Reconciliation and COIN in Afghanistan

[Dayuhan]

Right. Our foreign service is trapped in the 1960's and can't find its way out of the thicket. Until it catches up (probably a generational recycling), and fills with people not trained in old school poli sci, they will stay in the thicket. The days of foreign service as a reporting tool are in the tail light. It needs to be much more robust, savvy and diverse in its engagements and results.

I'd have said trapped in the 1860s. Too much of our Foreign Service seems convinced that the central function of a diplomat is exchanging erudite repartee in a rarefied salon, occasionally taking time out to negotiate a treaty.

The problem currently for the US is that senior leadership over the past several administrations are being extremely slow in recognizing that U.S. Foreign Policy for Globalized Uni/multi-polar world of 2010 needs to look considerably different than U.S. Foreign Policy for a Bi-Polar, pre-globalized world of 1989.

This I'm not so sure of. It might be more accurate, I think, to say that the US has struggled to come up with a viable post-Cold War policy in certain parts of the world, notably Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia west of India.

In much of the world there has been a significant and reasonably effective transition out of the Cold War paradigm.

In Latin America we've taken a big step away from interventionism, and accepted that "left" doesn't have to mean "communist", and that even when it does mean communist or something like it, that's not necessarily a threat. During the Cold War we'd never have accepted a Chavez or a Morales, and would likely have gone back to the Kirkpatrick shuffle: a sponsored coup, followed by support for an oafish dictator threatened by a left-wing insurgency. During the Cold War our relations with even moderate "left" governments such as those we have now in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile would have been very strained at best. All that has changed, I'd have to say for the better.

There's also been effective change in East Asia. Despite vestigial paranoia over "Chicoms" we've managed to engage China as something other than an enemy. We've accepted and dealt with the emergence of several East Asian nations as fully developed states. We deal reasonably productively with ASEAN. We haven't solved the North Korea problem, but we've managed it, and not every problem has an immediate solution.

Relations with Europe and the former Soviet states haven't always been ideal, but they have moved into a post Cold War phase without major transition problems. It's not realistic to expect that relations with everyone will always be smooth - interests diverge and there will always be tension - but there has been peace and in general the tensions have been managed.

Obviously you can't attribute everything that has gone well in the world to an effective US transition out of the Cold War paradigm, just as you can't attribute everything that's gone badly to an ineffective or absent US transition out of the Cold War paradigm. In most of the world, though, we've managed to move past the Cold War without making a complete mess.

Obviously there is a problem, and that problem effectively (though not universally) covers the area from Africa through the Middle East and on to Pakistan and the southern edge of the former Soviet sphere of influence. Again, I think the problem here is not that we're necessarily stuck in a Cold War rut, but that we've struggled to devise effective post-Cold War policies. That's not entirely our fault: it's a complicated area with enormous amounts of tension that have to be worked through, much of which is not a product of any US action or inaction. There's an abundance of complicating factors, including but not limited to oil, Islam, Israel, and a whole raft of colonial and Cold War legacies.

I don't think our problem is being stuck in the Cold War, I think our problem is an inability to devise and execute realistic, achievable post-Cold War policies that are simultaneously consistent with US interests and aspirations and consistent with local interests and aspirations. That failure is disturbing but understandable: it's a thorny problem with no clear answer and an extraordinary range of possible unintended consequences to any proposed action or inaction. We don't have a magic wand that will resolve the area's problems, and neither does anyone else.