The Skeptics

In an essay for Armed Forces Journal, Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis writes that after traveling across Afghanistan and speaking with more than 250 soldiers in the field, “What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.” Further down he continues, “I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.”

It’s hard to disagree.

Davis’s essay comes weeks after the top-secret 2011 National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan finds that security gains in the Afghan war are unsustainable and that pervasive corruption, government incompetence and militant safe havens in Pakistan have undercut progress.

I’m reminded of a comment made recently by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee:

There have been gains in security . . . but the Taliban is still a force to be reckoned with. They still occupy considerable land in the country.

“Occupy” is the operative word in that sentence. That gains in Afghanistan are “fragile and reversible” is the oft-repeated mantra of defiant optimists who invoke our inability to achieve key objectives—improve local governance, eradicate corruption, convince Pakistan to shut down safe havens, etc.—as reason to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely. Mind you, the opposite is also true: if such objectives are somehow reached, then we can never leave, since leaving would risk jeopardizing the gains we’ve won.

The intractable cross-border insurgency, of course, will outlive the presence of international troops. After all, a local district mullah who moonlights as a Taliban operative has nowhere else to go. Indeed, as the last ten years have shown, insurgents can outlast coalition troops by merely reemerging after we’ve left—that’s an endurable occupation.

In separate dissents appended to the report mentioned above—a report that reaches similar conclusions about the war made in the 2010 N.I.E.—the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, agreed in the judgment that the Taliban have shown no readiness to abandon their political goals. And, according to Col. Brian Mennes, who commands 3,300 troopers of the 4th Brigade: “The Taliban are going to have a role in post-war Afghanistan. . . . They are Afghans. They are there—it’s just physics!’”

Coalition night raids and drone strikes have managed to eliminate the Taliban’s numerous shadow governors, mid-level commanders and weapons facilitators; however, as the 2011 N.I.E. was quoted as saying, the Taliban’s “strength, motivation, funding and tactical proficiency remains intact.” And “many Afghans are already bracing themselves for an eventual return of the Taliban.”

From war fighters and trigger pullers to desk-bound spooks and armchair analysts, the conclusion reached is that after a decade of war, we still haven’t won. The reason? All politics is local.

Remember that a key component of the Obama administration’s strategy for Afghanistan was winning over local people and luring them away from the Taliban. But the always-perceptive Captain Cat, who has worked on Afghan peace building, offers insight into what went wrong:

As we talk and sip tea, the younger man’s brother arrives, wrapped in a patu. He keeps his hair long, jihadi style, and it pokes out of his pakool. He was a more senior commander than his younger brother, and only reconciled a few months ago.

I ask the commander what he does with his days. “The government doesn’t trust anyone who is reconciled, so no one will hire us. My other brother does small jobs, he owns a cart in town and he sometimes does delivery work. He gets calls from Miram Shah from the Taliban and they tell him “look at your life now, pushing carts. What kind of a man are you?”

“I really regret reintegrating with the government, I wish I hadn’t—but if I go back now, the Taliban will kill me”.

We shake hands and I leave them. Miserable, bored and ashamed, they will while away their days wondering how to feed their families, when the Taliban will come for them and why they put their trust in the government. It’s hard not to wonder the same thing.

Tragically, the vast majority of Afghans were initially happy with the foreign-troop presence. They took a “wait-and-see” approach. But that spirit has largely deteriorated. Conversely, the Taliban are reviled, but the general view among many Afghans toward the movement is either ambivalence or that the Afghan government is worse. Perhaps more importantly, as the Afghan government’s head of Rural Rehabilitation and Development insisted to me at his office in Kabul awhile back: “Taliban is part of our culture.”

The coalition’s deus ex machina is reconciliation with the Taliban. While such an outcome to the war is hardly a victory worth celebrating, it’s difficult to imagine a lasting solution that does not involve the war’s other occupying force, the Taliban.

Image: isafmedia

Dmitri Medvedev with Hu Jintao (www.kremlin.ru)U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice huffed that her country was “disgusted” by Russia and China’s decision to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning the violence in Syria and calling for an immediate end to that bloodshed. Their actions, she added, were “shameful” and “unforgivable.” Not only could Ambassador Rice apparently use a refresher course in diplomatic language, Washington’s response also betrays a troubling arrogance on two levels.

First, U.S. officials seem to believe that even such major powers as Russia and China should simply kowtow to the United States and adopt whatever measure Washington and its allies want on any subject, even when such a measure might be contrary to the interests of Moscow and Beijing. That is an offensive attitude that is provoking more and more irritation and resentment not just in those capitals but in such places as Ankara, Brasilia and New Delhi as well. Someone needs to convey a message to Rice and other Obama-administration officials—and much of the U.S. foreign policy community—that America’s “unipolar moment” is over and that other powers in the international system are increasingly unwilling to take dictation from Washington.

Second, U.S. leaders apparently assume that their Russian and Chinese counterparts have severe cases of amnesia and, therefore, do not recall how the United States and its NATO allies repeatedly exploited and perverted previous UN Security Council resolutions regarding other situations. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, clearly had suspicions about the prospect that even a seemingly mild resolution on the violence in Syria could be twisted for more ambitious policy goals. Although he condemned the bloodshed in Syria, Churkin cited Russian concerns about “regime change” intentions by “influential members of the international community.”

Given the track record of the United States and its NATO partners, Churkin was hardly being paranoid. He very likely recalled the 1999 UN Security Council resolution on Kosovo, which Moscow and Beijing reluctantly accepted following NATO’s unauthorized air war against Serbia, and how Washington and the European powers later ignored the provision that explicitly considered Kosovo still to be Serbian territory, albeit under international occupation. In blatant violation of that provision, the United States and key NATO countries bypassed the UN Security Council and recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008. Moscow and Beijing both complained vehemently that the action of the Western powers was not only illegal, it set a terrible international precedent that could cause problems for numerous countries, including Russia and China.

And Churkin likely recalled the more recent episode in which Moscow and Beijing foolishly accepted a UN Security Council resolution authorizing limited air strikes in Libya, supposedly for the purpose of protecting civilian populations. The ink was barely dry on that resolution before the United States, Britain and France used extensive air strikes to assist rebel forces opposing the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. In other words, an ostensibly humanitarian mission became a cynical fig leaf for a regime-change strategy that NATO was pursuing.

Having been burned on those and other occasions when they went along with UN initiatives favored by the United States and its allies, it is hardly surprising that Moscow and Beijing would be suspicious and hypercautious about even a seemingly innocuous resolution on Syria’s violence. Susan Rice’s temper tantrum in response to their vetoes will certainly not allay suspicions about U.S. motives. Indeed, that reaction will likely intensify Russian and Chinese wariness.

As many expected, Islamist parties will form a dominant majority in Egypt’s first freely elected parliament. The Islamists are here to stay, and fearmongering over their rise is unproductive, since Egyptians will judge for themselves whether Islamists are delivering on their promises. Moreover, understanding the dynamics that brought religious parties to power should be the real goal and will ultimately prove more useful to those engaging this nascent democracy.

The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political arm of Egypt’s underground religious fraternity, the Muslim Brotherhood, won almost half the seats in parliament. The al-Nour Party and the Islamist Alliance, a coalition of puritanical Salafist parties more conservative than the Brotherhood, came in second with 25 percent of the vote. Combined, Islamists have taken about two-thirds of the seats in the new assembly. If placed on a generic right-left political spectrum, Salafis and other archconservatives would be on the Far Right, socialists and non-Islamists would be on the Far Left, and the liberal and moderate nationalist parties like al-Wafd would fall somewhere in the middle alongside the right-of-center Muslim Brotherhood. The movement advocates the system of a ceremonial president overseeing foreign policy and a prime minister in control of domestic affairs. It decided not to field a candidate for the presidency.

Egyptians in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular prefer stability and economic growth to waging jihad. On the one hand, the Brotherhood vows to never recognize Israel; on the other its deputy chairman recently claimed, “We have announced clearly that we as Egyptians will abide by the commitments made by the Egyptian government. . . . They are all linked to institutions and not individuals.” On war, renowned French social scientist Olivier Roy explains that Egypt’s religious parties are constrained by democratic mechanisms that hold the people’s legitimacy:

The “Islamic” electorate in Egypt today is not revolutionary; it is conservative. It wants order. It wants leaders who will kick-start the economy and affirm conventional religious values, but it is not ready for the great adventure of a caliphate or an Islamic republic. And the Muslim Brotherhood knows this.

Elements of the 1978 Camp David Accords are in dispute, but such changes will not lead ineluctably to war. The more interesting questions about the rise of Egypt’s Islamists lie in the domestic arena: Will the Brotherhood make good pluralists? Will religious liberty be deemed apostasy or an individual human right? Will a body of Islamic scholars be established to arbitrate sharia law? Part of the problem is that the Brotherhood members talk a good game about the principles of “liberty and equality” and economic freedom, but they are also smooth political operators. They have repeatedly downplayed their popularity to avoid frightening Egypt’s liberals and foreign observers. In fact, knowing that Turkey—not Iran—is the republican system that many in Egypt want to emulate, the Brotherhood ran a campaign claiming that their party was the Turkish model. It’s not. Al-Wasat, a Turkish-style Brotherhood offshoot, is “the most moderate on the Islamist spectrum,” observes my friend and former colleague Omar Hossino, who studies Egypt and hails from Syria. Al-Wasat got 2 percent (nine seats) of the vote.

So, what’s next? Despite the gathering clouds of conservatism, shifting alliances within Egypt will broaden the culture of political debate. In this respect, contrary to received opinion, the Brotherhood loathes what it considers the destructive excesses of individualism and the oppressive forces of secularism. Post-modern political correctness should not inhibit us from addressing that thorny issue. It matters tremendously. Alongside the military, the winners in Egypt’s parliament will help write the country’s new constitution. To pass it needs a two-thirds vote in parliament, which the FJP could have if it formed a coalition with al-Nour. Recently, however, the ultraconservative Salafis, who vilify secularism, have reached out to liberal parties to form a minority coalition against what they see as the Brotherhood’s near monopoly on power. As academics Philpott, Shah and Toft argue here:

The choice facing Arab Spring nations at this point isn’t one between religion and secular government. It’s a choice between democracy that includes all parties—religious and secular—and a regime that imposes a rigid and exclusive secularism.

That distinction is important. In his in-depth historical survey, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, the late academic Richard P. Mitchell writes that although early adherents to the Brotherhood believed their ruler must be “knowledgeable in Muslim jurisprudence, just, pious, and virtuous.” They also believed that “‘the nation,’ ‘the people,’ in fact, are the source of all the ruler’s authority: The nation alone is the source of power; bowing to its will is a religious obligation.”

If in fact Egypt’s Islamists believe in the “social contract,” in which rulers are the chosen agents of the people, the concern among many in the West that Egypt’s Islamists are inherently incompatible with democracy misses the point. Democracy in an Egyptian context will undoubtedly produce something different; for religious movements like the Brotherhood their primary political focus is the maintenance of Islam. After generations of being oppressed under secular tyrannies, the Brotherhood’s strong defense of Islam through civic activism has resonated with the majority of Egyptians.

Egypt’s revolution is still a work in progress, and thus far it has not been pretty. A Muslim reformation could be the wave of the future. But while austere interpretations of Islamist doctrine are at odds with Western liberal-democratic principles, such contradictions are precisely what Egyptians must sort out. Breathing down their collective neck and attempting to shape their political destiny harms their ability to resolve such incompatibilities on their own terms.

As I wrote a while back, admittedly on a slightly different topic:

Western policymakers, in their attempt to export liberal democracy, also run the risk of establishing a frame of social and political expectation and thereby making the dynamics most necessary for social change inflexible and ethnocentric. Because foreign-led efforts implicitly deprive local people of their ability to deal with social conflicts on their own, there is an argument to be made that societies grow more attached to that which they have sacrificed through arduous struggle.

My friends Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler (R+S) recently penned an interesting article on applying realism as a prescriptive foreign-policy theory. Some have attacked their analysis on nonrealist grounds, positing that liberalism is a productive part of U.S. security, disputing their historical case studies, contending that realism plays a greater role in public policy than (whinging) realists imagine and arguing that realists have no special claim to policy rectitude.

This debate is essential to improving both IR theory and American foreign policy. And since I mainly agree with R+S’s arguments on the points just mentioned, I would like to propose an “internal” critique. R+S’s prescriptive project will impoverish realism as a predictive theory of world politics. In fact, structural-realist premises cannot produce a single strategic prescription for all great powers. But don’t stop reading yet—these theoretical complaints yield an important policy conclusion: America should follow a different set of prescriptions than what R+S suggest.

R+S lay out three prescriptions for realist strategy: balance against great powers and strategically important minor powers through military build-ups and alliances; ignore minor powers in unimportant areas; and encourage local coalitions against strategically important minor powers. Three structural-realist assumptions inform these policies: the international system is anarchic; the present and future intentions of states are inherently uncertain; and war outcomes are unpredictable. In such a world, weakness can be deadly, so states must be highly attentive to the balance of power. But because war is costly and risky, security is best obtained by deterring aggressors and avoiding conflict where possible. R+S defend this logic against the alternatives of appeasement, cooperative reassurance, buck passing, bandwagoning and preventive war.

This analysis suffers from theoretical, prescriptive and logical problems. The root cause of these problems is that states often have good reasons to pursue “opportunistic” strategies, primarily buck passing and war.

Theoretically, the structural-realist project is in trouble if R+S are right: theirs is a world without a geopolitical explanation for war. If the rational response to anarchy, uncertainty and risk is to balance and deter, then there is no rational cause for war at the level of the international system—even the rationalist trinity of commitment problems, private information and indivisible spoils require the willful pursuit of aggressive behavior in order to cause war. As those who have pursued R+S’s project in the past concede, this makes war a result of domestic political pathologies. The structural realist dream of using the balance of power to “explain why some historical periods were more conflictual than others” (pp. xxii) falls by the wayside.

Prescriptively, there are many examples of states who pursued opportunistic strategies and in so doing improved their power position. The wars of German and Italian unification worked out well for Prussia and Piedmont; sitting them out worked well for Britain. The resolution of the various Eastern Crises in the nineteenth century also shows that buck passing can pay. Adopting R+S’s normative prescriptions would force us to conclude that all of these states adopted mistaken policies ex ante, their ex post gains notwithstanding. Such a move seems implausible and seriously undermines the power political criteria used to make their prescriptions.

Fortunately for the realist project, R+S’s universal balancing logic is unsound. The core of their prescription stems from their third assumption that war is a costly and risky business whose outcomes are difficult to predict. Opportunism of all kinds, in their view, risks a war gone wrong. A buck passer cannot be “confident that the war will end in a stalemate,” (pp. 806) and thus may face a victorious state that has profited by war, or it may be forced to intervene later to prevent such an outcome. In the meantime, deterrence has been undermined, making war and its costs more likely. Preventive war, on the other hand, is Bismark’s “suicide from fear of death.” R+S aver that the chances another state will attack are always “less than one-hundred percent, while the costs and risks of starting a war with it are certain.” (pp. 807) Balancing supposedly represents a route to security that avoids the potential for miscalculation by relying on deterrence.

The problem here is that trying to determine whether deterrence will succeed or fail is little different than wagering on the outcome of war and is by no means without costs and risks of its own. Balancing requires paying up-front military and diplomatic costs. Investing in and maintaining a military strong enough to pose “the prospect of having to fight a protracted war of attrition”—R+S’s criterion for deterrence—can be quite expensive. Forming coalitions with other states can chain you to actors who are unreliable, either dragging you into a war for their interests or requiring you to bail them out of a war they are fighting poorly. Balancing can make you are target or a sidekick for one.

And there is no reason to accept that beliefs about whether deterrence will succeed or fail are any easier to generate than beliefs about the outcome of a war. Deterrence calculations for a balancer are simply the flip side of the aggressor’s war calculation. Both are examining a military and political situation and deciding whether war will pay; a balancer is simply looking for ways to make the answer “no,” while aggressors are looking for ways to make the answer “yes.” Buck passers are making the same judgment, except as a third party to the potential conflict. In no case are these judgments easy to make. Indeed, the great lesson of Mearsheimer's Conventional Deterrence—from which R+S draw their deterrence criteria—is not that deterrence is easy but rather that it often fails. Cold War hawks used this point to provocative effect during the central front debates, and Mearsheimer himself used it to justify a policy of using nuclear weapons first in Europe.

The significance of this analysis is two-fold. First, balance-of-power theories should recommend different strategies for different great powers: the distribution of power, the military and political situation, and, most importantly, geography will make different strategies optimal in different contexts. The common critique that structural realism overpredicts balancing is misplaced. The international system provides strong constraints and incentives for strategy, but realists should not be asked, and ought not claim, to predict the full range of state strategies simply on the basis of the balance of power alone.

The policy takeaway here is that the United States should play hard to get: America prospers most as a buck passer, not a balancer. R+S argue that America should encourage local coalitions of minor powers to balance on their own, but it is precisely our propensity to act as the balancer of first, rather than last, resort that discourages others from carrying their own weight in world politics. Indeed, the more certain other states are that R+S’s prescriptions are right—the America can and should hold the balance in regions of strategic importance—the more reason they have to free-ride on our efforts and engage in irresponsible behavior. American grand strategy should focus on emphasizing an important fact to other political actors: the repercussions of your region burning to the ground are orders of magnitude larger for you than for us. Offshore balancing really needs to happen offshore. Otherwise it quickly slips through selective engagement into liberal empire.