PPI Senior Fellow Mike Signer has written a piece in Dissent magazine on Irving Kristol, his son, Bill, and the morphing of neoconservatism from an ideology of skepticism to one of hubris. An excerpt:
NEOCONSERVATISM, AS formulated by Irving Kristol, originated in privation, intellectual combat, and a reckoning with the harsh practical consequences of dangerous ideas. Irving Kristol’s parents were Eastern Europeans who arrived in America in the 1890s. His father was a garment worker and later a clothing subcontractor; his mother gave birth to Irving in Brooklyn in 1920. When he was sixteen years old, he enrolled at the City College of New York (CCNY). Instead of paying much attention to classes, however, he dove into the extempore debate among the students.
The 1930s were a fervent time to be a student at CCNY. Fascism was taking hold in Italy, and communism was surging in the Soviet Union. The sometimes cheerful, sometimes angry clashes among students who were trying to decide where the world should go at this momentous period helped to launch an intellectual movement that was skeptical about the applications of pure theory.
Though it took decades for it to become “neoconservatism,” the roots of the movement lay in the young intellectuals’ effort to steer America away from the shoals of Stalinism, the horrible outgrowth of what had begun, decades earlier, as an ambitious political theory. This may help explain why Irving Kristol’s own political theory, for all its lushness and bombast, often counseled caution and modesty. In a lecture he gave in 1970, he pronounced that “moral earnestness and intellectual sobriety” were the “elements . . . most wanted in a democracy.” Strikingly, he applied this ethic of restraint to democracy itself. In 1978, he wrote, “It is the fundamental fallacy of American foreign policy to believe, in face of the evidence, that all peoples, everywhere, are immediately ‘entitled’ to a liberal constitutional government—and a thoroughly democratic one at that.”
By contrast, in the years to come his son fixed neoconservative foreign policy on abstractions and evils—on metaphysics rather than physics—particularly when it came to democracy. As a result, the striking feature of Bill Kristol’s political theory is not the ideas but the extravagance surrounding them. In a now-famous 1996 Foreign Affairsarticle co-authored with Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol wrote that Republicans should endorse a policy of “benevolent hegemony” that was “good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world.” “America,” he added, “has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world’s monsters, most of which can be found without much searching.”
On December 1st and 2nd, Code Pink sponsored 18 anti-Afghanistan-escalation rallies across the country. Says Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans in the press release:
Adding troops will lead to more civilian casualties which will lead to more recruits for the Taliban [sic] — and a protracted war that the American people don’t support. This is not the “hope” so many voted for.
But that rhetoric doesn’t jive with what Ms. Evans and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said following their week-long trip to Afghanistan this fall (which I wrote about here). While she said Code Pink would go on opposing additional troops, Ms. Benjamin made a surprising shift at the end of her fact-finding mission:
We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline. That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left, the country would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.
So even though Code Pink has been on the ground in Afghanistan and heard from Afghans themselves of the U.S. military’s tangible benefit to Afghan civil society, it chose to intensify its opposition against the U.S. military presence with a series of rallies.
Well, you can’t have it both ways — either you think U.S. troops are protecting the population (as the McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy is designed to do, and which Code Pink acknowledged was the case at the end of their fact-finding mission) or you think U.S. troops will cause more casualties (which they claim in this week’s press release). Of course, if Code Pink endorsed so much as an extended timeline for troop withdrawal, it would drive its core constituency into a meltdown.
At the very least, it might have shown some restraint and not convened 18 protests. This could have been an opportunity for Code Pink to use its high profile and the knowledge its founders gained during their time on the ground in Afghanistan to educate its supporters on America’s mission there. But that’s not Code Pink. Instead, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin passed on that chance and stuck their heads in the sand.
NEWS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 2, 2009
CONTACT:
Steven Chlapecka – schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931
or Frankie Strum – frankie@trumanproject.org, T: 309.222.5788
WASHINGTON, DC—In a conference call on December 2, six leading progressive organizations came together to offer support for and commentary on President Obama’s newly announced Afghanistan strategy. Representatives from the Truman National Security Project, the Center for American Progress, the Progressive Policy Institute, the National Security Network, Third Way, and the New Strategic Security Initiative spoke on the call, offering thoughts and answering questions.
Points highlighted in the call include:
The Obama administration’s review produced a smarter, stronger strategy that stated clear objectives and is based on American security interests, namely preventing terrorist attacks.
The administration’s review process honored America’s commitment to maintaining civilian control of the military in a democratic society. General McChrystal’s plan was war-gamed, challenged, and debated by military and civilian officials alike. Only then did the commander in chief sign on.
Counterintuitively, sending more troops will allow us to get out more quickly. A build up of troops now will enable us to train Afghan forces more quickly, and thereby disengage U.S. forces sooner.
Only Afghans can win this war – the U.S. can help, largely through training. Afghanistan had no army when the U.S. arrived eight years ago. Now the Afghan National Army numbers nearly 100,000 troops, partners on 90 percent of NATO’s missions and undertakes 60 percent of their missions solo. But they cannot be trained without trainers and cannot “partner” without partners.
Progressives who care about the humanitarian cost of war should be relieved; the alternative to this strategy is a “counter-terror” approach that will use more drone attacks and claim more civilian lives.
U.S. commitment to Afghanistan is broader than military resources. We also need to take advantage of this unique moment to talk about security as a comprehensive effort — one that must be led by civilians and will require an Afghan political solution.
Afghanistan is not Iraq and it is not Vietnam. There are lessons we can draw from those conflicts, but the shape and purpose of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is of a wholly different nature.
If there was a missed opportunity in President Obama’s speech, it’s that he didn’t fully express a way forward in America’s relationship with Pakistan.
Afghanistan is far from a nation-building or an empire-building exercise, as indicated by the timeline the President set out for beginning to bring troops home.
For further questions or inquiries, please contact Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931 (office), 202.556.1752 (cell).
President Obama’s speech last night was — to state the obvious — a tough one to give. Just think of the many constituencies the president had to address: not only the American public, but the military who have been in need of some direction, the Democratic base, terminally cranky Republicans, the Karzai government, the Pakistani government, and Bozo the Clown to boot. No one constituency would be fully pleased.
We all know that President Obama gives a wonderfully inspiring speech. I had a hunch that this address would not fall into that category. Rather than inspiring the public to work towards a distant American nirvana (as he did in the March 2008 Philadelphia race speech), West Point was more of a sales job.
With all that in mind, I was looking for the president to discuss five major topics:
1. Make a case for why we were in Afghanistan.
2. Explain our forces’ mission.
3. Address how he would work with the Karzai government.
4. Clearly outline the strategy for Pakistan.
5. State his interpretation of an exit strategy.
To put a “grade” on it, I’d give the president 3.5/5. Here’s why.
First, I thought he made a compelling case reminding Americans of why we’re there. He spent the first several paragraphs going over the history of what led us to this point. That’s been the toughest issue for much of hard left to grapple with — America has clear national security interests in Afghanistan, and it is unfortunate, but necessary, to enact a robust strategy to ensure the country’s safety.
It’s a rationale that has been so difficult for some to accept. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills says:
[Obama] said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one.
But it’s not a dumb war. It’s a necessary one, and I struggle to understand why Mr. Wills has become so disenchanted with President Obama over this decision when even he acknowledges that the president campaigned pledging a “larger commitment” to Afghanistan. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Second, I didn’t think the president went far enough in explaining the counter-insurgency strategy that American forces would be undertaking. To me, he missed an opportunity to explain that our forces are there to promote peace by protecting the Afghan population from the Taliban. So only half a point there.
Third, I was impressed with the president’s emphasis on working with and around the Karzai government. His particular emphasis on “Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders” indicated the White House’s recognition that bypassing Kabul is an effective part to regional development across the whole country. A full point from me.
Fourth, the Pakistan strategy was certainly mentioned, if not emphasized, as one of the pathways to a successful disengagement. Sure, as the president said, we will “strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear.”Yes, we know it’s necessary, but I have a nagging sense that the “how” hasn’t been worked out yet. The White House’s overture on a comprehensive partnership deal with Pakistan is encouraging, but only part of the solution – a half-point.
Ah, and finally, that exit strategy. I would have preferred that our exit from Afghanistan be measured in terms of progress, not calendar dates, which merits a half-point deduction. I think David Ignatius came very close to summing up my feelings:
Obama thinks that setting deadlines will force the Afghans to get their act together at last. That strikes me as the most dubious premise of his strategy. He is telling his adversary that he will start leaving on a certain date, and telling his ally to be ready to take over then, or else. That’s the weak link in an otherwise admirable decision — the idea that we strengthen our hand by announcing in advance that we plan to fold it.
For a speech that was sure to please no one entirely, I thought it was a brave attempt at explaining a tough, unpopular, but ultimately correct decision.
Not even Michael Moore can accuse President Obama of rushing into war. He has taken two months to make a decision that seems dictated by the inescapable logic of his assessment of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity.”
To Dick Cheney, such deliberation is — surprise — a sign of weakness. After eight years of war, however, most Americans are probably relieved to have to a president who thinks long and hard before sending more U.S. troops into battle. That’s doubtless true as well of our NATO allies, who also will be asked to commit more troops despite widespread skepticism of the war in Europe.
Had Cheney and President Bush kept their sights on Afghanistan, Obama wouldn’t be in this fix. Perhaps the former vice president is carping because he doesn’t care to explain this week’s report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It recounts how the Bush-Cheney administration refused to commit the forces necessary to prevent Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, then bottled up in the Tora Bora mountains, from escaping across the border into Pakistan in 2001.
In any case, having thoroughly analyzed the multilayered complexities of the Af-Pak situation, President Obama now has a difficult sales job to perform. He must persuade war-weary Americans to back a second round of escalation — 34,000 more troops on top of the 30,000 he already has dispatched to Afghanistan. In essence, his message will be: we need to get in deeper to get out sooner.
He’s right. U.S. military commanders say more troops are necessary to stop Taliban advances, especially in southeastern Afghanistan. We also need more troops to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces. In his speech tonight, Obama is expected to stress that the purpose of his surge is not to defeat the Taliban, but to buy time for building up Afghan security forces so that they can take over the fight. He will emphasize the conditional nature of America’s commitment — conditioned on the Afghan government’s ability to win popular backing and legitimacy by fighting corruption, offering services, and providing security.
At the same time, Obama must convey a sense of strategic stamina. He must convince our friends as well as our enemies in the region that the U.S. is not planning to walk away from the struggle against Islamist extremism.
It will take time to build up strong Afghan forces, to help the central government become more effective, to reconcile with local tribal leaders in Pashtun areas, to build roads, schools, and other basic infrastructure. So even as the U.S. hands off responsibility to Afghans and draws down its combat troops, we must signal our enduring commitment to help the country defend itself against our mutual enemies. The Taliban and their al Qaeda allies need to know they will not be able to simply wait for us to tire of the struggle and go home.
And Pakistan needs to know this, too. If it looks like the U.S. is once again abandoning Afghanistan, the Pakistani military and intelligence service will be tempted to go back to their old bad habit of using the Afghan Taliban and other radical groups as foreign policy tools. By turning up the pressure in southern Afghanistan, Washington will be in a stronger position to insist that Pakistan keep pressing the Taliban on their side of the border, and flush al Qaeda leaders out of their havens.
No one needs reminding that patience is a virtue more than the president’s own party. Already, some leading Congressional Democrats are demanding what no president can responsibly offer — clear exit strategies and precise timelines for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
America has a vital interest in ensuring that Islamist extremists don’t seize power in Afghanistan — and, even more important, in Pakistan. No one knows when this struggle will end, but the stakes for our security are such that they call for the same constancy and resolve America displayed during the Cold War.
Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal responded to my post from last week on the strategic deliberations in Afghanistan. See here for his initial post and here for my response.
While there’s much in Michael’s post I disagree with on a substantive level (like his odd suggestion that “we want al Qaeda in Afghanistan.” Really?), my main beef is on a macro level, when he states that your friends here at the PPI continue “to reflect a perspective that has driven some dangerous foreign policy thinking in the Democratic Party in recent years…. Aren’t the days of ‘Democrats need to be as militaristic as the Republicans’ behind us?”
Michael is implying that I am mindlessly supporting President Obama’s reported escalation in Afghanistan out of a fear that Democrats will look weak on matters of national security.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In no way am I “as militaristic as the Republicans,” nor am I engaging in militarism for militarism’s sake. That’s ridiculous. My position boils down to what I think is essential to keeping the country safe. (On that note, Michael will no doubt re-raise the pre-invasion debate on Iraq, which I’m happy to deal with in a separate post.)
Here’s what it comes down to: Democrats can’t shirk the responsibility of making difficult choices on national security because of political expediency. It is easy to say, “We’re sick of being in Afghanistan, we’re sick of American soldiers dying, we have been al Qaeda-free since 2001, and all the poll numbers say Americans want out, so why don’t we just pack it in?”
But based on my analysis of the existing evidence, I firmly believe that America has ongoing national security interests in Af-Pak, and what the president will announce tonight offers the best possibility (of many imperfect choices) to permanently secure the country against a patient and resilient adversary. That might not be the popular or easy choice, but it’s the necessary one.
Michael would likely argue that he sees little compelling evidence to suggest an ongoing national security interest, or that there may be one, but it can be contained with a significantly smaller military footprint.
I’d disagree, of course, and so would President Obama, who has had far superior information on the subject than either of us, and whose campaign and governance to date hardly suggest a leader intent on duping the country into more unneeded military misadventures.
Berlin the city is bracing for its first winter snows, but Berlin the seat of government is in the middle of a storm of a very different type.
On Sept. 4, a German military commander near Kunduz, Afghanistan called in a NATO air strike against two stolen German tanker trucks, allegedly unaware that hundreds of civilians had gathered around them. The resulting attacks left as many as 150 dead, but the Merkel government, then in the thick of its reelection campaign, said the casualties were a tragic but unavoidable mistake, and the issue was largely irrelevant on election day.
Since then, the civilian leadership of the military has shifted — Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung moved to the labor ministry, while Economics Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg took over the defense post. Jung left the spotlight, and zu Guttenberg immediately called the attack “militarily appropriate.” Everything seemed calm, for a few weeks.
But new evidence shows that Jung may have known of at least some civilian casualties only hours after the attacks. Even worse, the leading daily paper in Cologne, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, reported that the Merkel government had internally determined before the election that the attack was not actually necessary, but had kept its assessment secret.
The new reports have led to Jung’s resignation, on Friday, as well as the sacking of two top defense ministry officials by zu Guttenberg. Merkel’s team now says it is “reassessing” the situation. But it’s unlikely to be enough: The parliamentary opposition, particularly the hard left, has been looking for an anti-war foothold for years, and the unfolding scandal is an excellent chance to step up its attacks on Merkel and zu Guttenberg, whom some see as a potential future chancellor candidate.
It’s important not to blow the scandal out of proportion. The German public response has been muted, in large part because no German soldiers died in the incident. For all its cultural differences, the public’s calculus for tolerating the violence of war is the same as in the U.S.: all death is tragic, but even civilian deaths overseas, at the hands of German troops, are unlikely to change the mood dramatically.
Indeed, one of the more salient aspects of the attacks is the discovery that German overseas aggression, long the bogeyman of German culture, is no longer such a big deal among the public. Germans are unlikely to accept, say, permanent bases or unilateral declarations of war anytime soon, but the Kunduz Affair shows that these days they are much less idiosyncratic in their attitudes toward war than the world has long believed.
Which isn’t to say that the scandal will have no effect. Given the conservatives’ hold on parliament, it is unlikely to disrupt their planned re-approval of the Afghan deployment next month. But it will make it harder to significantly increase troop deployments next year, something zu Guttenberg has hinted he will pursue in the coming months. Which is bad news for the United States and NATO, both of which are clamoring for more contributions from alliance members.
It sure sounds bad, right? Conservatives are crowing that this is the result of President Obama’s weak-kneed, liberal “appeasement policy.” But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how exerting real pressure on Iran (with Russian and Chinese support no less) somehow amounts to appeasement.
Don’t get too upset by Iran’s brinksmanship just yet. Dr. Rebecca Johnson, editor of Disarmament Diplomacy, brings us all down a notch:
The idea that they have the economic wherewithal to build and get these [plants] functioning in a short space of time is nonsense. It’s bravado; it’s braggadocio.
That’s why this is all part of the negotiating dance. Its steps are something like this: The international community, stronger now than ever with Moscow and Beijing on board, squeezes Iran. Iran, beginning to sense that it has been backed into a corner, lashes out with wide-ranging threats. Then, everyone calms down and the real talk begins.
The Iranians know the score, too. Buried beneath the headlines was this revealing quote from Kazem Jalali, spokesman for the parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, who left the door open for more talks: “We have options ranging from complete and full cooperation to leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty on our table.”
Of course, negotiations may ultimately bear little fruit, but that judgment certainly can’t be made yet. Until the diplomatic shimmy-shake really gets swinging, cool resolve and patience are in order.
Listening to the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” while sitting in a restaurant in Pristina, the capital of the disputed Republic of Kosovo, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hit me that Kosovo is an underplayed success story of nation-building. From an oppressed corner of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kosovo has turned into a vibrant society. It has its share of problems, like all the other countries in the Balkans, but it has established itself as a case study for how Western democracies can work with a Muslim-majority country.
The fruits of this engagement were seen in the local elections held in Kosovo on November 15, the first held by Kosovo since it declared independence in February 2008. With the help of the Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), I was able to participate as an observer of the elections, up in the northern part of Kosovo. We were able to watch the elections from both sides of the Ibar River, the de facto dividing line between the Serb- and Albanian-controlled parts of Kosovo.
At the polling centers we went to in Mitrovica south of the river and in the town of Vushtrria, staffers conscious of the historic nature of the vote were more than eager to show us around. The major (Albanian) parties all had representatives at just about every station, who followed the election closely. And the aftermath of the election was like it is for most elections around the world — political negotiating behind closed doors. Like elsewhere, democracy works as far as it goes.
Still a House Divided
The key words in Kosovo, however, are “as far as it goes.” It doesn’t go up to the Serb-majority area in the north. As dusk started to gather in Mitrovica, we headed north of the Ibar into the Serb-majority areas. Polling stations were supposed to open, but the Kosovo Election Commission had left them closed in most locations out of safety concerns. Gangs of “Bridge Watchers” milled around election sites — Serbians who watched who crossed the bridges across the Ibar and pelted rocks on those with Kosovo plates. (Hence our choice of a rental Land Rover with neutral Macedonian plates.) A temporary polling center was run literally out of the trunk of a car at the “invisible border” between Serb and Albanian areas by a Brit and an Aussie – but no one showed up.
We drove up to Bistricë e Shalës, an enclave of 200 Albanians in the otherwise exclusively Serb Leposavić municipality. The last part of the drive to Bistricë was a five-mile ordeal on a dirt road over a mountain and down into a nestled valley. You could see why Serbs had failed to drive Albanians out of the location during the 1999 war — which made it all the more impressive that the Election Commission had a polling station set up, complete with party and NGO observers. But with Serbs in the north boycotting the election, all 146 votes for mayor cast in the nearly 20,000-person municipality came from that station. The most immediate issue the Mayor-elect of Leposavić faces is the fact that over 99 percent of his electorate doesn’t recognize his mandate.
The government of Kosovo has made strides towards solving this problem. A big step in the process is redistricting, creating new, Serb-majority municipalities to give the Serb minority more clout and buy-in to the process. While that has yet to make headway in parts of Kosovo that border Serbia, like Leposavić, it has worked in enclaves like Gračanica, home of a famous Orthodox monastery and over 10,000 Serbs. Despite Belgrade’s entreaties to boycott the Kosovo election, turnout in these enclaves was reputed to be around 30 percent, which compares favorably with Serb turnout for Belgrade-organized parallel elections last year. Mitrovica is scheduled to have similar, Pristina-organized elections next summer after a Serb-majority municipality is established there.
But the solution to Kosovo’s relationship with Serbia is a tough one. Over the local Peja beer the night before the election, one observer familiar with both Serbia and Kosovo asked: “Why would the Serbs want it?” noting that Kosovo’s GDP per capita was less than one-third the rest of Yugoslavia’s 20 years ago. Certainly the beauty and cultural heritage of the Serb monasteries of Gračanica, Dečan, and Peć pull at Serbian heartstrings. But Belgrade’s lament that Kosovo is the heart of Serbia is met with the rejoinder that that heart beats in a foreign body. With Albanians numbering over 80 percent of Kosovo’s population a decade ago, and outnumbering Serbs in the country 10-to-1 now, Serbian claims need to be measured against the reality on the ground.
From a cynical perspective, Kosovo is an opportunity for Serbia — a small, poor Eastern European country — to get the focused attention of the U.S. and the EU. The foreign minister of Serbia, the young Vuk Jeremić, would be an unknown back-bencher if not for boosting his career by insisting on the indivisibility of Serbia and Kosovo. Both the president and prime minister of Serbia, considered strongly in favor of Serbian membership of the EU, would be tarred and feathered were they to publicly consider Kosovo anything short of an integral part of Serbia. As such, normalized relations will not come as long as this generation of politicians is in office in Belgrade.
Small Steps
A solution will have to come with the next generation. After visiting Bistricë, we went into the Serb part of Leposavić and met with an example of what that solution to the Kosovo problem will be. Savo is a Kosovo Serb who grew up in Leposavić and commutes into Mitrovica every day to go to school. A talented musician who, like most 18-year-old guys, has a fondness for Metallica and Green Day, Savo hopes to study music at the local university in Mitrovica. Over peach slivovica he and his brother home-brew, Savo explained that his parents consider themselves strictly Serbs. But, when asked, Savo conceded that he considered himself both Serbian and Kosovar. He was in fact dating an Albanian girl he met through a political awareness program NDI is sponsoring to integrate teens from both ethnic groups in Mitrovica. It’s this kind of incremental embrace of the opportunities in Kosovo — the opportunities that 30 percent of Serbs in smaller enclaves grasped when they went out to vote — that will lead to a solution that both Serbia and Kosovo can live with.
But it’s a long road to get there. Helping both sides get down that road will be the carrot of accession to the EU. Both Serbia and Kosovo are part of the Western Balkan vacuum that exists within the European Union’s sphere. While Serbia is a full-on participant in the Stabilization and Association Process (SAA) that precedes EU accession, Kosovo has been part of the Stabilization Tracking Mechanism (which seems to be all the steps of the SAA, without the promise of EU candidacy at the end), with five of the 27 EU members, notably Greece and Spain, not recognizing its independence yet. Getting Serbia to the bargaining table with Kosovo as a prerequisite for EU accession would be a powerful motivator, much as the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia was willing to talk to its Turkish counterpart before Cyprus’ EU accession in 2004.
For its part, Kosovo has so far been be willing to adhere to diplomatic niceties to assuage Serbia. The government in Pristina might want to consider another step of suggesting the exchange of “High Commissioners” with Belgrade. Taking a cue from the United Kingdom’s decolonization process in the 1950s and 1960s, such a move would acknowledge the special relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, allow Serbia to save face by not having to immediately accept a Kosovar ambassador, and — most importantly — give both countries a formal channel of communication to address their mutual concerns.
After dusk we went back to the Albanian part of Mitrovica to a school on the west side housing the biggest polling station in the city. As the clock ticked past seven o’clock and the polls closed, the polling station chairman asked for the door to the spartan classroom closed. I watched as polling officials, party representatives, and an observer from a local NGO gathered around the teacher’s desk. Opening the Election Commission’s booklet of directives, the chair began reading out loud the instructions.
As they went through the process the chair ordered one of the polling officials to retrieve the box of sealed disputed ballots to begin counting. A party official objected, saying that he interpreted the rules differently, and counting should proceed in a slightly different manner. After a couple of minutes of discussion, in which all had their say, the polling chair conceded the point, and ballots began to be counted. In that little corner of Kosovo, 500 miles behind the Iron Curtain that had lifted 20 years earlier, democracy slowly went to work.
McClatchy is reporting that the Obama administration has decided on a strategy that will involve sending at least 34,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. At present, this is a single-source story coming from at least two anonymous “U.S. officials” and has yet to be confirmed by the White House.
Separately, the Washington Posthas reported that an announcement will be made “within days,” possibly in a prime-time address to the nation next Tuesday, December 1.
If the initial report proves to be true (and after all the leaks thus far in this process, it may not be), it’s unfortunate that the headline focused on the raw number of boots on the ground. The Obama administration’s primary objective has been to formulate and enact a strategy, and then resource it properly.
Though there has not been news of which strategy the Obama administration will embrace, the reported 34,000 troops strongly suggests that it will adopt many of the strategic recommendations offered in Gen. McChrystal’s August counterinsurgency (COIN) plan. Strategy sessions in the White House may have refined McChrystal’s plan by focusing the COIN on 10-to-12 major population centers and Ambassador Eikenberry’s last-minute objections have clarified the administration’s exit strategy, but 34,000 more forces would endorse the meat and potatoes of McChrystal’s strategic outline.
Here at the PPI, we understand the American public’s weariness and skepticism at this announcement. After eight years of war, many wonder why more progress hasn’t been made, and how many more American lives must be sacrificed. It’s a tough choice, but if this initial report proves to be true, we stand with the president in his decision to adopt much of Gen. McChyrstal’s strategy as the best choice to offer definitive and lasting security to the country.
The general’s plan is hardly a guaranteed success, but it offers the highest possibility of permanently denying al Qaeda the safe haven only the Taliban can provide in a difficult and complex operating environment. It also shows that the U.S. is committed to being a partner with the Afghan people against the Taliban, one of the most vile groups imaginable. They are fanatical ideologues who deny women basic rights and have been bent on enforcing a draconian interpretation of sharia law.
Even though it seems counterintuitive, it is our firm belief that adopting McChrystal’s plan now is likely to stabilize Afghanistan faster and ultimately permit American forces to come home sooner than if we remained strategically rudderless. Think of it this way: if al Qaeda somehow regroups and executes another mass-casualty attack against the U.S., then we’re essentially back to square one, deciding anew how many more troops to send.
Any announcement of troop levels is likely to send shockwaves through the Democratic Congressional caucus. The President will certainly have to make the rounds on the Hill to quell any impending revolt (including a possible war-tax). However, as Will Marshall and I have reminded Democrats, it’s crucial that they support President Obama’s decision:
Whatever course he chooses, the President will need his party’s understanding and support to succeed. If Democrats fall out over Afghanistan, he won’t be able to sustain a coherent policy, and the public will likely lose confidence in the party’s ability to manage the nation’s security.
Competence in national security is part of being a full-spectrum governing party, and failure to protect the country would be a key indictment against Democrats.
For all those reasons, if this initial report proves true, we welcome the president’s steadfast resolve and reasoned decision-making on this crucial national security issue.
Over at Democracy Arsenal, Michael Cohen — with whom I spent an interesting, accidental 48 hours in Dubai trying to get to Afghanistan as election monitors — attempts to place American foreign policy in context:
Sometimes it’s worth putting American foreign policy — and the military decisions we have made and continue to make since 9/11 — in a proper and sobering context.
Eight years and two months since America was attacked on September 11th, and 3,000 Americans were killed, the United States has approximately 168,000 soldiers stationed in two Muslim counties. In neither of these countries is there any al Qaeda presence — and there has not been any such presence since 2002. Indeed, since the fall of 2001, al Qaeda has not launched a single major attack on U.S. targets or the U.S. mainland.
Yet, instead of having a national debate on how we got ourselves into such a bizarre and pointless predicament — and squandered so many lives and so many billions of dollars in the process — the current debate in Washington is focused on how many more troops we will send into harm’s way to pursue an enemy that is down to about 200 core operatives.
Do you ever get the queasy feeling sometimes that somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is having a bit of a chuckle about this?
But Michael’s “proper…context” leaves out too much. And the irony is that I have to engage Michael on the topic he wants to debate – “how we got ourselves into such a bizarre and pointless predicament” – in order to explain why he’s missing the point.
Michael seems preoccupied with wanting to debate the past, but it’s the past – the Bush administration’s extraordinary mismanagement and poor decision-making – that compels the Obama White House to revisit discussion of strategy and resources in the first place.
Michael and I had a heated discussion about all this in a cab in Dubai, and here’s the point we’ve differed on: Al Qaeda has not attacked the U.S. since 2001 due to a variety of factors, but al Qaeda’s current weakness is, I contend, temporary, and if the Obama administration fails to choose the most effective strategy (and match it with the sufficient military and civilian resources), the group could rejuvenate itself in the Afghan hinterland.
So, when the time comes and we feel confident that the large-scale terrorist threat to the U.S. is definitively a thing of the past, then we can have the debate Michael wants. In the meantime, a debate over troops and strategy in Afghanistan seems exactly the kind of discussion we should be having.
Lorelei Kelly at the New Strategic Security Initiative issues a thoughtful challenge to progressives over at the Huffington Post:
If progressives really want to help forward the policy discussion, they should develop a set of alternatives premised on enduring commitment and solidarity with the Afghan people (local grants through the National Solidarity Program is a good example), and not pose them as a tradeoff for troop levels. Heck, even the commanding general in Afghanistan says this conflict has no military solution. Take that and run with it. But doing so means exercising forbearance when talking about the military presence. Uniforms are going to be part of the picture for a while. What the alliance is actually doing on the ground will determine the outcome. Tactics are already changing. But prioritizing civilians will mean that soldiers bear more of the risk.
We need to come to terms with that.
Any success must also include a significant shift in resources and coordination to make sure Afghans actually receive support to own their future. This kind of partnered consultation can start despite Karzai in office. The Afghan people know who isn’t corrupt. We need to go national and local at the same time because promising upstarts exist at both levels. The goal is a process — and so will be tough to measure, which is why a commitment is important. All sorts of policies here at home provide illustrations. From building the national highway system to public education, broadly distributed achievement through time take time. The laser-focused message the Afghan people need to hear is “we’re on this path with you.” We need to commit.
[…]
The president will put forward his decision soon. It will involve a troop increase. If progressives stay in full opposition mode, they will exist on the margin of the debate right when we need them setting the agenda. Exit to the sidelines will also undercut future efforts to advocate a new strategy for U.S. security. We are moving from a time when we could contain threats to one where we must minimize them. This can only happen through sustained engagement.
The progressive community would do well to consider Lorelei’s words before blindly opposing a troop increase. Even Code Pink has recognized the need for engagement and moderated its position. After all, America’s military is in Afghanistan to protect the Afghan population and promote peace. Those are progressive values.
Yesterday, I railed on Joe Lieberman for convening a witch hunt over the Ft. Hood shootings. One man’s witch hunt is another’s “responsible statesmanship,” per Jamie Kirchick over at TNR’s The Plank. He makes two points:
Given the gravity of this incident and the potential for future such attacks, it makes eminent sense that such a hearing would occur, in order to find out how such clear and visible signals of impending danger were ignored by the Army hierarchy….It’s not “Going Rogue.” It’s responsible statesmanship.
The point Jamie misses is that though the Army’s performance evaluations clearly indicated that Nidal Hasan was a very poor psychiatrist (so poor that, as NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling’s excellent reporting indicates, Hasan’s boss had at least one discussion about the possibility of discharging him) with significant other problems, Lieberman’s witch hunt will be unable to find “clear and visible signs of impending danger.”
Why? Based on the evidence, the red flags just weren’t there. Only in hindsight could you connect Hasan’s questionable, disturbed past with a propensity for extreme violence. I worked at the Navy’s internal criminal investigation agency (NCIS), which examines threats to crimes against the Navy and Marine Corps. If I had to make a decision on resource allocation to the Hasan case one month ago based on what we know, I would have recommended no additional surveillance and that his file be reviewed perhaps six months down the road.
The Pentagon’s internal reviews are better equipped than Lieberman’s hearings to comb through the Army bureaucracy and propose mechanisms to address sub-standard performers with probable mental fragility. That said, even that investigative process can hardly be a guarantee of preventing another Ft. Hood.
The Washington Independent reports that Lieberman has determined that Ft. Hood was a “terrorist” attack, and that he has called Hasan a “lone wolf.” That’s subtle code for the controversial provision in the USA Patriot Act that allows the FBI to eavesdrop on individual “terrorists” who plot without outside assistance. The provision was removed in a recent House mark up in part because the Justice Department had a hard time making the case it was actually necessary. The constant invocation of Hasan as a “lone wolf” – which the Independent’s Daphne Eviatar argues actually doesn’t fit Hasan – could well serve as a pretext for re-authorizing the provision, and suggest some clues into Lieberman’s motives.
But that’s all speculative. At the very least, Lieberman should allow the military and FBI investigations to be completed before jumping in with his own highly public process. Leaping in front of the cameras to assign blame for Ft. Hood before the formal probes have concluded seems like something a politician, not a statesman, would do.
Pop quiz, hot shot: Who are Jean-Claude Juncker and Herman Van Rompuy?
If you answered, “Two guys I met studying abroad in Florence my sophomore year,” you’d be close…but wrong. And according to the BBC, you wouldn’t be alone in your ignorance — a smattering of man-in-the-street interviews produced hardly better results.
Mr. Juncker and Mr. Van Rompuy are the prime ministers of Luxembourg and Belgium, respectively (and if you trivia buffs need some extra ammo to entertain Aunt Betty around the dinner table on Turkey Day: Juncker, in power since 1995, is the longest serving head of state in Europe). Both are in the running for the post of EU President, a new position created by the European Union when Ireland, the Czech Republic, and Poland finally ratified the Lisbon Treaty over the last several weeks.
The treaty’s backers argue that Europe has long-needed to speak with one voice on the world stage, thus the desire for a permanent president. Up to now, the EU has had a rather ridiculous six-month rotating presidential term, filled by the EU’s member states’ leaders. It’s a thankless job — at 27 members, there are only a handful of issues that truly unite Europe’s political classes. And some — like the Iraq war — are so divisive that they tear at the very fabric of European integration.
In most free and democratic countries, major offices are chosen by the electorate. Oddly, the first EU president won’t be. Tonight, the EU’s 27 heads of state will lock themselves in a room, dine on the continent’s finest delicacies, sip (or slosh, if you’re one Mr. S. Berlusconi) its most prized wines, and pick one of their peers to hold the post. All without a campaign poster in sight, or a public debate to be had. That’s right — Europe’s first president will be chosen in the manner of Popes and politburos, not democracies. With no hope for this presidency, let’s hope the next one is chosen by the voters. After all, the EU’s parliamentarians are.
Tony Blair is also in the running for the post, but don’t expect him to get it. When 27 extraordinarily powerful men and women sit down to choose someone to be — in one convoluted sense, anyway — their boss, they aren’t likely to pick a charismatic home-run hitter. A quiet, controllable technocrat from Luxembourg or Belgium like Juncker or Van Rompuy is much more likely.
That tactic could backfire — look at Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki. He was chosen in 2005 as a compromise candidate by ethnic powerbrokers; weak at first, al-Maliki has grown to be the most assertive force in Iraqi politics. But then again, don’t count on it in Europe — megalomaniacs like Nicolas Sarkozy aren’t eager to be outshone by the new prez.
Two cases in point: Michele Rhee, Washington, D.C.’s blunt public schools Chancellor and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Yesterday, Rhee told a gathering of CEOs that the District suffers from a “complete and utter lack of accountability in this system.” That’s likely to intensify the flak she’s already taking from the teachers’ union, which is apoplectic about her decision to lay off 250 subpar teachers, and from the City Council, which sees her as insufficiently deferential on matters of school reform.
But Rhee was unapologetic. “Collaboration and consensus-building are quite frankly overrated in my mind,” she told the executives. “None of you CEOs run your companies by committee, so why should we run a school district by committee?”
It’s a good question, though such characteristic bluntness probably won’t lengthen her tenure as chancellor. Rhee is adamant about putting the needs of Washington’s public school children, who are overwhelmingly poor and minority, above the interests of adults in the District’s political-educational complex who resist fundamental changes in a system that’s manifestly failing.
On measures of student performance, the District ranks 51st among the states and near the bottom of nation’s biggest metropolitan regions. In weeding out teachers on the basis of job performance rather than seniority, Rhee has hit a verysensitivenerve. She’s saying, in effect, that public education in the District isn’t a jobs program for city residents. Let’s hope she goes on making waves.
Here’s Rhee at yesterday’s event:
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton created a flap in Pakistan recently when she had the temerity to note that Osama bin Laden and his top al Qaeda henchmen have been living in that country since 2002.
The Pakistani press, ever alert for signs of U.S. encroachment on that nation’s sovereignty, went ballistic. Foreign policy mandarins sagely opined that the U.S. secretary of state had committed a clear breach of diplomatic protocol by embarrassing her hosts.
Well, they should be embarrassed. The presence of America’s terrorist enemies in Pakistan should be a besetting sore point in U.S.-Pakistani relations. It signifies either governmental incompetence or, worse, collusion. And with the Pakistani Army now clearing Taliban havens in South Waziristan, which it formerly regarded as no-go territory, the question of why the nation’s intelligence and security forces can’t locate our enemies only grows more insistent.
Pakistani officials reportedly are pushing back hard on U.S. suggestions that they go into North Waziristan next. It’s the home base for the notoriously thuggish Haqqani network, which is responsible for a wave of kidnapping and terrorist attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.
All this suggests that Pakistan, set to receive about $7 billion in U.S. aid, remains a strangely reluctant partner in the struggle against extremists who threaten Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S.
The White House reportedly is upset with Clinton for her occasional outbursts of candor. Let’s hope they don’t fit the muzzle too tightly.
It seems like just yesterday — to surge or not to surge?
If you’re thinking it was just yesterday, then you’ve got the wrong major American military deployment. Not Afghanistan, but Iraq. What a difference a year makes — at the heart of the presidential campaign debate on national security in 2008, Iraq has all but faded from public discussion.
So, to review: Earlier this month, the Iraqi parliament passed an election law for the January 18, 2010, parliamentary vote. The law theoretically resolved a handful of outstanding yet crucial issues that were needed to facilitate the vote, even though the U.N.’s man in Baghdad says pulling off the election by January would be a “herculean task.” Just today Iraqi President Jalad Talibani again threw the January poll in doubt by insisting, perhaps on behalf of his Sunni veep, that minority and refugee Iraqis needed greater representation in parliament.
The election is the last major hurdle to a U.S. military withdrawal at the end of 2010 (save 40,000-50,000 American troops for training and counterterrorism operations). Failure to conduct a legitimate election — and more importantly, to have the loser accept the results without resorting to more violence — could potentially re-escalate sectarian strife as Iraq’s deep political wounds along ethnic lines would be ripped open again.
Addressing and resolving the parties’ various complaints about the election law will be a major issue over the next few days. Watch this space.
If you believe Tom Ricks’ analysis (and in this case, I happen to) there’s a good chance that violence in 2010 — at least against Iraq’s civilian population if not American military forces — will be the highest it has been in several years. Anecdotalevidence suggests that one-off attacks are on the rise, with the occasional massive bombing like the August attack against the Iraqi Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Finance that killed some 155 people. Groups proclaiming themselves to be al Qaeda in Iraq — though probably composed of Saddam’s Ba’ath party loyalists — have claimed responsibility in several instances.
The good news? Even though they carry the “al Qaeda” brand, they’re not intent on or capable of an attack on the U.S. mainland.
The bad news? They could be a major destabilizing force in Iraq for years to come, because the U.S. military has pulled back from cities and towns — as stipulated in the Status of Forces Agreement — and is now in a supportive role to Baghdad’s forces, which seem none-too-hurried to ask for American help. What’s more, the cash used to flip the Sunni Sons of Iraq to cooperate with Iraqi/American forces has dried up as the task of distributing payment has fallen to the Iraqi government.
Or, to cut all this down to a nice, tidy phrase used by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction’s (SIGIR’s) quarterly report from October 2009: “The security picture in Iraq remains mixed.”
As for reconstruction itself, SIGIR points to several positive developments in oil infrastructure development, but nothing will be really resolved until a comprehensive revenue-sharing agreement among the Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds for hydrocarbons is passed.
That’s a ton to chew over. Here’s what I think all this means: If the election is held come January and the Iraqi security forces are able to at least contain violence, then the U.S. will able to stick to the plan. American troops will be substantially reduced from 120,000 to 50,000 by the end of 2010. This is no small feat and there are a few major hurdles before it happens. However, if it does happen, allow me to bastardize a Churchillian phrase and say it would represent the beginning of the end.
The key words in Kosovo, however, are “as far as it goes.” It doesn’t go up to the Serb-majority area in the north. As dusk started to gather in Mitrovica, we headed north of the Ibar into the Serb-majority areas. Polling stations were supposed to open, but the Kosovo Election Commission had left them closed in most locations out of safety concerns. Gangs of “Bridge Watchers” milled around election sites — Serbians who watched who crossed the bridges across the Ibar and pelted rocks on those with Kosovo plates. (Hence our choice of a rental Land Rover with neutral Macedonian plates.) A temporary polling center was run literally out of the trunk of a car at the “invisible border” between Serb and Albanian areas by a Brit and an Aussie – but no one showed up.
But it’s a long road to get there. Helping both sides get down that road will be the carrot of accession to the EU. Both Serbia and Kosovo are part of the Western Balkan vacuum that exists within the European Union’s sphere. While Serbia is a full-on participant in the Stabilization and Association Process (SAA) that precedes EU accession, Kosovo has been part of the Stabilization Tracking Mechanism (which seems to be all the steps of the SAA, without the promise of EU candidacy at the end), with five of the 27 EU members, notably Greece and Spain, not recognizing its independence yet. Getting Serbia to the bargaining table with Kosovo as a prerequisite for EU accession would be a powerful motivator, much as the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia was willing to talk to its Turkish counterpart before Cyprus’ EU accession in 2004.