Paul Pillar

With the double milestones in Afghanistan of NATO turning over the remainder of its combat role to Afghan government forces and the announced imminent opening of peace talks with the Taliban, it is an appropriate time to note a few lessons demonstrated by this war.

Foreign military expeditions are more likely to be longer and costlier than expected than to be shorter and cheaper. Most Americans would have been astounded back in the autumn of 2001 if told that U.S. troops would still be fighting and dying in Afghanistan more than eleven years later. Other examples come easily to mind, the Iraq War of the past decade being an especially obvious one. An exception to this pattern was Operation Desert Storm in 1991, aided by the clarity and limited nature of the objective of liberating Kuwait.

Finding off-ramps is hard. The initial goals of the intervention in Afghanistan, of rousting the perpetrators of 9/11 from their haven and ousting their then-allies from power, were noble. They were achieved in the first few weeks of the intervention, after which it probably would have been better to declare the operation a success and go home. But mission creep is a ubiquitous phenomenon.

Welcomes get warn out. Afghanistan used to be a rare oasis in the Muslim world of favorable sentiment toward the United States. The dissipation of much of that goodwill is the almost inevitable result of the damage, frictions, and anger that come from foreign occupation and the operations of a foreign military force.

Hassan Rouhani's stunning and sweeping victory in the Iranian presidential election is already generating much debate among expert Iran-watchers about how to interpret this outcome. There are different views, for example, on what inference should be drawn regarding the posture of Supreme Leader Khamenei toward the election. Was this outcome one that the leader might have anticipated and is part of a skillful management of contending factions, or does the election result instead indicate that the leader's control of Iranian politics is less than was often surmised? There also are different views on what role sanctions-induced economic strain may have had on the election. These are genuine questions on which objective and well-informed observers can disagree. Not genuine is the spin from some other fast-off-the-mark commentators who are endeavoring to deny any significance to Rouhani's victory and to portray the Iranian regime as nothing but the same old recalcitrant adversary—a spin motivated by opposition to reaching agreements with Iran and the favoring of confrontation and even war with it.

Useful implications for policy toward Iran can be drawn without resolving all these analytical questions, even the genuine ones. Sometimes a particular course of action is the best course under any of several different interpretations of exactly what is going on in another nation's capital. This is one of those instances. In particular, there are clear implications for approaching the next stage of negotiations on, and policy toward, Iran's nuclear program—which, for better or for worse, is the subject dominating discussion of relations with the Islamic Republic.

Sometimes a child is able to drag a parent into doing something the parent might not really want to do—say, taking the kid to an amusement park—through a two-step process. The first step is to nag, repeatedly and insistently, about going to the park. The parent, not wanting to be bothered about such a chore, tries to buy time and assuage the child by saying that they aren't going to the park now but they will when a suitable day arises. After some time goes by and the trip to the amusement park still has not been taken, the child's theme becomes, “But you promised.” The issue is framed no longer just in terms of the pros and cons of going to the amusement park but also in terms of the parent's credibility. The parent, worried about maintaining credibility of both promises and threats on other possible matters, gives in.

A similar process is occurring with some of those who, for whatever ill-conceived reason, would welcome a war with Iran. With some of the same people, it is occurring also with the nearer-term issue of intervening in the civil war in Syria. In each case step one is agitation in favor of threatening the use of military force. Step two is to argue that unless the threat is carried out, U.S. credibility will be damaged. Similar to the child who wants to go to the amusement park, the same persons whose urgings led us to get into an option-reducing box then yammer about the damage that results from being in that box, unless we get out of it in the particular way they want.

A perpetual, and perpetually misguided, American notion about international negotiations is that sitting down to talk constitutes some sort of reward for the party on the other side of the table—a reward to be bestowed only in return for good behavior. This notion may be involved, even if only indirectly, in the curious U.S. resistance to participation by Iran in the prospective international conference about the conflict in Syria. Perhaps the resistance has more recently lessened; on Tuesday the deputy Iranian foreign minister commented in Moscow that Iran had received a “verbal invitation” to attend the conference, without specifying who had extended the invitation. We should hope that the verbal invitation will turn out to be a firm one.

The United States has been joined in its resistance by France. Maybe Paris's posture has been rooted somehow in old French hang-ups about the Levant. The reason for the similar posture by the Obama administration, notwithstanding its leadership role along with Russia in arranging the conference in the first place, is unclear. If the administration itself does not subscribe to the talking-as-reward school of thought, possibly the policy has been just one more manifestation of an environment in Washington in which anything that could be construed as a positive gesture toward Iran is considered bad politics and the opposite is always good politics.

Sixteen years ago I participated in the annual summer study of the Defense Science Board, a panel of senior experts and executives from the private sector created in the 1950s to advise the Department of Defense on scientific and technical matters. The summer study is the board's biggest project each year, for which it assembles a large ad hoc task force going well beyond the board's own membership. The topic of the study performed in 1997 was DoD Responses to Transnational Threats. I worked with a science and technology subgroup that made its principal focus the use of modern information technology to collect and exploit data pertinent to terrorist threats.

The resulting report recommended aggressive exploitation of the then-new World Wide Web and data-handling technology available in the private sector to perform such collection and exploitation. The report talked about the importance of exploiting “meta-information” on use of the Internet as well as substantive information possibly pertinent to terrorist threats. The term “data mining” was used, not as a dirty word but instead as a descriptor of the kind of technology that the government ought to employ more extensively. Perhaps as a reflection of the fact that it was mainly scientists and engineers and not lawyers who wrote this part of the report, there was no mention of drawing fine lines or indeed any lines between collection abroad and within the United States.

The president's appointments of Susan Rice and Samantha Power certainly have caused a stir, as reflected in commentary right here at The National Interest. Without adding to the pile of overall judgments about these choices, something more can be said about how these appointments raise an issue concerning the correct and incorrect ways to draw lessons from history. Both appointees are identified with ex post facto anguish over the international response to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and a determination not to let a similar event happen again. Rice is quoted by Power, in the latter's later writing about this event, as saying that “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”

A visit to Russia by a Republican Congressional delegation led by Dana Rohrabacher of California has featured some unusual twists. The trip was at least partly arranged by action-film star Steven Seagal, which makes it only slightly less weird, as far as the role of entertainers is concerned, than Dennis Rodman being a point man for engagement with the leader of North Korea. Then there is the whole idea of GOP legislators being activists for greater security cooperation with the Russians. They belong to the party whose presidential nominee last year described Russia as the principal geopolitical adversary of the United States—an “absurd statement,” according to Rohrabacher this week.

The general idea being promoted by the delegation is sound, and to the extent the trip makes a difference it may well be to the good. A major theme of the trip is the importance of cooperation against Islamist terrorism. Bilateral cooperation with a wide range of partners has long been an important component of U.S. counterterrorism. The list of those partners is very long, longer than most of the public is apt to expect, and has included many states that have generally been thought of as U.S. adversaries. Acting on shared interests between Russia and the United States in opposing certain varieties of terrorism makes sense. But any such cooperation should be undertaken with eyes open about a couple of things that the Congressional delegation, based on its comments, does not seem to appreciate fully.

The State Department released this week the government's legislatively mandated annual report on international terrorism. There is no doubt what headline the administration hopes will be taken away from the release of the report, which covers the calendar year 2012. In a background conference call for reporters on Friday, Senior Administration Official One got immediately to the main message being pushed: that “one of the most noteworthy conclusions” in compiling the report was a “resurgence of terrorist activity by Iran and Hezbollah.” In fact, activity by Iran and Hezbollah was the only subject of the press backgrounder, and Iran and Hezbollah were treated as two peas in a pod that jointly account for this “alarming trend.” The other briefer, Senior Administration Official Two, joined in the messaging with gusto, warning anyone who might look at Hezbollah as a political actor that it is “a terrorist organization, and not just a terrorist organization, but a broad organization that is morally bankrupt to its very core.”

Many who offer opinions on policy toward Iran, and particularly on how to handle negotiations over its nuclear program, implicitly claim an unusual ability to read the minds of Iranian decision-makers. Assertions are made with apparent confidence about what the Iranians want, fear or believe, even without any particular evidence in support. Several possible explanations can account for the misplaced confidence.

One is that we are seeing common psychological mechanisms in action. A well-established human tendency is, for example, to interpret cooperative behavior on another person's part as a response to one's own behavior, while ascribing uncooperative conduct to innate orneriness on the part of the other person. Thus there is a failure to understand how firmness in Iran's negotiating position is a response to firmness on the Western side, and there is an accompanying tendency to interpret a lack of Iranian concessions as indicating an Iranian desire to stall and drag out negotiations.

Another explanation is that a particular frame of mind is imputed to the Iranians because it implies a U.S. policy that is politically popular for other reasons. Loading ever more onerous sanctions on Iran is a popular political sport, especially on Capitol Hill, to show toughness or love for Israel. The politicians who play that sport therefore favor a view of the Iranian mindset according to which the Iranians are simply not hurting enough and need to hurt some more, after which they will cry uncle.

As Iraq after the U.S. invasion became a violent cauldron that featured, among other forms of bloodletting, a surge of Sunni terrorism, American apologists for the war and other supporters of the invasion who were trying to cope with their cognitive dissonance put the violence in a favorable light that even got additional mileage out of the pre-war fiction about how invading Iraq would be a way of dealing with al-Qaeda. The new concept was the flypaper theory of counterterrorism: the idea that the war was serving to attract terrorists to a place where U.S. forces could more easily gun them down. Better to fight them and kill them in Iraq, went the idea, than to fight them later after they got to the United States.

The fundamental flaw in the flypaper theory as applied to what was happening in Iraq is that it assumed there was a fixed number of jihadi terrorists, some subset of whom were cooperatively coming to Iraq to be martyred. Far from there being a fixed number, the war significantly boosted the number. The great majority of those who committed terrorist violence in Iraq were not, prior to the war, previously established terrorists who had been hiding and plotting in some unreachable place in South Asia or elsewhere. Instead, they were perpetrating such violence for the first time, having been stimulated to do so by the U.S. invasion and occupation and subsequent Iraqi civil war.