Infected By Optimism
Posted on March 27th, 2009
by Daniel Larison |
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David Brooks seems to put aside all of the reasons for skepticism about grandiose plans for Afghanistan that he correctly describes at the start of this column, and apparently he allows himself to ignore his properly skeptical instincts because so many of the people he met in Afghanistan are so very optimistic. Brooks concludes:
I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:
After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.
Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.
Infected may be a far more appropriate word than Brooks imagined. As I have said before, optimism is very much like a disease of the mind, and it is contagious. It inhibits lucid thought, it shuts down core reasoning centers and seems to inflict terrible damage on memory. It is optimism that continually causes us to lose our respect for limits and to have unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve, which leads us to set ourselves up for failure and disaster by encouraging us to overreach and believe that we can find a solution to every problem. There are certain realities in Afghanistan to which there are no American or NATO solutions (the drug trade springs to mind, as does the weak central government in Kabul), because they are not really problems, or at the very least they are not our problems. Their “solution” is so far beyond what our limited national security goals are that we are not going to find the solution in any reasonable amount of time at anything like an acceptable or reasonable cost.
If it was a fantasy in Iraq “to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states,” it remains a fantasy today. It makes no difference what label one gives to it, and it is certainly not a fantasy that only neoconservatives embrace. If Americans have not learned by now that such efforts are folly, and more important that they would not be worth it even if they turned out to be successful, it may indeed say something about our national character. What I fear is that Obama, who has always been an interventionist with great confidence in this fantasy of what American power can achieve, believes that the “energetic and ambitious response” is what the American public desires and will support for years to come. I worry that he will discover midway through his term that the public that voted to bring the war in Iraq to an end really is sick of frittering away our resources to no apparent purpose and for no real national interest, and they will turn on the entire mission in Afghanistan because it has been defined at once too broadly as a grand nation-building exercise and too narrowly in its preoccupation with forces based in western Pakistan.
Because Obama is setting far too ambitious goals for Afghanistan with too few resources, while largely neglecting (or exacerbating) more significant problems inside Pakistan that are gradually making our position in Afghanistan untenable, he runs the risk of jeopardizing public support for the much more limited and achievable security goals that are in our interest and the interest of Afghanistan’s neighbors. In the end, he will have the support of the fantasists who led us into Iraq and liberal internationalists who are still invested in the idea of nation-building, and he will have to face the growing numbers of people who have grown weary of a Long War that has ceased to make any sense (if it ever made sense in the first place). These people are not “isolationist” (as they will inevitably be labeled by the fantasists), but will have no interest in subsidizing open-ended missions in service to a ‘forward’ policy that seems unsustainable and which also seems far inferior to a containment approach.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
On the other hand, you have to give Brooks some credit – very few people could formulate a phrase like “withdraw into realism” without recognizing any irony.
This the same old “who lost China “stuff all over again..Just as the Democrats doubled down in Vietnam lest they cement their rep as a bunch of Commie Symps, so Obama appears prepared to fall all over himself for fear of wearing the “soft on terror” hat. This in spite of what seem to me pretty good instincts on Iraq, Gaza, etc..
Jetan beat me to it. “Withdraw into exhaustion and realism,” indeed! BTW I’ve not not noticed the easiness with which counties resort to reason.
In my experience, people who challenge you to transcend realism are trying to sell something. But we knew that didn’t we?
Opps! too many nots.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’m an optimist.
However, there’s a difference between optimism and stupidity. Calling one the other does not make it so.
It’s true that there’s a difference between stupidity and optimism. Stupidity can sometimes be cured by experience. Optimism seems to resist all forms of treatment.
Actually there’s a place for optimism…how else would have Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Washington won the Revolutionary war or Ford revolutionized American life. However, when it comes to Afghanistan I’m an uber pessimist. I question if we should have ever gone there and we certainly shouldn’t be there seven years later. All this said I think Daniel is completely mischaracterising the administration’s moves this week. They all distinctly “limited liability” to me me. Clearly the military men wanted massive combat reinforcement. They didn’t get it. What they got was the already agreed 17,000 combat troops and another 4000 trainers of one sort and another. There is absolutely no way Obama is going to allow the Afghanistan war consume his presidency in the way Johnson’s and Bush’s presidencies were consumed. Even if he any such suicidal tendencies the Democrats in congress and their man in the WH aka Joe Biden aren’t going to let it happen. At the moment and for the next year probably the war is not on the national radar so Obama has a bit of time to let the military test their theories. If the price is too high by year end he’s going to start calling in his chips and move to basically a policy of containment of both Afghanistan and Pakistan even if it means the Taliban taking over all or parts of both countries. This will cause him to get some neocon flak domestically but since they are totally discredited it’s almost a political advantage. Basically while I’m pessimistic about Afghanistan I’m optimistic that the Obama administration know what they are doing and won’t over commit.
On the nation-building side, Obama was clear about the additional efforts he was proposing we make:
He’s talking about shifting the Afghan economy entirely away from opium poppies and into some other kind of activity–how does this not qualify as pie-in-the-sky? (The Taliban brought an end to the drug trade, thanks to extremely brutal rule, but how do we seriously propose to do this without resorting to those methods?) I don’t know why you have confidence that they won’t overcommit—he just did that in the speech! Oh, yes, and corruption is going to be brought to heel in a low-trust society with weak institutions, too–I forgot to mention that “realistic” goal.
For what it’s worth, Kaplan interprets the administration’s plan in a similar way:
What is worth noting in Kaplan’s assessment is that Afghanistan is, as we know, much less receptive to central government control, which makes nation-building even more foolhardy than I still think it is in Iraq, but the security threat to Kabul from the Taliban is less grave. Moving forces into the south and continuing drone attacks across the border all seem sure to make our position less tenable in the coming years. Preventing Pakistan from being destabilized ought to be the top priority, and almost everything in the Taliban-centric approach we are seeing does not aid in stabilizing Pakistan, but seems likely to have the opposite effect.
With due respect Daniel politicians say all sorts of things. And if we’re relying on Kaplan’s interpretation of reality then all is lost. As I said in my piece this all smacks very much of a limited liability investment. The nation building component is cleary, and correctly, part of the Petraeus classic counter insurgency solution. My comment would be don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does. And what he’s done so far is fairly small potatoes if you contrast it with the surge of sainted memory in Iraq. Basically I think they are figuring out what to do and this is going to take a little time. “They” are Holbrooke, Petraeus, Clinton, Biden and Obama..plus a few people who aren’t on the radar. I’ve got a lot of confidence in the essential commonsense of Holbrooke, Clinton and Biden and even the General doesn’t seem to be a member of the MacArthur school of military thinking. So any counsel Obama gets is going to be very measured and he’s a very careful man as becomes more apparent by the day. We’ll have to see how this turns out but you’re being over alarmist in my opinion. Btw while I’ve never been to Afghanistan I have been to some of the borderlands in Pakistan which is why I’m an uber pessimist about the whole venture.
No one is relying on Kaplan’s interpretation. It is another perspective that I happened to see as I was responding. It may be that Kaplan is not always wrong, and in this case his observations seem to match up with what a lot of other experienced people are seeing. Everything Obama has said about his position on Afghanistan and Pakistan has so far been borne out by what he has done or what has been permitted on his watch. Time and again, the people who have misread Obama on foreign policy are the ones who don’t take what he says seriously enough.
I agree that the scale of the military commitment is small compared to the “surge” (which failed in its political goals and therefore failed on its own terms), but for all of the structural reasons why the “surge” was never likely to succeed in achieving politicial reconciliation the nation-building enterprise is also unlikely to succeed in reaching any of its goals.
The problem in Afghanistan is not one of massive internecine fighting between sectarian groups; civilian insecurity is nowhere near as great as it was in Iraq. The “surge” model is almost entirely beside the point. What will matter is whether Petraeus can successfully bribe elements of the Taliban as he bribed Anbar Sunni militias. The rest of the nation-building project is a waste and a distraction. Of course, we have yet to determine whether the fix in Anbar was just a temporary one or something more than that.
The borderlands of Pakistan have been lawless (or rather, outside control of central government) and will by and large continue to be for a very long time to come. If we define success as eliminating a near-permanent feature of that part of the world, we will necessarily fail. If we do things to try to shore up the Pakistani state, rather than undermine it, we might have some limited success. At this point, what we need to aim for is containing the damage already done to Pakistani stability and creating minimally stable conditions in Afghanistan that permit us to withdraw and turn entirely to a containment approach. If we actually aim for all the goals Obama is laying out, I don’t see things ending well.
Daniel I think we should get the hell out of there as soon as possible. This makes me sceptical of “any” solutions that involve defeating the Taliban or nation building so if anything I’m coming at it from an even more pessimistic direction than you. So you’d expect me to be even more concerned about yesterday’s announcements but I’m not. The reason is their obvious tenuousness which is commented upon by another blogger at AC who refers to an implicit exit strategy. I just think you’re building castles in the air which may or may not come to pass. I agree with all your comments about the surge in Iraq, we tamped down violence by boots on the ground and laying out a lot of cash but that’s all we did, tamp it down. To me the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan are in a different league in terms of complexity and intractability and I think that will become increasingly apparent as the year wears on and Obama will react accordingly. You seem to think he’s going to bet the ranch on nation building in Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem remotely possible to me and therefore all this agonizing is a bit of waste of time.