By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, my good friend Derrick Crowe posted a quote from a recent piece on just wars by the Center for American Progress. It struck me as perfectly encapsulating the pitfalls of the kind of "we didn't mean to aquire one" notion of benevolent empire Americans seem to have inherited from we Brits.
One of the biggest problems of American foreign policy, Niebuhr contended, is that Americans are tempted to overreach, to overestimate the innocence of our own power, and thus also overestimate its possible effectiveness.
It was still on my mind when I read an op-ed in the L.A. Times by Gerrard Russell, who was senior advisor to the UN's Peter Galbraith in Afghanistan. Russell is plain that the "innocence of our own power" is leading us into a mistaken Afghan escalation.
what is depressing about the situation in Afghanistan is not that it has suddenly gotten much worse but that it steadily fails to get better.
...Until an equilibrium of power has been reached among Afghans that is generally unchallenged, pulling out foreign troops would precipitate a civil war. It would be a tawdry and selfdefeating end to the intervention in Afghanistan. Yet, for as long as foreign troops are dominating the conflict with the Taliban, and for as long as the U.S. is seen as the final arbiter of Afghan politics, an equilibrium of power cannot be reached.
The U.S. presence is the Afghan government's safety net, protecting it from the need to take responsibility for the fight against the Taliban. Until Karzai's government sees its survival at stake, it will not play its best game.
This is exactly the argument that major progressive think tanks like CAP made for Iraq, an argument that eventually led to the SOFA agreement for withdrawal of US combat troops by 2011. Yet its an argument none of those think tanks have deployed for Obama's occupation in Afghanistan - and as far as I can see they've not done so purely for political reasons. Russell's oped is like a breath of fresh air on that score, coming as it does from a a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government with three years experience at the highest levels in Afghanistan.
Russell prescription is simple and threefold. First, give up pressuring other nations for extra troops and shrink the coalition to a manageable size, simplifying command and control feuds. Secondly, "withdraw forces to impregnable bases from which they can back up Afghan forces in cases of extreme need" thus ending Afghan perceptions of being occupied by a hostile force fighting on their land. And thirdly, but perhaps most importantly:
We must also lose the fight to give the Afghans a better government than they have had. It is simply not ours to win. Our views of what makes a good minister are not always right by any means. But, even more important, when a government is seen to be imposed by foreign influence, its failures can be blamed on foreigners. Let every pretense be stripped away. Let the failures of the Afghan government be clearly its failures, and let its successes be just as clearly its own. Expose that government, in other words, to the laws of natural selection. It must adapt or die.
Foreign governments can advise. They can set certain conditions for their aid money, which should be simple and apolitical -- an anti-corruption commission, for example. And once they no longer have ownership of the Afghan government, they will be able to enforce those conditions more effectively.
But the Afghan government must be in the lead, clearly in charge, free to make its own political decisions and to learn its own lessons. And that is what the Afghan people must see.
In the long run, rather than the U.S. putting in more troops, it might have a greater effect by putting them out of harm's way. And it might succeed best by failing first.
Russell understands Niebuhr, one of President Obama's favorite writers - our good intentions have led us into a situation where we're doing everything for the Afghans when all we should be doing is offering to catch them if they fall. That's the very definition of "benevolent Empire" that leads into so many accidental mistakes and so much additional chaos down the line. In this context, it's very significant that the "best counterinsurgent you've never heard of" - Odierno's political advisor Emma Sky - is entirely unsure whether COIN does more than paper over the cracks short-term.
Iraq is going through a revolution. While we all may hope that the worst of the violence is behind us, Iraq still has a long way to go before it becomes a viable state and its people come to terms with past injustices and learn to move forward together. 2007 may come to be viewed as the year that set the conditions for sustainable stability. Alternatively, it might be remembered as the year in which the country became more fractured and divided into fiefdoms run by warlords; or as the year in which the various factions positioned themselves for a future civil war, with the United States assisting the Sunni Arabs. We have witnessed notable success in bringing down the violence, but the government has yet to make sufficient progress in developing its capacity and legitimacy, and in narrowing the gap between itself and the people.
Yet that unsure, unproven model is the one Obama is ready to escalate. Instead, he should be taking away the props which stop the Afghan government from being empowered to do things for itself.
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