Assad to the moon, all expenses paid—on a Russian launch vehicle.

Chess, Anyone?

May 23, 2012 -- It used to be, I think, that the vast majority of strategists and statesmen played chess, or in non-Western cultures some comparably complex game that required players to anticipate what their opponents might do in an extended sequence of moves. This was good training for the real world. If you read in the history of diplomacy, you can find many excellent examples of careful statecraft resembling what we may call sequence assessment. (A masterful and also quite brief description of the phenomenon, as seen by a social scientist, may be found in Erving Goffman’s little-known 1969 book Strategic Interaction.) One can also find examples of hotheads going off half cocked, usually to their and everyone else’s regret. Big mistakes make big news historically. But my sense is that responsible individuals, who made up the vast majority a century and two ago, generally understood the difficulty of their task, and worked at it in a fairly disciplined fashion.

Now consider some recent events in that light. For several years now the United States has been using Predator drones to attack terrorist and insurgency targets in several countries. We hear most about Pakistan, but we have also been doing this sort of thing in Yemen––especially recently––and elsewhere.  From a strictly military point of view these strikes have been effective. As many observers have pointed out, however, their broader political impact over time is harder to measure, given the political blowback potential of such methods. And as a few observers have warned, once this technology gets loose there is nothing to prevent very nasty folks, state and non-state actors alike, from attacking American and allied targets with armed drones. What goes around comes around, indeed.

The Predator issue is a subset of a larger concern about technology designed and produced by the United States and other advanced allied countries eventually trickling down, one way or another, into the inventories of other nations. The anti-access and denial dilemma that has arisen in recent years, particularly with regard to the U.S. military being able to access bases in allied countries in Asia in a crisis, is the larger and more significant case in point. The general phenomenon describes a race in which we need to not only maintain a technological lead, but be able through that lead to defend against our own stuff one or two developmental generations removed in the hands of adversaries. This is not as easy as all that to do, especially when the challenge is taken to be an afterthought.

Note, too, that just last week the press carried stories about EU forces attacking Somali pirate bases with helicopters. The European troops never set foot on Somali soil, and apparently they did not kill anyone––just destroyed some boats used in the Somali piracy enterprise. I was surprised to read about this, for two reasons. The first reason is that it is a rare occasion when the Euroweenies manage to gird themselves up to do anything more than talk, unless we have first pounded on their heads and necks to rouse them into a kinetic mood. The second reason is that the operation struck me as dangerous. I hope that the European decision-makers who ordered this assault thought through what Somali pirates might do in response. They are not exactly helpless; they have a few options.

I am not squeamish about the use of military force when there is good reason for it, but I am leery of the way force has been used in recent times—not least in Afghanistan, and we’ll come back to that in a moment. But as to the piracy business, let me tell a brief story, if I may.

When I was ship-riding the U.S.S. Boxer last year, and the U.S.S. Farragut the year before that, the question of our ROEs (rules of engagement) in dealing with piracy came up in my conversations with several soldiers, sailors and marines. I was at first stunned, to be perfectly honest, with how restrictive our ROEs were.

One sailor, who of course I will not name, described having a Somali pirate square in his sights from the deck of an American DDG––and this was a pirate who had clearly been involved in a very recent assault on a ship––but was told not to shoot. The rule was that U.S. personnel could only shoot at pirates to defend themselves, which meant in practice if the pirate was aiming a weapon at them. If the pirate turned his body a few degrees away from an American target, even if he had been shooting at it just two minutes earlier, U.S. military personnel were not allowed to fire. Others in uniform nodded, and the general sense was that these restrictions were frustratingly unreasonable. Why send out anti-piracy patrols, they waxed rhetorical, without a set of engagement rules enabling the patrols to cause the pirates pain?

Well, that is what we want our warriors to say. But a talk with their superior officers, which apparently reflected the views of their civilian superiors, yielded another perspective. We could escalate the conflict with piracy, and we could win it at least temporarily if we wanted to, but at what price? The kind of piracy the Somalis were practicing amounted to an irritant, not a strategic threat. To try to extirpate the problem threatened to raise all kinds of political, legal and literal costs that might not be worth paying. Hence the extremely limited rules of engagement.  

So in that light I wonder if the West European decision-makers who ordered the attack on those boats really thought through the possibility that in future Somali pirates might decide to sink a few ships instead of merely hold them for ransom, and to kill several people instead of holding them all hostage. (Of course, Somali pirates did kill some Americans, and paid the price for doing so—but we’re still wondering if something we did catalyzed their behavior…..it might have.)  Perhaps they did think it through over in Brussels, and are ready for the next possible and likely sequence of moves. If so, good for them (and us). And perhaps not. We’re bound to find out sooner or later.

Which brings me back to Yemen. Just a few days ago a horrific bombing in the capital, Sana, killed ninety people and injured scores more. Most of the dead were Yemeni military personnel, and the target of the apparently al-Qaeda attack was clearly a military facility. Given the accelerated pace of attack against anti-regime forces in the country in recent weeks, the bombing was clearly a payback.

(It was, by the way, also not terrorism if by terrorism we stick to the proper definition: random attacks against civilians aimed at spreading fear and, yes, terror. Attacks against uniformed military personnel do not fit this definition. Such attacks are acts of insurgent warfare, not terrorism, even if they are perpetrated by people who also engage in terrorism. It is important to keep this distinction clearly in mind, lest we allow nefarious others to spin the meaning of the word for their own purposes. It is plainly not true that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, but our conflation of acts of war with acts of terrorism makes that falsehood seem plausible. This is why the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor, and the October 1983 attacks on U.S. troops in Lebanon, were not and should never have been described as acts of terrorism. Alas, some of us lose our verbal composure when we get upset. You can lose a rook like that, or even your queen.)

To get back to Sana, it’s simply not a good idea to start a fight, or to accelerate a fight, that you are not prepared to win it. If our right hand, along with that of our Yemeni associates, is going to rev up attacks against jihadi militants there, our left hand needs to be raised in anticipatory defense against the likely-to-inevitable reaction. For that to happen we need our brain to be working. So you see the problem. Big organizations of all kinds sometimes have trouble engaging their brain to properly oversee distributed standard operating procedures.

In the Yemeni case we have every reason to believe that threats against us are brewing. We need to preempt them if we can. So I am not arguing for quiescence, and certainly I am not arguing for a 21^st-century version of graduated response. If it were possible to pre-emptorily clobber the bad guys senseless and really finish the matter, great––I’d be first in line to say “let’s do it.” I doubt, however, that the strategic equivalent of a knockout punch exists in a situation where insurgency is so deeply embedded in social/tribal realities. 

All I’m pointing out here is that we need to think through the various contingencies that may arise as a result of our actions before we undertake them. I am not entirely confident that we do this these days on both a regular and serious basis. Maybe we’re playing too little chess and too many video games where, when you get whacked, you just dial up another game and quickly put ignominy in the rear-view mirror.

Obviously, there are tough calls in this business. Most of the important ones are tough. And since it is never possible to know for sure what the unfurling future will bring, a very good case for letting the urgent drive out the eventual is not hard to make. That is why it is a completely false argument to say, for example, that U.S. support for Afghan mujahedin against the Red Army in Afghanistan was a bad idea because it eventually created 9/11. It did no such thing in any way that any reasonable person could have anticipated in the early 1980s. Al-Qaeda did not exist when that decision was made, Osama bin-Laden did not base himself in Afghanistan until 1996, and anyway the frequent journalistic assertion (or assumption) that the mujahidin then and the Taliban a la 2001 and now are one and the same is complete nonsense.

Still, the point remains: Don’t jump off the diving board until you’ve checked to make sure there’s water in the pool. And so let us continue, in closing for today, with a few words about contemporary Afghanistan.

This past weekend’s Chicago NATO Summit was all about agreeing on a plan to withdraw combat forces from Afghanistan. That will happen, as best we can tell, by the summer of next year. In advance of the summit the United States signed a complex agreement with the government of Afghanistan that appears to keep us in close association for many years to come, but exactly what it says and means isn’t entirely clear. Nonetheless, the impression the Obama Administration wants to convey is that it is acting in a deliberate and responsible manner to end the war––or at least American participation in it––after accomplishing many, if not all, of our goals. No one can blame the Administration for wanting and trying to do this: If it preserves American reputational capital, it’s the right thing to do. I hope lots of people all over world swallow the hook, the line, the sinker, and for that matter the entire canoe.

But I don’t. One reason I don’t is that the entire enterprise of responsible U.S. and allied withdrawal depends on the fiction that the Afghan National Army and police are capable of defending regime in Kabul from its enemies. (And it is a fiction—see the September/October 2011 TAI essay by Alim Remtullah if you really want to understand why.)

It seems to me that there are two kinds of people in our government and military who believe this fiction, or pretend to. The first kind are those whose jobs it is to make this work, mostly soldiers who have been trying their hardest to train Afghan soldiers and police over many years. What a lot of people who have never worked in government seem oblivious to is that when it is your job to make the policy work, it usually leaves scales on your eyes. You can be so deep in the details of your day-to-day responsibilities that you are unable to discern broader patterns. 

I think the nation-building (really state–building, to be precise) mission in Afghanistan has been utopian lunacy from the start; it's something we never should have started....never should have jumped off the diving board. It is impossible to create a modern functioning democracy, let alone a liberal one of Western provenance, in a place where there is not and never has been even a modern state. It's foolish to have willed the end with no solid idea in mind of how to will the means. But my heart goes out to those who have tried to make this crazy policy work. That is what I meant a moment ago when I said that it pains me that our decision-makers sometimes fail to think through the consequences of what they set in motion, because it is the guys on the ground––the very best our country has to offer––who often end up paying the price.

The other kind of people who believe in the prowess of the ANA and the Afghan police are those for whom it is simply convenient to believe it, because it hopefully affords us that famed “decent interval” of Frank Snepp Vietnam fame. Last Saturday the New York Times carried a front-page feature on how Barack Obama’s view of Afghanistan allegedly changed over time from a war of necessity to something a whole lot less than that. It was a plausible tale except for just one thing:  It never mentioned politics.  

According to the article, written by the consummate pro David Sanger, Obama changed his mind when he realized how hard, how expensive and how long achieving the military’s goals would really be. All I can say is that if it took Barack Obama a year or more to realize this, then he is not nearly as smart as some people think he is—either that or he really wasn’t paying much attention to this “war of necessity” before his Inauguration Day.

I have a somewhat different interpretation of what has happened. I think Senator Barack Obama understood very well that to be elected President he had to pick a war to support. Democrats seen to be soft on national security don’t get elected; Obama knew that, just like everyone else (except, of course, those geniuses in the Democratic Party who nominated people like Michael Dukakis and John Kerry). Since Obama obviously could not pick Iraq, that left Afghanistan, which perforce became the war of necessity.

But when the military and its civilian adjuncts could not do the impossible there, and the war became both unpopular and a political liability, Obama turned on a dime to dissociate himself from the effort. That, Mr. Sanger, is when he discovered what a tough deal Afghanistan really was—some coincidence, huh?

Frankly, I’m glad he did because, as I said, this was a fool’s errand to start with if ever there was one. And since Obama himself had changed the mission in 2009 to make the military’s task even more impossible (I realize that for anything to be “more impossible” is logically impossible––relax, it’s just a figure of speech….), it’s only right that he be the one to change course. But I don’t believe for a minute that the President’s behavior can be described strictly in the strategic tense; political calculation drips from every pore of this policy.  Barack Obama may indeed be playing a kind of chess, but it’s a match that seems to me to have only a little to do with U.S. foreign policy and national security concerns.

The only problem with how Obama has played the game thus far is that he’s now ceded the initiative to a select group of top Taliban commanders. He has to hope that his decent interval lasts at least until early November. Since we’re not withdrawing beyond a point of no return until after the election, this hope can be backed by combat force if need be. But if the appearance of a responsible and orderly withdrawal is foiled by aggressive and successful Taliban tactics this summer and into the fall—or if the Karzai regime implodes for any number of imaginable reasons—then the President is going to have a real problem on his hands. With just a little luck, these guys could drain the pool while the Administration is in mid-swan dive. 

So don’t touch that dial, friends; I’m going to keep a watchful eye on this for you.

Aren't We All Just So Gay?

May 21, 2012 -- Sitting down on a rainy Monday morning trying to collect one’s thoughts about the weekend’s media fest can be a challenging task. There is so much in the newspapers, and yet so little. One hardly knows where to start. But I'll start with a brief offhand observation about sex.

Just about everybody enjoys sex––thinking about it or remembering it, if not actually doing it. This has been true for a really long time, probably since before newspapers even existed.  Starting maybe a century or so ago––I'm being vague on purpose here––it became fashionable to talk and write and read about sex, as well. Lately, however, in America's prestige press––and most particularly in the New York Times––the sexual obsession d‘jour is homosexuality--thinking about it, remembering it, talking about it, writing about it, reading about it, and, one gathers, given half a chance, doing it.

The New York Times Magazine, in particular, has been beating on this theme for years. But so has the newspaper itself. Saturday's front page featured an article about a contrite psychiatrist who had the temerity about a decade ago to suggest that therapy might be available for those who did not wish to be or to remain homosexuals. Apparently, for one reason or another, this octogenarian doctor recently decided to apologize for his supposed offense.  I don't know why; there are all sorts of oddball therapies available for all sorts of maladies, real and imagined, and no one uses a political correctness sledgehammer to pound on them.  The way the New York Times reports the story––and it does so at great length––reminds one of a medieval passion play in that there is only one possible correct way to tell the story, and no hint of any other way is present. It is a way that makes clear that any suggestion, ever, that homosexuality is deviant or in any way undesirable is not only inadmissible, but qualifies as unalloyed evil.

Thanks to the unceasing and highly single-minded effort over the past several decades of those I call homonoids, homosexuality in its various aspects is now virtually the only subject about which one cannot have a normal critical discussion in the United States. Maybe there are a few others––like whether the genetic characteristics of groups might influence aspects of behavior. But those who are paranoid about the implications of truly open discussion—hence the term homonoids--and who for psychological reasons sometimes believe that homosexuals are actually superior to heterosexuals (I doubt most homonoids would object to a proposed therapy that would enable heterosexuals to become homosexuals) have made ordinary critical discussion, at least in public forums, completely impossible--and that in turn tends to encourage extreme views on both poles.  Not good.  

We are used to this from the New York Times. One learns to ignore it. But then yesterday's Washington Post featured on its front page a story about a transgendered child, reported, as in the Times, at great length. Is the Post trying to compete for the “alternative” neo-prurience market? I hope not.

Let me clarify one issue here and complete the thought with one general observation. First, I am not “homophobic.“ I am not afraid of homosexuality anymore than I am afraid of encountering someone's vomit. Mild disgust is not the same as fear. Some of my best friends..... you get the point.

Moreover, I could not care less what consenting adults do with their genitals in private, nor do I think anyone's civil or legal rights should be jeopardized or limited just because some people reveal their atypical sexual proclivities in public. But the obsessing of the press about this is just unseemly, just as promiscuous behavior and sexual obsession of all kinds is unseemly.

And now, for the promised general observation: The United States is in a mess. Our political system is dysfunctional, our political economy is febrile, and our leadership class seems not to have the first idea what to do about it. We must invest vastly more in education, science and technology, and infrastructure, and we must do it wisely and urgently.  We must address energy and environmental issues as the highest of priorities. We’ve got to get serious about the real sources of escalating medical care costs, about reforming our unaffordable entitlements programs, and more besides. At the same time, we must find a way to keep our books in order, and to fine-tune the federal government so that it stops doing too many things badly and start doing fewer critical things well. We’ll never get a handle on the clientalist and rentier behaviors that are sapping our politics unless we reduce the size of the public trough from which lobbyists and special pleaders come to feed.

And amid these urgent exigencies, what do some of our prestige newspapers choose to perseverate about? So-called culture war issues that have not a thing to do with the crisis we are in. This is sort of troubling. After all, what we should expect of benefit to the common weal from at least a significant shard of an intellectual and literary elite that seems to enjoy nothing better than talking publicly about their private parts? This is embarrassing. Large numbers of intelligent people around the world (I exclude Western Europe here) think we’ve lost our minds. Do you have any idea now President Obama’s statement on “gay marriage” went over in Muslim-majority societies, and what it did for the image of the United States in those places? (But that’s a story for another time.)

I know many people feel very strongly about abortion rights and gay marriage and surrogate parenthood and so on down the list, and they have every right to. But everybody else has to understand that these issues are completely peripheral to the challenges our country now faces. We really don't have time for this stuff, which is why in my presidential platform––which I will reveal once more in a few weeks, as I do every four years––I propose that all culture war issues be demoted by mutual agreement from the national/federal level, and that states and local communities manage these sensitive matters in the context of community standards, just as they used to do a few decades ago.

No, this is hardly a perfect solution. (Nor is it even remotely likely to happen, I am well aware.) Everyone understands that local politics can be as mean-spirited and as imbued with know-nothing proclivities as any other kind of politics. But if we don't get these extremely emotional, polarizing and insoluble-on-principle issues out of our national politics, it will make doing the things we need to do that much harder. Alas, we won't, and they will.