Paris, September 15, 2009 – The more one hears the discussion among Democrats about the war in Afghanistan the more one feels that it is a serious handicap that Barack Obama has no personal experience of international relations or of foreign policy or military service, beyond such experience as one gains as a first term U.S. senator.
His vice president, Joseph Biden has a great deal of legislative experience in these matters, and knows a lot about foreign affairs, but from hearing him speak and reading what he has written I feel no confidence in his judgement, which seems entirely the conventional wisdom of the policy community and the newspaper editorial pages, with nothing original or questioning in it.
That is to say, Senator Biden knows everything about America’s foreign relations, but it only adds up to all that “everybody knows,” and the United States is not in a situation today that recommends a discredited conventional wisdom as a guide to future policy.
On Afghanistan, there seems to be no coherent reason or vision as to why we are there. To “catch” Osama bin Laden, ten years after his crime? But you don’t have to take control of a country of 250 thousand square miles and 3l million people in order to catch a terrorist leader. (Especially when it is taken for granted that he actually is in Pakistan.) You don’t have to take it upon yourself to solve Afghanistan’s internal social problems or to “defeat” (how, no one knows) the Taliban military, political and religious uprising in the country. What has that really to do with Americans?
Mr. Biden is reported to oppose “doubling up” in troops to “win” the Afghanistan battle, but because he believes Afghanistan is the wrong war and Pakistan the right war (which has not yet even started). This seems also the view of the Obama advisor, Bruce Riedel, who headed an interagency policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan some months ago, and published the findings in a recent issue of The National Interest magazine in Washington.
His and the vice presidents’s position seems to be that while Afghanistan has been important enough (as a “nest” for al Qaeda) to be worth a war, Pakistan offers a much better and more important war because it harbors not only Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban -- and nuclear weapons as well. If you are looking for a real war, they say, the prospect of Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in possession of nuclear weapons makes a much more exciting threat scenario than conducting a losing counterinsurgency campaign in poor, land-locked Afghanistan, where the enemy is armed with locally-made assault rifles and maneuvers on motorbikes.
It is one of the poorest countries on earth, lacks nuclear weapons as well as any ability to build them, and has no significant resources other than agricultural land on which opium poppies flourish. Once, before all this started, its geographical location interested U.S. oil interests as providing a route for a pipeline to carry Central Asian oil to the sea. But today there are cheaper ways for moving oil than by a pipeline across a country at war.
The following scenario of global menace appears to fascinate these people in the Obama administration. Al Qaeda will take control of the Taliban (who are not their allies, but have merely given them hospitality). The Taliban will then take control of Pakistan away from the country’s rather highly-regarded army (of nearly a million and a half active and reserve personnel), and Pakistan’s citizenry of 182 million people.
Afghanistan is composed of 31 million people. The Taliban are a minority political movement drawn from the Pashtun population, which makes up 40% of the total. The rest are Tajiks (26%), Hazaras (19%), Uzbeks (6%) and others, none of who display the ambition to conquer Pakistan. Not even Hindu India would want to conquer and try to rule Muslim Pakistan, which would result in nothing but trouble for them -- although they might wish to eliminate Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent; but nuclear deterrents exist in order to deter other countries from eliminating the first country’s deterrent, and thus far this has worked.
A retired CIA counter-terrorism chief named Haviland Smith has suggested in a newspaper article that Mr. Obama trapped himself during the campaign into having “his own” war (just like most other recent presidents). He made the promise to leave Iraq, but to defend against Republican accusations of weakness he announced that instead he would fight the “real war” in Afghanistan, theoretically against Osama bin Laden. Now he’s caught, and has handed the war over to his military advisors who assure him that they know how to win wars, even though they are at a loss to explain what would constitute victory in this one.
My own feeling is that the situation is even worse. I think the American government now has become institutionally a war government, which finds its rationale in waging war against small and troublesome countries and peoples, in the generalized pursuit of running the world for the world’s own good. In this effort, one war is pretty much like another, and every president, to be reelected, needs one.
© Copyright 2009 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
