War of Choice?

[Zack]

Is our open-ended occupation of Afghanistan a good strategic decision? I thought that I was alone in the view that it was not, but Stephen Walt seems to agree with me.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/...afe_haven_myth

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/20/safe_haven_2_a_response_to_peter_bergen

I don't see how we expect to completely eliminate safe havens inside Afghanistan after we leave, particularly in light of some of the more dismal assessments of the war. In addition, many of the safe havens are across the border in Pakistan, safe for the most part from Afghan forces, and our own ground troops. It doesn't seem plausible that we will successfully eliminate all of these havens in the region, much less across the globe. This also assumes that if the Taliban were to regain power in Afghanistan (a proposition I am skeptical of anyhow) it doesn't necessarily or even likely follow that they will invite al-Qaeda to set up shop in their country, or even if they did, that it would in any meaningful way improve al-Qaeda's capabilities. The Taliban itself is not a ideologically homogeneous entity, and is furthermore not as global in its aspirations as al-Qaeda is. The camps that were in Afghanistan taught small unit tactics for the most part, which did not play any role in the attacks on American soil. The knowledge necessary to make explosives is also not in any way related to our success or failure in Afghanistan. Bombings targeted at Westerners do not seem to be at all related to the existence of safe havens.

Our presence in Afghanistan seems to have the opposite effect of what we intend. Removed from its state as a "vital national interest" the blood and treasure we have and are expending to try to defeat the insurgency and stabilize the government seems wasted. I, like Walt, do not find the moral argument compelling, nor would I expect the Congress or American people to be willing to expend enormous resources on something that is not necessary, and probably hurts our security in the short term.

[Abu Suleyman]

The flaw with Walt, as is so often the case, is that he fundamentally believes that most states, and indeed most organizations are merely security seeking, that is to say that all they really want is to keep on doing what they are doing without interference. Although he does not explicitly state so in these articles, he is a well known and perhaps even the leading advocate of Defensive Realism.

In the Afghanistan case, this is fatal in several ways:

1) Even assuming that the Taliban and any Taliban inspired successor state are merely security seeking, their very presence in the region is destabilizing, as proven by how things were prior to 9/11. Neither Pakistan (as long as it is secular, but with large Islamist contigents), nor Shi'ite Iran can allow a Salafi regime exist unmolested in their neighborhood, to say nothing of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakstan, or Uzbekistan, which all have their own problems.

2) There is reason to believe that the Taliban, even if they have no designs on attacking the U.S., are more than security seeking insofar as they also wish to convert Pakistan to a Islamic state. Witness the seizure of Swat Valley. If Pakistan became a "Taliban" state, then we would have a Pashtun-Islamist Nuclear Superstate in Central Asia.

3) Even if the Taliban fails to seize power in Pakistan, as actually seems likely, the biggest threat for training camps and safe havens is not attacks against the US, but attacks against China, India, and Pakistan. All three countries have significant Muslim minorities/groups, and are nuclear powers. Indeed, there are more nuclear states within driving distance from Kabul than from Berlin. While there may be reason to doubt that the US would be their target in any meaningful timeframe there are already Salafist groups operating in all three countries, and we have every reason to believe that at least in Pakistan and India there are direct and indirect ties between those groups and the Taliban.

These three reasons are not proof that the war is a war of necessity for the United States, but it is proof that the war is necessary for a super-power. It is no secret that many realists, and many political scientists believe that the doctrine of primacy (i.e. holding on to superpower status) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze. However, such ideas are not common in the American Foreign Policy community. If the U.S. were to abandon Afghanistan, it would be exatly like Britain abandoning Greece in the opening hours of the Cold War. In essence, we would be signalling to the world that we are abandoning all pretence of Superpower status, leaving areas like Central Asia to the Great Powers of the region, and becoming one great power among many.

This all goes unsaid, because the President and his staff neither wish to seem like they are pursuing the same strategy as Pres. Bush, nor do they wish to admit that if they abandon Afghanistan, they have essentially presided over the demise of the American "Empire". Walt, for his part, knows that even outside of the United States, in spite of protestations to the contrary, the idea of the return to multipolarity is not popular, because most countries are freeriding off the US. Therefore he cannot openly say "we need to accept that we are no longer a superpower". Even returning to a position of hegemonic offshore balancer seems like a step down from the titanic power the US has had for the past twenty years.

[Fuchs]

1) Even assuming that the Taliban and any Taliban inspired successor state are merely security seeking, their very presence in the region is destabilizing, as proven by how things were prior to 9/11.

Incursions to the north were under control of Russian forces, Pakistan was stable, the Muslim separatists in the Chinese border region didn't make it into our news and Iran had a more stable government and less separatist trouble than today. So what exactly was worse or more destabilizing in the region prior to 9/11 when the Taliban were in power?
It doesn't look as if our actions actually stabilized the region.

2) There is reason to believe that the Taliban, even if they have no designs on attacking the U.S., are more than security seeking insofar as they also wish to convert Pakistan to a Islamic state.

The USA is a better example of a state that is actually not security-seeking (no matter what the propaganda says).

3) Even if the Taliban fails to seize power in Pakistan, as actually seems likely, the biggest threat for training camps and safe havens is not attacks against the US, but attacks against China, India, and Pakistan.

Their problem - their solutions. None of our business.

These three reasons are not proof that the war is a war of necessity for the United States, but it is proof that the war is necessary for a super-power.

I disagree. inf act, I even disagree with the assertion that the USA is a super power. It's a great power. It had much too small actual influence and success for a superpower in the past eight years.

There's no way of staying a superpower by pretending so with a series of failures.
The USA did not lead in any successful major affair for about ten years unless its influence was codified in multinational institutions (and even then only occasionally).
The only independent political initiatives with an U.S. "leadership" function in the past 8+ years were utter failures so far. Those nations who followed the U.S. lead usually followed into disaster; in economic policy, foreign policy and wars.

The Afghanistan war is therefore no war that protects U.S. superpower status; it's more like the Suez crisis or the Soviet-Afghan War.
It confirms the inability to dominate and reform even an extremely backward country.

The direct Western involvement in the Afghan Civil War was a war of choice. We probably would have achieved the extradition of OBL and his loons if we had respected Pashtun hospitality a bit more. At the very least we would have prevented that OBL and AQ take responsibility for 9/11 (which would have taken away the Taliban's excuse for no extradition; the assertion of innocence). That in turn would have spared us of most of the global jihad crap.

An alternative path would have been an indirect involvement; pressure on Pakistan to stop support and own support for Northern Alliance warlords and non-Taliban Pashtun powers.

Finally, we could have limited ourselves to raids and covert actions (that's what I expected to happen in autumn 2001).

[Abu Suleyman]

I just knew that Fuch's would be the guy who would post a reply, and I just knew that he would have to take a swipe at the U.S.

Up front I have to take issue with some of your assertions, in part because I don't understand some of your assertions. In your refutation of the Taliban as a destabilizing force, you cite domestic instabilities. However, my point was not that the Taliban contributes to domestic instability, but that as a government it contributed to international instability, which it undoubtedly did. When the Taliban was in power, all states in the region had a vested interest in controlling it and a legitimate fear of interference in their domestic affairs. Moreover, the fact that something doesn't hit our news is hardly an argument.

I love the ad patria attack at the US, but I guess I can't be surprised, since you are European. (See what I did there,nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) Whether the US is more or less security seeking, or whether it claims to be is irrelevant to whether the Taliban can be trusted to behave as a security seeking state.

Finally, your belief and my beliefs about the US's superpower status are irrelevant to the assertion that American Policy makers believe that the US is a superpower and therefore act accordingly. Whether successfully or not, any state (US or otherwise) which views itself as Superpower is going to view involvement in Afghanistan as a war of necessity, because it is for any state that is a superpower. The rest of the arguments about what form that involvement should take are spurious and irrelevant to the question of necessity.

Put another way, imagine that you have a daughter, who thinks that she is a princess. A princess must have a crown, and arguing with her that she is not a princess and therefore does not need a crown is futile because she is a princess, dammit; now get her her crown! There are things that whether we agree with them or not, or even if they are true is not the important issue. In this case, America and American's generally believe that the US is a super power, indeed so do the Jihadi's which is why we are the "Great Satan" and not, China or India. You may be right, and I know plenty of people who would agree, but that doesn't matter for this discussion.

I would point out that you are completely willing to address the Pashtun's in terms of their cultural perspective, and demand that the US do so, but are totally unwilling to look at things from an American Policy makers perspective. In English we have a saying that goes "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." I know there is one in German that means the same thing, but I can't remember it. It means, in this case, that what is good for one country is good for them all. (If you know the German saying, please tell me.)

[Fuchs]

OK, let's focus on one thing.

You wrote

(...)Although he does not explicitly state so in these articles, he is a well known and perhaps even the leading advocate of Defensive Realism.

In the Afghanistan case, this is fatal in several ways:

1) Even assuming that the Taliban and any Taliban inspired successor state are merely security seeking, their very presence in the region is destabilizing, as proven by how things were prior to 9/11. Neither Pakistan (as long as it is secular, but with large Islamist contigents), nor Shi'ite Iran can allow a Salafi regime exist unmolested in their neighborhood, to say nothing of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakstan, or Uzbekistan, which all have their own problems.

in a "War of Choice?" thread.


I took your words as an assertion that the entry into the war was not a matter of choice, but of necessity because the Taliban were intolerable.


First, I wondered why they were tolerable up to 9/11, but that's a worn (albeit strong) question.


Second, I decided to poke at the oh-so terrible situation of Taliban in power by describing how relatively stable, under control and tolerable the pre-9/11 situation in and around Afghanistan really was.


A robust, shi'ite Iran was their Western frontier.
Russian 'peacekeeper' MRDs were keeping Muslim guerrilla incursions under control north of Afghanistan.
Pakistan was still a much more stable and robust state in the SE than it's now.
China had at most minor troubles with Muslim separatists who didn't even make it into our news, so were hardly a significant component of "necessity" (in fact, afaik those Uighurs aren't much connected to the Taliban anyway).
The Afghan Civil War was still going on, with wannabe-religious representatives of the majority tribe in power.

That was an acceptable, bearable situation, it did not constitute a necessity for a Western involvement in the war.


Finally about the superpower thing:
Beliefs constitute no necessity. Beliefs are illusions, thoughts - not the real world.
And group think doesn't impress me at all anyway, so I'm not particularly impressed by the prevalence of certain ideas in certain institutions or nations if those ideas cannot stand up to analysis.

[Abu Suleyman]

I took your words as an assertion that the entry into the war was not a matter of choice, but of necessity because the Taliban were intolerable.


First, I wondered why they were tolerable up to 9/11, but that's a worn (albeit strong) question.


Second, I decided to poke at the oh-so terrible situation of Taliban in power by describing how relatively stable, under control and tolerable the pre-9/11 situation in and around Afghanistan really was.

Fuchs, you are an excellent representative of discourse that I have read. I mean that as a compliment, in spite of what I am about to say.

I am not addressing this question as a historical one (i.e. how did we get here), but rather as one of current situations. Indeed, this is the way in which Walt approaches the problem himself. The point of any current political question is not what the problem was then, the question is what the problem is now. Most people, at least in the US, would agree that ignoring the Taliban/Al Qaeda in AF prior to 2001 was a mistake. The fact that we did so does not make it any less of a mistake. Apparently, you believe that we should have continued on pretty much the same path post 2001 as we (the US) had pre-2001, and I think that if you can be dispassionate about the issue you could make the argument that a purely covert/law enforcement approach to AF would have been preferable to what we did. The problem is that in the US there is no such thing as dispassion about 9/11, everyone has strong emotions, and we just have to accept that. What happened, regardless of whether it was good or not was almost inevitable given the political make up of the US.

All of that notwithstanding, the question is "Where are we now?" I do believe that Pres. Obama clearly stated that he is approaching the issue from a current events mode, and I think we have to take him at his word. As things stand now, AF is a critical theatre of operations if the US sees itself as a Superpower. It is possible that the US entered AF voluntarily, and I would say that our method of entry was definitely elective. Nevertheless, given the axioms extant in the US, AF is a "must-be" involved area.

To put it analogously, imagine if you had a man who was afraid of heights on a cruise ship, who went out on decks and because of his fear of heights passed out and fell overboard. Barring external intervention like a helicopter rescue, at that point if he wishes to return to the ship his is in a 'Must Swim' situation. Tossing him a dinghy and saying that that is actually an acceptable alternative is not going to work. Neither is berating him for being afraid of heights nor for falling overboard. None of this is to say there isn't something to learn from the situation afterwards, but at the moment the man is in the water, his assumptions and beliefs about the situation create a critical interest.

The same is true for the US. America's national personality guaranteed that after 9/11 no small response would do. Love us or hate us, we don't take kindly to MASCAL sneak attacks, just ask the Japanese, (or Spain, although it probably wasn't their fault). Now that we are where we are at, our assumption that we are a Superpower, rightly or wrongly, and the situation in Central Asia demands that we be involved there.

Pre-empting a possible response, you may be thinking, "All you have to do is abandon your stupid/futile/arrogant idea of Superpower status and the problem goes away." This is my point exactly. But so far, no one is openly talking about that, and I don't forsee it becoming politically viable in the US any time soon.

[Entropy]

A couple of points:

A war can evolve over time. In the case of Afghanistan I think it began as a war of necessity and is now, in it's current form, a war of choice. A COIN-based nation-building enterprise is a choice and there are other options to consider between nation-building and abandonment.

Secondly, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Taliban in Pakistan are not the same thing. They may appear to be similar, but they are not. Different leaders, different fighters, different constituencies, different goals. Also, the idea that the Pakistani Taliban might take over or conduct a coup in Pakistan is ludicrous. That said, there is a real possibility that Islamists could come to power in Pakistan, but an Islamist take-over is not the same thing as a Taliban take-over.

Third, the Taliban may or may not be destabilizing, but I think the same could be said for a highly centralized Afghan government as well as the US presence. Which is more destabilizing? It depends on who you ask, which is one reason terms like "stability" are less useful as descriptors and policy goals for a place like Afghanistan.

Fuchs,

I agree with some of what you say, but on this you are flat wrong:

We probably would have achieved the extradition of OBL and his loons if we had respected Pashtun hospitality a bit more. At the very least we would have prevented that OBL and AQ take responsibility for 9/11 (which would have taken away the Taliban's excuse for no extradition; the assertion of innocence). That in turn would have spared us of most of the global jihad crap.

That's exactly what the US tried for more than five years. Much of the source material from that era is now declassified at the GWU archive. Contrary to your assertion, the US engaged the Taliban on many levels to get them to either control, extradite or expel UBL. A useful summary of this activity can be found here.

And this mostly a myth:

Second, I decided to poke at the oh-so terrible situation of Taliban in power by describing how relatively stable, under control and tolerable the pre-9/11 situation in and around Afghanistan really was.

The Taliban brought a lot of anarchy and bloodshed to many parts of Afghanistan that were perfectly stable.