Category Archives: Middle East

Just How Hard Will Afghanistan Be?: ‘We Issue Pens to Afghan Soldiers’

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Robert Kaplan has a nice new piece on Afghanistan over at the Atlantic. As usual, it is worth your time. Kaplan travels to places most of us in IR could only dream of visiting, so his work’s got a verite feel that our modeling and endless quotations of one another never do. (This is why people read him, not us.) Unfortunately Kaplan repeats the same motifs again and again, so its not clear if we are reading about Afghanistan, or just Kaplan’s expansive Americanist ideology again. In this way, he is becoming like the Kagans. You already know his answer: geography is a huge constraint on international action; America’s NCOs and infantrymen are kick-a—; we should win the GWoT at even huge expense; and US empire is probably good for the world, even if others resent it.

This time around, Kaplan lays the groundwork for Stanley McChrystal’s presidential bid. What is it with conservatives and the lionization of generals? Just read Kaplan’s purple prose. No one doubts Petraeus or McChrystal’s military talents, but I am pretty sure the US right’s cult of personality tendency for military machismo is unhealthy for the democratic process. Also, is it really admirable that McChrystal only sleeps four hours a day? How many of us could make good decisions living that way regularly? That told me less that McChrystal is super-committed, and more that he is overworked, under-resourced, and under-staffed. That sounds like the Bush-era GWoT all right…

But the money quote from Kaplan’s piece has go to be this from a NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) interviewee:

The recruits may not know how to read, but they are incredibly street-smart. They’re survivalists. Basic soldiering here does not require literacy. We give them a course in how to read and issue them pens afterwards. They take tremendous pride in that. In Afghanistan, a pen in a shirt pocket is a sign of literacy.

Note the use of the military verb ‘issue.’ Yes, the $.50 plastic pen you forgot in the coffee room yesterday is a formally issued piece of military hardware that signals prestige in the wider Afghan society. WOW.

Consider all the information that short anecdote conveys to you about education, poverty, and governance in Afghanistan:

1. Afghans are so poor, they can’t afford pens. ISAF has to issue them, and only qualified soldiers get them.

2. Afghans are so illiterate, no one really needs them.

3. Widespread illiteracy and poverty means the Afghan state, even down into the local level, cannot meaningfully connect to the citizenry.

If illiteracy is so widespread that pens are a mark of social prestige, then Afghanistan can hardly be expected to have complex institutions or national centralization. If you can’t write bills or receipts, what kind of markets will you have? If you can’t read laws from Kabul, much less correspond with state organs, how do you know what the rules are, where to pay taxes, etc? If education is that non-existent, how can you build an army, infrastructure, courts, etc?

None of this means the US and other wealthy states should not help Afghanistan. Indeed, your heart should break when you read that Afghans are issued pens. Nor is this a verdict on the utility of ISAF; maybe we should still go, despite the huge hurdles this very revealing anecdote makes clear.

But this anecdote told me more about how hard the Afghan operation really will be, than Obama’s surge speech last year, or any of the other fearless, ‘we-can-do-it’ prose of Kaplan’s piece. This is way beyond Iraq. Afghanistan doesn’t just need counter-terrorism/insurgency, it needs nation-building on an order that took the US two centuries to achieve.

Obama didn’t include anecdotes this revealing in his Afghan surge address last year. Did he white lie by not showing us just how high the slope is? It kinda seems like it…

There’s No US-Israel ‘Crisis’ — It’s just Regular Old Alliance Politics

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I can’t be the only one who thinks this whole got quickly overbaked – one small step in a well-established, well-publicized endeavor leads to the biggest crisis among friends in decades? Regardless of your opinion of Israeli West Bank behavior, settlement/colonization is a very widely-known and long-standing policy, so there’s little new here.

So this is less about Israel itself, and more about the changed US debate on Israel since the release of The Israel Lobby three years ago. Neocons who are nervous that elite opinion in the US is shifting against Israel saw an opportunity to push back before things go to far. And those pushing for more distance between the US and Israel saw an opportunity to push the issue into  mainstream credibility. But little of this impacts the real depth of the US-Israeli alliance (shared anti-Islamism, liberal democracy, fear of Iran). The whole thing smacks of inside-the-Beltway navel-gazing by people paid to hyperventilate. To rework Rahm Emanuel, never pass up an opportunity to manufacture a crisis.

1. Sure, Biden got snubbed. But ‘alliance politics’ are old hat. At least since the 70s, the US has been complaining that its allies don’t listen to it, that they don’t pay enough for their defense, that they freelance without asking the US for permission. Israel is just doing what lots of US allies have already done (which doesn’t mean it’s right, only that’s fairly typical). Consider that only two or three NATO allies now spend on defense what they they are treaty-obligated to spend (at least 2% of GDP). That includes really big ones like Germany, Italy and Canada. European allies have a pathetic 3 aircraft carriers between them. Or consider that the Europeans don’t want to go to Afghanistan, even thought they are treaty-obligated to do that too. Do we flip out about this every year? No. (Should we? Yes.) Or consider Mexico. Our closest ally in Latin America (since NAFTA)  has illegally exported 10-20 million of its poorest people to the US in the last generation, yet somehow we can’t get them take border security seriously. So why single out Israel so much for its bad behavior? Indeed, this has always been the biggest problem I have had with the Walt/Mearshiemer take on Israel (although I’m sure it’s not because of the idiot charge that they’re anti-semitic).

2. If you want America’s allies to behave better, then stop reaching for hegemony and start playing hard to get (Walt’s own idea btw, thereby increasing my confusion). US hegemony, or more specifically, our relentless celebration of it as America’s right because we are so awesome, tells allies that we love the top-dog slot so much, that we’ll never pull back from more involvement, more force, more shadow world government. This is my biggest beef with the Kagans, Robert Kaplan, Irving Kristol and the neocon persuasion generally. Just how much more do we have to spend on defense? How many more bases do we have to build? Kaplan even admitted that the US mission in Afghanistan is bleeding us white and better serves China than the US; but then he says we must go anyway! How can you possibly convince the allies to help if you say you’ll commit suicide before withdrawing…

This sort of attitude says that being the king-dog, lone superpower isn’t just good for US security or economy. Now it’s a part of our very identity. After three generations have been raised on the post-1940 National Security State, globe-spanning American exceptionalism is a part of who we are now (“God’s special mission for America,” to quote George W. Bush). Besides being exactly the forerunner of domestic tyranny the Anti-Federalists warned about way back in the 1780s, it also tells the world that the US will never abandon allies. Hence we cannot credibly threaten them.

3. Not only does this incentivize free-riding (Germany, Mexico), it also encourages misbehavior (Israel), because the US will never abandon its global role, because it loves it so much. This is (one) fatal flaw of the neo-con argument for US expansion. (The other is that we can’t afford hegemony much longer). Walt makes this argument regularly: if you want the allies to actually do what we tell them, then you have to be willing to cut them off once in awhile, to punish them for misbehavior. But given that NO ONE has the guts to cut Israeli aid on Capitol Hill, then the regular expectation should be Netanyahu-style misbehavior, not compliance. Think of Joe Lieberman and John McCain as enabling an alcoholic: why would Israel possibly stop if the consequences are absolutely zero? Ditto on Germany and defense spending.

Korea is a good comparison case here. US threats of alliance abandonment are far more believable here, because they are real. The size of US Forces in Korea (USFK) is in long-term decline. USFK is not tied into a larger multilateral framework like NATO, which would make it harder for the US to leave. Most Americans don’t know as much about Korea as they do our more culturally western allies, and if they do, they think rich Samsung-land should be able to defend itself. All these reasons cast doubt on the US guarantee to Korea. Koreans know this, and they know how much they need the US. As such, Korea is a far less troublesome ally to the US than most. By contrast, the Israelis or Germans know we aren’t going anywhere; too much of America’s self-identity as a totally awesome superpower is tied up a forward US presence in Europe and the Middle East. (Maybe there is a measurable relationship between cultural distance and credible threats of alliance abandonment; someone write that master’s thesis.)

4. The long-term structure of US foreign policy makes it all but impossible for individual initiatives, even from the POTUS himself, to change allied behavior. We tell Israel to be nice to the Palestinians once in awhile, while we simultaneously deepen our long-term position in the greater Middle East. Do you really think we can credibly threaten Israel with abandonment (a sanction for misbehavior) while US force structure so obviously say we won’t? As we build a huge string of bases that tells everyone – Jew, Muslim, Arab, Afghan, Persian – that we’ll be here for a long time? If you want the allies to burden share and follow orders, then stop enabling them through the endlessly sprawling national security state and endlessly expanding defense budget.

Would it just be Easier to Pay-Off our Middle Eastern Opponents?

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I recently watched Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries on the invasion of Iraq. It is quite good, particularly on the huge uncertainty generated by the fog of war, and the consequent overuse of violence to protect oneself from that uncertainty. At one point in the miniseries, a town is being hit by Tomahawk cruise missiles, and a soldier makes the interesting remark that with all the money put into just a few of those Tomahawks, they probably could have just bought off the local Fedayeen or Republican Guard units, or bought off enough locals to kill or arrest them. It is an interesting notion, and once I can’t say has ever received scholarly treatment in IR or strategic theory. Here is another good master’s thesis waiting to be written.

Instead of killing these people, can we just throw money at them? Fred Kaplan asks this question, and so does Michael Semple. Both are dubious. But I am not so sure, especially given the huge costs of Westerners trying to coerce the Taliban, ex-Baathists, and other various alienated Muslim/Arab elements around the Middle East. The obvious retort is that money does not buy allegiance, only temporary quiet. Money does not ensure ideological affinity or loyalty; it does not make its recipient a liberal committed to the democratic processes or central governments of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. This is so, but consider the following counterpoints:

1. The US military, as the soldiers in Generation Kill pointed out, is an extremely expensive machine. The just-released 2011 US defense budget is $700+B. That is a staggering sum of money. The cost of using such an expensive force is high too. US equipment is super-expensive, given increasing computerization and integration (the ‘networked battlefield’). It will cost another mint to replace and bring back up to par US military stocks around the world when the GWoT ends (someday, we hope). What the US military spends in the GWoT every day certainly out-costs what bribery would cost by at least an order of magnitude (billions vs millions).

2. Shooting people instead of buying them has huge costs too. As we have learned by now, we are never going to kill every terrorist on the planet. We cannot kill our way to victory. Worse, in tribalized cultures like the ME, for every person we kill, there is a brother, son, uncle, friend who gets pulled into a blood oath to avenge that death. We have created spirals of ‘accidental guerillas’ through less-than-ideal discrimination in the use of force (another point Generation Kill demonstrates very well). Every unnecessary or partially necessary combat fatality creates a high possibility of more and more irregular combatants joining up for revenge. We might stanch the inflow of new recruits if we kill fewer and buy off more. Indeed, many people, Kaplan included, have noted that funding the Sunni gunmen to fight against al Qaeda in Iraq was the turning point in Iraq, not Bush’s surge. We also used bags of money in in Afghanistan in late 2001. So there is some evidence that this might work.

3. Isn’t paying off people morally superior to coercing, much less shooting, them? I am aware of course that the die-hards of al Qaeda and other Salafist groups cannot be bought. But there are many others who might be ‘buyable.’  I think a morally superior use of American power would be to purchase their temporary quietude than to hunt them.

4. You might object that simply buying them just delays the fighting. When the money drys up, then they will go back into the bush. Maybe, but

A) Buying them off, even temporarily, buys the government time to reach out and reconcile them. It gives exactly the ‘breather’ to the Iraqi or Afghan central government that Bush claimed they needed to get on their feet. But instead of the US military coercing a pause in violence, the dollars buy it. But in the end, the effect is the same. And if the Iraqi or Afghan governments can’t use that pause to get their acts together, then no amount of US killing will help them in the medium-term. Whether you choose policing/coercing or buying, you still get the same outcome (the pause), which our ME client-friends must then use (but they will likely squander).

B) Buying them indefinitely is still probably cheaper than a medium- to long-term US commitment, like the new Afghan surge Obama just announced in December. Everyone seems terrified that the US will be in the Middle East for decades, as it is in Germany, Korea, and Japan. Ok, so instead of hotly disputed withdrawal deadlines – which get flim-flammed anyway by ‘conditions on the ground’ which warrant that trainers, pilots,  the CIA, etc. to stay behind after the withdrawal date – why not substitute pay-offs for awhile? I realize it is hardly ideal. It’s US-funded local graft. But consider the alternative.

These are just some initial thoughts. As I said, this is a wholly under-researched question, probably because it feels morally uncomfortable, shady, or sleazy. It reeks of corruption. And it surely does, but given the alternatives, particularly the use of US force, I think the moral equation is overbalanced in its favor actually. But this needs more serious investigation.

The Delicious Irony of al Qaeda’s Looming Bankruptcy

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One of the many ironies of Islamic fundamentalism – besides the most obvious of killing for God – is its dependence on money despite its overtly nonfinancial religiosity, and its theological commitment to wrecking capitalism.

Hah! So much for all that piety and devotion to Allah; better go sell some more heroin to southeast Asian drug lords.

FP has a nice bit on al Qaeda’s rocky finances, which raises the obvious question no jihadi would ever address – why should an aggressively religious-ideological organization require money at all?

The answer of course is just as obvious. Most ‘warriors for God’ are in it for the cash; God is just nice ideological cover. Lots of pirates, separatists, militias, and other brigands in Southeast Asia (Philippines especially) and Africa use Islamism as cover for pretty standard mafiaosi thuggery. If the Taliban ran out of drug money, how many of its ‘devoted’ warriors would show up the next day? In fact, we learned just how few, when the drug money temporarily dried up after the Northern Alliance victory in late 2001. It took about 5 years for the Taliban to get back on its feet, because it was broke. But aren’t martyrs looking to go to heaven supposed to fight for free? I guess not.

And how about using capitalist tools (fundraising, shadowy bank accounts, paychecks to fighters and video producers) against capitalism itself? Doesn’t the use of the tools bring those very pollutions into the heart of the jihadi effort?If capitalism brings ‘westoxification’ and ‘Jewish financial hegemony’ – hence the targeting of the World Trade Centers – how does one reconcile using it openly?

The answer is just as obvious – one can’t –  which tells you just how intellectually bankrupt Islamism, even in its softer forms, really is. Muslims, like everyone else, can be seduced by money. They are just as tempted to willfully misread their own private interest as aligned with their religious requirements. This must be a revelation to absolutely no one save the radical imams of the Middle East. In 1202, the fourth crusaders, supposedly off to save the Holy Land for Christianity, took a left turn to plunder other (byzantine) Christians for the cash instead. How nice. And what an obvious parallel to Saddam Hussein paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in the 1990s.

Further, the Muslim world is just as tied into the global economy as everyone else. You can’t ‘escape’ capitalism or the market, just like you can’t ‘escape’ gravity or the tides. Just ask the Soviets; 75 years of titanic effort and bloodshed still couldn’t keep Russians from trading on the black market for bluejeans. The non-western paradise Islamists want is just as illusory and ridiculous as the Aryan pre-modern paradise the Nazis wanted to build in Russia. If even al Qaeda has to use ‘Jewish’ money and capitalism to fight exactly those evils, then there’s no way they will win – no matter how many financial centers they blow up. The world has moved on; Islamists are on a fool’s errand to find a myth that never really existed anyway…

The Ft. Hood Shooter and the Dual Loyalty Question

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As has been noted, too much of the commentary on the Fort Hood shooting has avoided the fairly obvious, albeit very politically incorrect, explanation. Clearly Hasan, who yelled ‘Allah akhbar’ during the killings, was murdering out of jihadist-fundamentalist intent. These were the same last words heard from Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. Given that the US has a Muslim population of at least 2 million (the data are hotly contested), it is hardly unlikely that all US Muslims remain untempted by the binladenist call. In fact, given Europe’s thorny problems with jihadism, it is remarkable how little of this has happened in the US.

This does not mean, of course, that all Muslims are radicals or that some sort of ‘green scare’ is necessary or whatever. But that is a straw man used to deflect serious discussion. We should also not use ‘islamophobia’ as a racist slur to prevent a serious investigation of Hasan’s motives and a national discussion about the integration process that so spectacularly failed in his case. If anything, the initial US reaction was so adamantly worried about this possibility, that the analysis, for all its good intentions, has obviously missed the real reason. It is politically correct to suggest stress and syndromes and such, but it is also rather dishonest.

Hasan actually fits a fairly well-known profile of Muslim bombers and fanatics who have emerged from the West. They feel deeply alienated by the GWoT. They worry that it targets Muslims, not terrorists, and that the GWoT is really a Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam. They feel deep conflict between their ties of citizenship and religion. Frequently they are socially isolated, and their vague discontent is catalyzed and metastasized by some radical cleric or website. Olivier Roy has done a lot of good work on the alienation Muslims living in the West feel, and how that alienation can drive extreme cases into terrorism. Try here and here. This profile fits the 9/11 hijackers, the Scottish airport assailants, and the London bombers.

The issue we seem to loathe finger for multicultural PC reasons is the ‘dual loyalty’ problem, but it so clearly obvious here that it cries out for discussion. It should be blindingly obvious that most people hold multiple identities or roles and that these will conflict. They do so in our lives everyday. Our roles as professionals at work collide with our responsibilities to our families. But if we apply this strikingly obvious logic to race/religion/nationality questions, it simply becomes taboo in US.

Because the US is an immigrant country, this logic creates terrible tensions. So we have admirably tried to ignore it, but turning away doesn’t mean it goes away. Indeed, what softens that dual loyalty problem is integration over time – the Americanization that comes from living in the US for several generations. Just about everyone’s grandmother gets off the boat with deep ties to the Old Country. The parents straddle the Old and New Country with proficiency in both languages. The grandkids don’t speak the old language at all, indulging only silly multicultural fantasies of ‘finding their roots,’ even though anyone from the Old Country would immediately tag them as an American. By the great-grandkid’s generations, the Old Country is a misty myth, and the great-grandkid’s spouse is likely to be of another ethnicity anyway. Hence, Americanization.

As Samuel Huntington notes, the requirements of US citizenship are comparatively light. This means just about anyone can join the US national community. It also ensures a certain level of cultural frisson that simply would not be tolerated in many other countries. Clearly simply handing someone a flag or a driver’s license does not insure Americanization, nor, does even the military uniform of Hasan (a great surprise, that, actually). Far more likely is time and sociality. Mixing, learning, speaking the language, interaction, slowly wears away the sharp conflict of identities and helps each individual informally reconcile possibly competing loyalties.

Islam however does raise particular issues of integration, as Islam frequently defines itself as a ‘way of life,’ rather than simply a ‘go-to-service-on-the-weekend’ religion that most Americans profess. Insofar as Islam indulges totalist visions of religion as an all-encompassing lifestyle, the pluralism and tolerance necessary for living in the West may not come easy. (For a similar problem, consider the unique status of the Amish.) This seems to be Europe’s great problem. America’s Muslims seem to have made their peace with pluralism better. That needs to be explained; there is a good dissertation there.

Does the US Need a Long-Term Exit from the Middle East?: 3. When is it Ok to Lose a War?

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For part one, on Afghanistan, try here; for part two, on Iran, try here.

The budget deficit for FY 2009 (which ended on September 30, 2009) was $1.42 trillion. I can hardly think of a better reason to ask the question in the title of this post. For comparison purposes, the US economy is about $14.5 trillion and its national debt is $12 trillion. South Korea’s GDP is about $900 billion. So the US borrowed 150% of the entire output of the world’s 13th largest economy. If that is not imperial decline, I don’t know what is. The day after I read that statistic, I told my Korean students they should start thinking about a post-American Korean alliance framework. The odds against us are lengthening fast.

A few months ago, the US general in Afghanistan said we are losing there. And that seems to be the general consensus. This happened in Iraq too from 2004 – 2007, and in Vietnam after Tet. In the Iraqi case we pulled off something like a miracle with the surge and tribal awakening against al Qaeda. Although the best authority on Iraq says we are worse there than we think, at least we aren’t calling it the ‘forever war’ or a ‘fiasco’ anymore. In Vietnam of course, things went less well. Despite the changes at the top (Clark Clifford, Creighton Abrams, then the Nixon administration), we could not pull the South back from the brink, and by 1975, we had effectively lost.

So my question is why would a great power like the US give up, one possible option in the current greater ME mess? Clearly the US has huge resources, greater than North Vietnam & the VC, al Qaeda in Iraq, or the Taliban. (Remember that the Iraq Study Group recommended in the fall of 2006 that we gradually withdraw – effectively giving up. Nor is it likely that we are willing to plunge back into Iraq in huge force if things go badly in the next 2 years, during the final withdrawal.) And we have seen other great powers give up and leave/lose before too: the USSR in Afghanistan, France in Algeria, and lots of the postcolonial struggles. This is a great dissertation waiting to be written. Here are a few thoughts, all directly relevant to the medium-term US presence in the GME.

1. Wars, like any other enterprise, involve a cost-benefit analysis. Sullivan makes quite clear just how high the costs of the GWoT really are, and how little we have accomplished. It is painful reading. But by any reasonable assessment, the costs of the ME to the US are skyrocketing and look only to increase for all sorts of reasons (continuing Israeli intransigence, Iran’s nuclear sprint, the $1 trillion price tag on McChrystal’s plan). The unprecedented size of the budget deficit, and level of borrowing necessary to continue the ME wars, makes the cost-benefit question far more relevant than I have seen in the Afghanistan surge debate in the last few months. Too much of the debate has focused on Obama’s backbone or channeled ‘Americans-don’t-lose-wars’ nationalism. Far too little focuses on the extreme lack of resources.

2. We learned from Vietnam that losing a war isn’t so bad after all. All the predictions of the 1970s about coming of multipolarity, the end of the Cold War, the rise of the third world, and American decline were wrong. The US has tremendous power reserves. A strategic retrenchment will not diminish them. Most of the world will still expect US military power to dominate major power crises; most of the world will still value US market access above all trading relationships. Leaving the ME is not the fall of the Roman Empire.

3. Extended wars are domestically destabilizing and liberalism-reducing. This is a brutally obvious lesson from democracies in extended wars or standoffs. Israel and South Korea have done reasonably well in reconciling the nationalism and militarism demanded in such competitions, with the liberalism and social tolerance we expect from democracies. But the nominal, might-have-been democracies of Pakistan and South Vietnam were simply destroyed by unrelenting external confrontation.

4. Small wars that become big endanger other, more critical international commitments. Here is another Vietnam lesson. The drain of Vietnam began to seriously endanger America’s more central needs in Western Europe and Northeast Asia; this is major reason why we gave up. Today, the 3 trillion dollar GWoT is sapping America’s ability to hold the line in places of much greater importance. While Europe is not threatened (Russia somewhat in the east), East Asia is witnessing a major power shift.  It’s hard to argue that Asia’s rise is not of far greater importance to the US than the enduring primitivism of ME. The US is not balancing China right now, but it is awful nervous about the future of Chinese power, and  you can be sure the Chinese relish watching the US lose its bearings (torture) in the ME.

Does the US Need a Long-Term Exit from the Middle East?: 2. Iran

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In my last post, I suggested that maybe Afghanistan is a bridge too far. More generally after 8 years of the GWoT, I am starting to think the GWoT more generally is going that way too. I know it is vital for US security, but the costs are really starting to scare me, encouraging the isolationist hidden in every American: if they don’t want our help in Eurasia, fine – let them kill each other as they wish.

A friend went to hear a Council on Foreign Relations speaker on Iran – inevitably an ex-national security type. The speaker said we are leaving Israel in the wind to deal with Iran, and that the likelihood of an Israeli strike is rising faster than most people think. Here was my response.

“She sounds to me like your standard neo-con hawk actually – mixing analysis with policy preferences, trying to scare the hell out of the West with frightening scenarios that imply if only the US was tough and committed, this would not have happened. I think she reads the Kagans too much.

A few points:

1. Nuclear proliferation is inevitable. It’s already underway in Asia seriously. The US can’t bomb, sanction, invade all these places. We better find a way to live with this, instead of saying every time a proliferator is on the cusp that we should consider military force. That’s a recipe for forever war as the costs of nuclearization continue to come down.

2. Israel’s security is not America’s security. If they want to start a war with Iran, then that’s their issue. The US informal security guarantee to Israel cannot mean that we get chain-ganged into every conflict it wants to fight.

3. I think the likelihood of an Israeli strike is wildly overrated. They’re not stupid, and they know they are deeply isolated on this one. Israeli hawks are probably bluffing to encourage the US and UN to move more meaningfully on Iran. It’s the Richard Nixon ‘madman’ theory all over again: if Israel acts wild and erratic enough, maybe others will be spooked into doing something.

4. Iran with nukes is more dangerous, but let the locals balance/contain it first. It should not be our affair firstly.

5. We don’t really have much choice. Iran is genuinely committed to nuclearization, and Americans are unwilling to use serious force to stop that. So all we can really do is watch from the sidelines. Our hands are tied by a US public opinion that has been deeply anti-interventionist after Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Asked if I had suddenly become a dove on the GWoT:

“I don’t know. Maybe. But I think more that I am really beginning to worry about the costs of the war on terror. It goes on and on, and the US is bankrupt now, seriously, and really overstretched. We just cannot afford this stuff much longer – we’re becoming like Britain in the 30s or the USSR in the 80s. I can see the enthusiasm out here in the Chinese scholars I meet. They are relishing watching American fritter away its power running around the caves and deserts of the ME. Israel is our friend and should be, but the ME is becoming a sinkhole for US power. We desperately need Israel to find peace with its neighbors, or to cut it loose, because its exceptionalism is becoming just too expensive for the US now. We need to start seriously telling the Israelis that American support is not a blank check. If the Jewish religious right wants an apocalyptic war over the territories, and  to bomb Iran…, well, that’s just a bridge too far. Right now Iraq and Afghanistan are enough. Do we really need to risk a regional war between Israel and the US on one side, and Muslims on the other?  Increasingly, I am thinking we need a long-term out from the ME. It’s bankrupting the US. I don’t know. My thinking on the ME is in real flux; maybe because I am watching Asians get rich and strong while we are stumbling. The trend lines are just not good. The ME just seems so intractable, and it is becoming such a huge drain on the US.”

To the charge I might abandon Israel:

“Well, I am watching Asians get rich while we are hunting ghosts in the ME. The Chinese love this. They are watching the world’s only superpower blow its lead and fritter away its power in a probably vain effort to bring peace to the ME. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this is a fool’s errand. You must be thinking the same…”

Does the US Need a Long-Term Exit from the Middle East?: 1. Afghanistan

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Part 2 is here; Part 3 is here.

This week I am putting up my thoughts on accepting a ‘defeat’ in the Greater Middle East (at least for a little while); cutting our losses; and a long-term exit from a region that is consuming US power at a remarkably frightening rate. My ‘rah-rah’ instincts are to stay and ‘win’ and my blogging to date has supported the GWoT pretty strongly, but increasingly the parallels of Afghanistan to Vietnam linger in my head. It’s hard not to see this debate like those of the Johnson administration in 1964-65. The risks of staying and draining US power, especially in the face of rising Asia, increasingly worry me. Perhaps living in Asia and seeing how wealthy they are all getting, while we run all over the ME, has instilled greater fear in me of US overstretch. The GWoT needs to end soon, or at least we need to find a far less expensive way to fight it.

The intellectual drivers of this rethink are all the good punditry that has emerged in the last 2 months of the Obama review. (This time has been an excellent public participatory debate on the republic’s foreign policy. Let’s hope this style recurs. It is downright revelatory and democratic compared to W.) Particularly influential on me have been Walt, Kaplan, and Greenwald. Walt’s constant and intelligent blogging at FP has really forced me to rethink how unlikely, unnecessary, and costly a counterinsurgency ‘victory’ would be, and the importance of husbanding US power for other concerns (Asia). Kaplan convinced me that we are helping others a lot more than ourselves. And Greenwald convinced me that my own thinking on US geopolitical problems too easily slides to the standard US ‘foreign policy community’ response of more force, more intervention, more effort. If all you read all day is stuff from think-tanks and policy institutes like Brookings, Rand, or the Council of Foreign Relations, you’d think the US should be the world’s first problem solver. But Walt is probably right that that is recipe for overstretch, and Greenwald is probably right that that puts a lot of blood on US hands.

So I am going wobbly on Afghanistan first:

Like Friedman and Kupchan, I am starting to think this is a bridge too far – at least right now. I am not so sure, but the costs of this thing seem pretty high, and likelihood of failure too, and it is not clear how much the US needs a victory in Afghanistan defined by a decade of nation-building (the McChrystal approach). Why my change of heart?

1. US finances are a mess, even worse than usual, and US unemployment just broke 10%. This constraint is worsening as the budget outlook worsens. It should condition ALL new foreign policy outlays, especially those involving the military, as wars usually out-cost expectations. A major counterinsurgency ramp-up may be the ‘imperial’ indulgence that pushes the US into a financial crisis. Think about the parallel of Johnson’s expensive Vietnam build-up and the costs it brought in the 70s.

2. The US partner in Afghanistan is really bad. Karzai is so obviously corrupt now. The stolen election may be the last straw. US troops are now in the bizarre position of tacitly protecting warlords, as well as the drug growers who supply opium in the US. How can we win if the government is a lost cause? Isn’t that oxymoronic?

3. The US Army is badly overstretched by any reasonable measure. Recruitment is problematic. Gear has worn down faster in hard conditions of Afghanistan (and Iraq) than expected. The Army and Marines need some pretty serious institutional downtime to rebuild capacities and absorb GWoT lessons.

4. International cooperation on Afghanistan is pathetic; this is a coalition of the unwilling. The Europeans are wholly disinterested. They just want to come home. Obama can’t get anything more from them than W got. America’s Asian allies (Japan, SK, Australia) are not enthusiastic at all. Korea will go, but they will be non-combat forces. Japan won’t go, and is even probably going to stop its Indian Ocean refueling operation. Australia won’t go either. Not even the UN can really function in Afghanistan now either after last week’s bombing. And Pakistan’s role is downright pernicious.

If this sounds like I am flip-flopping, that is somewhat correct. Try here for my argument 2 months ago in favor of the Afghan COIN. I am genuinely unsure of the right course – as is Obama apparently, so at least I am in good company.

The ‘War on Terror’ is not over just because We don’t use that Expression Anymore

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The above silliness is what happens when you pretend Obama’s charisma can stop the GWoT.

If you have read this blog even a few times, you know I thought Bush was a pretty poor president. He got lots of things wrong, and the country is much worse off after W than before. But flagging the post-9/11 anti-terrorism campaign as the ‘Global War on Terror’ was a good rhetorical move, and the expression should kept, if only because no one else has come up with a good alternative – one that rings of the scope, focus, and moral weight of ‘GWoT.’

Getting the GWoT rolling was a success. Getting other states to take terrorism seriously in the wake of 9/11 was foreign policy success. There is no doubt that Islamic jihadists are targeting the US. OBL and the rest believe this is a clash of civilizations. They believe Islam is encircled by non-believers, and they will fight to defend the faith. Americans are the primary threat to it. Bush, for all his flaws, realized this. And he did realize that the enemy is dispersed around the umma. This will be a large, multi-front problem for awhile. That does not mean it must be ‘WWIV,’ but it does mean that terrorism, specifically Islamic terrorism, is the most important national security threat to the US and the West in general for the next decade. (China could change that if she goes belligerent, but so far she is following the rules pretty well.)

None of that brief analysis is very controversial anymore. And the term ‘GWoT’ captured this pretty well. It is a bit indelicate as a term of art. But still it captured the essence of the current struggle pretty well.

So I am disappointed at the continuing, almost ideological unwillingness of the Obama people to utter this concept. I know they loathe W, and I suppose they think the expression simply alienates the rest of the world. But it did bring clarity about this contest to the US population and rally them to sacrifice and commitment. And it does help strategists build ideas within it as a conceptual frame about the future of US foreign policy. (For a good example, see Thomas Barnett’s Pentagon’s New Map.)

Further, it strikes me as willful blindness: the war on terror is past because we just don’t talk that way anymore. Really? The war on terror is over just because W is out of 0ffice and McCain lost? Obama can’t even close Guantanamo or untangle the torture mess. And the jihadists don’t care at all if Obama is black or lived in a Moslem country. You can’t end the war on terrorism with a linguistic sleight of hand; antiwestern terrorism will not be slowed, just because we don’t say it anymore. This strikes me as a rhetorical arrogance, but then the Obama people seem to lay so much emphasis on his ability as a communicator.

In short, it seemed like a pretty good term to nail down an elusive problem and an even more elusive response. Yes, it is open-ended expression, suggesting war that could go and on with no end in sight. But there is not really much else to put in its place. Condolezza Rice once suggested the ‘campaign against global extremism’ or something awkward like that, but that got nowhere. And after 8 months, Obama and H Clinton still have no kinder, gentler replacement. I still use the expression when I teach, even though the new administration does not, because I’ve got nothing else that works so well.

So come on already. Admit that we are still in this thing, even if the O people want to fight it a different way.

Islamic Homophobia Watch: Will Muslim Leaders Shake the New German Foreign Minister’s Hand?

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One of the most disturbing aspects of modern Islam for post-feminist Westerners and liberals generally (I would include Koreans and Japanese, e.g.) is its continuing insistence on harsh sexual mores and discrimination. Islamic divorce law, the covering of women, polygamy, and the persecution, even execution, of homosexuals are deep cultural divides between the West and the contemporary Middle East. (Go watch Osama to catch Islamic patriarchy at its misogynistic, chauvinistic worst.) (In fact, with a little less stricture, one might say these are value break-points between post-Christian Europeans and evangelical Americans too.) In any case, the expansion of freedom in the 60s and 70s to include sexual choice and empowerment for women and homosexuals is a major achievement in the West. Countless people are happier, because they can find sexual fulfillment in ways they truly enjoy and love-relationships they actually want to have. (Just read this.) This is why gays like Andrew Sullivan turned into hawkish neoconservative supporters of the GWoT. If the Islamists win, homosexuals will be swinging from the lampposts.

And now we have the prospect of a homosexual foreign minister of a great power confronting the steady homophobia of the Middle East (as well as much of the former third world). I find this absolutely fantastic. This is a moment rich in clear lessons about just how different liberal societies are from traditional ones, why progress from the narrow, bitter conservatism of tradition is so important, and why the West is fighting the GWoT. The Taliban would have buried Guido Westerwelle alive for inter-male sexual contact. And Ahmadinejad made a fool out of himself before Westerners when he told a Columbia University audience that Iran had no homosexuals.

In the 1980s, the Regan administration pointedly sent a black to be the US ambassador to South Africa. We had the guts then to stand up for an important principle. But in the GWoT we have been giving way far too much. Too frequently the West has looked the other way as the most harsh,  anti-modern versions of Islam demand respect in the West. (How come no one looks to the rather tolerant Islam of SE Asia, btw? Why do ME extremists always dominate these conversations?) So all sorts of demands Western liberals would never tolerate from, say, conservative evangelicals or the Amish are indulged – halal food in public institutions (Holland), gender-segregated washing facilities and beaches (France), equivocation on press freedoms (Muhammad cartoons), the endless pieties about ‘peaceful’ Islam in the place of real discourse on Islam’s dalliance with extremism since 1967, informal censorship of books and films through religious intimidation like the Theo van Gogh murder.

So here’s hoping Westerwelle sticks it to Islamic bigotry the same way the US did to South African bigotry. I hope he wears a pink tie or a rainbow lapel pin the next time the Iranians or Saudis ask the Germans for aid or to counterbalance US pressure. I hope the Saudi foreign minister worries whether his fingers will fall off if he shakes a gay’s hand. I hope the mullahs at Qom go through theological spasms and sleepless nights about issuing a fatwa so their officials can talk the gay guy without getting polluted or contaminated. I hope Middle Eastern leaders everywhere worry that they will contract AIDS/SARS/syphilis/bird flu/Ebola/Judaism just by talking to him. And good for Merkel for having the guts to appoint him. Westerwelle is qualified; he’s been around for awhile. Germany has looked the other way on Islamic sexism and homophobia for too long because of its Turkish population and commercial ties with Iran. Welcome back to the fight for tolerance and modernity.