War in Afghanistan

President Obama is considering two strategies for Afghanistan: sending in as many as 40,000 more troops to wage a full-blown counterinsurgency war (COIN in Army parlance), as General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has recommended, or keeping the number of troops at the current level of about 68,000 to wage a more limited, counterterrorist effort aimed at al Qaeda and, to a lesser degree, the Taliban.

There is a third option: End our military occupation and leave Afghanistan to the Afghans. Let them deal with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

To begin, 40,000 more troops, which would bring the combined U.S. and NATO force to 140,000, wouldn¹t be enough to conduct an effective counterinsurgency. The historical standard for counterinsurgency is 20 troops per 1,000 civilians. This is the standard recognized in the COIN manual written in large part by General David Petraeus, now head of U.S. Central Command and McChrystal's superior officer. The population of Afghanistan is more than 32 million. An effective counterinsurgency would require 640,000 troops-more than the entire U.S. Army active-duty force (548,000) and nearly the combined total of the active-duty army and Marine Corps (749,000).

The current force size is sufficient to occupy Kabul, the capital, which has a population of nearly 3.5 million. Increasing the force to 140,000 would allow for the occupation of two or three more provinces, such as Kandahar, Helmand, or Herat-but it would still leave thirty provinces unprotected.

Although perhaps with different objectives in mind, analysts as different as Fareed Zakaria and special forces Major Jim Gant have recently argued that the time has come to make deals with the "tribes" in Afghanistan. However, two relatively recent attempts to make such deals further illustrate the almost certain strategic failure of that approach there. During October 2006, an agreement was reached between NATO and Taliban forces requiring both sides to withdraw and cease operations within a designated area of Musa Qala district in Helmand province. However, the Taliban soon complained that NATO had launched air strikes within the exclusion zone and proceeded to attack and occupy the district town until expelled by NATO forces almost a full year later. The re-occupation of the district town by British forces was followed during December 2007 by the public defection of a local chief-also variously described as a "tribal leader," "former Mujahidin guerrilla" or "former Taliban commander"-who had also served as a former provincial governor for the Taliban in the 1990s.

Where is Hillary Clinton? Oh, I know. For a while, she was nursing the broken elbow. Then Tina Brown told her to rip off the burqa, which put Clinton back in the public eye, earning publicity not for what she was doing but for what she wasn't. But since then, things haven't really changed. Clinton, expected to be an outsized force in Obama's cabinet, has been largely dormant. Her tenure as secretary of state is like something out of the film The Lady Vanishes.

For the past couple months it's looked as though Vice President Joe Biden and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry have carved up Clinton's job between them. Biden made the case against adding troops-which needs to be made-and argued as well for pursuing a kind of low-grade warfare against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Kerry took a somewhat different approach. He ensured that Afghan President Hamid Karzai acceded to a run-off election against Abdullah Abdullah rather than throwing the whole electoral board game onto the floor. But the fact is that both men have been in the spotlight on the biggest issue that confronts the Obama administration: what to do with a kleptocracy that shows few signs of being able to resist the Taliban. The reelection, such as it was, of Hamid Karzai today, who was declared the winner by Afghanistan's Independent Electoral Commission, only raises the stakes.

And Clinton? Does anyone know what her views are? Or whether she is actually helping to formulate policy, not to mention strategy, as opposed to enunciating it?

So close yet so far. For five years Europe's elite has been attempting to consolidate the European Union's power in the face of popular opposition. Every EU member government has ratified the so-called Lisbon Treaty, yet the agreement remains in limbo, awaiting the signature of Czech President Vaclav Klaus.

The European Union began as a free-trade zone. The economic benefits were obvious while the threats to national sovereignty were few. Over time the EU gained political authority, but national governments remained supreme. However, in 2004 leading European federalists, or Eurocrats, sought to change that by drafting a constitution, later turned into the Lisbon Treaty-thereby avoiding popular referenda on ratification-turning the EU into something closer to a nation state.

It took two tries to get the treaty past the Irish, whose constitution mandated a popular vote. But the Eurocrats' apparent triumph still has fallen short: the Czech constitution requires President Klaus' signature for ratification, which he so far has withheld. Treaty backers fear that delay could prove fatal: if the treaty goes unratified until the next British election, required mid-2010, the anti-Lisbon Conservatives, widely expected to win, could rescind Britain's ratification. Then the entire project would collapse.

What are Lisbon's benefits? The public obviously has its doubts: a majority of citizens in all twenty-seven member countries wanted to vote on the treaty and in half of the states likely would have voted no.

If the treaty spurs Brussels to become anything like Washington's bloated Leviathan the European people will be clear losers. For instance, Stephen Booth, author of a new report for the think tank Open Europe on civil liberties, worries: "How can citizens expect their fundamental rights to liberty and independence from the state to be protected by unaccountable institutions which have a vested interest in creating new laws?"

From the November/December issue of The National Interest.

TWENTY YEARS after the fall of the Berlin wall, Russia remains as Sir Winston Churchill described it: "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Russia's complexity has contributed to an American debate in which policy preferences too often shape analysis rather than analysis driving policy. It's not a sound basis for decisions when key American interests and goals are at stake.

One doesn't need to be a Russian domestic radical or a foreign Russophobe to see major flaws in the way Russia is ruled. The country's president, Dmitri Medvedev, has catalogued its problems: "an inefficient economy, semi-Soviet social sphere, fragile democracy, negative demographic trends and unstable [North] Caucasus," not to mention "endemic corruption" defended by "influential groups of corrupt officials and do-nothing ‘entrepreneurs'" who want to "squeeze the profits from the remnants of Soviet industry and squander the natural resources that belong to us all."

 FOR THE last nine years, the Israelis have argued that the peace process could not move forward because the Palestinian leadership was weak, governance was dysfunctional, and the capacity and willingness to deliver security were absent. Moreover, there was no clear honest broker willing to trade in peace. Now, all that may be about to change.

The Palestinian nationalist old guard has been democratically ousted from power; the day of the young guard has finally arrived. Fatah, the largest nationalist group, held its sixth party congress in August-the first such meeting in twenty years-and elected a new leadership. The new leadership is much stronger than the old one, made up of more powerful and more popular figures. They are younger. They are educated. They were born and raised in the Palestinian territories. They are determined to push for a more moderate Hamas and to work toward peace with Israel. Security and governance in the West Bank have never been better. The current Palestinian leadership enjoys full control over the security services, something that has not happened since the 1993 Oslo accords. This is no longer the fragmented, dysfunctional Palestinian Authority of old.

IN AFGHANISTAN: a war going in the wrong direction, a fatally flawed election, reconstruction at a standstill and a growing political vacuum that the Taliban is filling even as some NATO countries contemplate withdrawing their troops.

In nuclear-armed Pakistan: a long-running multidimensional crisis, political and ethnic strife, an unprecedented economic depression, and growing local Islamic extremism which plays host to al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban.

In central Asia: the start of a suicide-bombing campaign by Taliban-inspired extremists wanting to derail regimes and governments that are themselves beset by corruption, unwilling to carry out economic reforms, practice authoritarianism and pauperize their people.

In Washington and European capitals: growing doubts about President Obama's commitment to and the viability of the U.S.-led military and nation-building campaign in Afghanistan, continuing suspicions about the intentions of Pakistan's military, the inability to push ahead with a regional strategy or engage with Taliban moderates, and now a lack of a credible government in Kabul.

Some of these points were highlighted by General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, when he sent his new Afghan strategy document to the White House on August 30, 2009. McChrystal called for a widening and deepening of a proper counterinsurgency campaign with the deployment of more U.S. troops and civilians-a campaign that was outlined by President Barack Obama in March when he presented his assertive new Afghan strategy to the American public. Obama then, and McChrystal now, stressed the need to rebuild the Afghan government and win the people's support-in other words, carry out nation building, a phrase that was banned from the Bush White House for eight years.

From the November/December issue of The National Interest.

THE DOLLAR is in trouble. That's clear, and it's been true for a while.

The cornerstone of the global economic system has long been the greenback. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the oil shocks that brought on inflation, the value of the dollar relative to other currencies could not be maintained, so countries moved away from pegging their currencies to America's. But still, the almighty dollar was used by countries all over the world for their reserves. The reserves provided backing for the currency and the country. They were a bank account that could be drawn upon in times of need. If oil prices shot up, a crop failed or lenders demanded their money back, there was a stockpile of money that could be used.

There was a longtime confidence in the dollar, even more when then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker brought down inflation in the early '80s. The dollar was a good "store of value." And the fact that others were willing to hold American dollars was a big advantage to the United States-it could borrow cheaply abroad.

To assure the dollar's standing, by the '90s, America officially had a strong-dollar policy. Speeches by then-Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin affirmed our determination to maintain the value of the dollar. And for much of the period, the dollar was indeed "strong." But it had little to do with the speeches, though I sometimes suspect not only that the secretary of the treasury but also the financial markets thought so.

THROUGHOUT THE recent Bush presidency, Europeans wrung their hands, criticized his administration's unilateralism (a little modified in his second term) and told the world how much they would do if only there was a multilateralist in the White House. Oh, for the chance to be America's international chum.

So now we have in the White House the president of Europe's dreams; the president we all yearned to vote for; a president who is awesomely talented and expresses with intelligent eloquence the sentiments about the world that Europeans had come to think were our own monopoly. Visiting Europe, the president is mobbed not only by the public but by their elected leaders, whose bedraggled or dour images could do with being touched by a little of his capacious quantity of tinsel.

But foreign policy is about more than photo opportunities. Obama should of course be the agent of change in the U.S.-EU relationship. That is at least how Europeans talked about him. Yet, as his administration deals with some of the predicaments of intelligent global engagement, what response can President Obama expect from his European admirers?

EXPECTATIONS, OF course, must be grounded in the history and realities of the recent European experience-what Europe is and what it is not; what Europe has achieved and what it has not. The Continent has been shaped by the institutions and alliances established after the Second World War.

THE GRISLY subject of torture is back with us again, with fresh allegations of CIA misconduct. It is a subject which first came to occupy my thoughts when I was writing a book on the Algerian War, A Savage War of Peace, back in the 1970s. It has never left me. In the course of my researches in France, one of the men I came most to respect, Paul Teitgen, former French prefect of Algiers, remarked to me:

All our so-called civilisation is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear. The French . . . are not torturers by nature. But when you see the throats of your copains [buddies] slit, then the varnish disappears.

Teitgen was a thoroughly honorable man, and he has surely been proved a wise one since 9/11.