Published: November 13 2009
Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador to Kabul and a former army commander in Afghanistan, set the cat among the Washington pigeons this week when he warned against any further increase of American forces, essentially because Hamid Karzai is not a reliable partner.
These leaked (un)diplomatic cables give a picture of an Afghanistan strategy at sixes and sevens. They nevertheless go to the heart of the agonising debate inside the Obama administration on what sensibly to do about what is beginning to look like a quagmire.
Mr Eikenberry is basically right. The counterinsurgency strategy laid out by General Stanley McChrystal, President Obama’s hand-picked commander on the ground, while totally coherent, is far too ambitious. It requires a level of forces, and a length of time that the US political timetable and shrivelling public support for the war among all the allies is unlikely to sustain. Simply put, few ultimately believe the US and Nato have the stamina for it.
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Salvaging Bush’s ‘legacy:’ It’s all about the ’surge.’
There’s a move afoot now to find something during the last eight years that was not a total failure, and some on the right (and the neocon left) are landing on the ’surge.’
Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, is one of those supposed lefties. He wrote a column recently in the Washington Post demanding that everyone admit that the surge worked. Publius at Obsidian Wings responds:
At first glance, Beinart’s request seems reasonable. Democrats – particularly younger ones – should admit that the surge was correct and that it represented Bush’s “finest hour.” Well, I don’t.
Here’s what’s really going on underneath Beinart’s reasonable sounding column. Beinart has been – and remains – committed to the idea that the use of force to solve problems is a good manly thing that Democrats should embrace. The problem, of course, is that Exhibit A of his argument – Iraq – didn’t turn out so well. (To his credit, he openly admits this point).
He still, though, wants to salvage his larger argument that force is good. In that sense, his surge cheerleading is sort of like grabbing the ball after the game is over and saying, “See, I win. Force can be good.”
On the merits, I think Marc Lynch sarcastically asks the right question: “[P]erhaps we could have another round of arguments as to whether the surge brigades arriving in the spring of 2007 caused the Sunni turn against al-Qaeda in the fall of 2006?”
But there is a serious point here. As bad as the Iraq War was, Beinart’s general worldview is arguably more dangerous. That’s because if the public accepts the Beinart worldview that force is usually the answer, then we’re destined to keep fighting new wars that solve no problems, but make people feel temporarily hairy-chested. One would hope we had learned more from Iraq.
