The War Has Been Postponed
By Harvey Sapolsky
Published: 18 October 2009
Seven months ago, the U.S. military was being praised by many security specialists as finally having gotten it: It understood that its future was counterinsurgency best practices, which means nation-building under fire from insurgents in the world's toughest neighborhoods.
Yes, it had taken a while, but the military's top leadership had finally seen the light. Future war would mean fighting insurgencies, and counterinsurgency was an interagency military/civilian team effort requiring skills in building governments, putting in the national plumbing - lights, roads, sewers, schools - and protecting the citizens from insurgents while training the local military to conduct security operations and to think and behave democratically.
U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus wrote the manual. All the big think tanks and study groups had called it. America needed to nation-build to fight terrorism. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had cut the programs of the old thinkers who wanted Cold War-type systems instead of signing up for the new fight. The neo-cons had been banished, but their democracy-spreading anti-al-Qaida strategy had melded nearly seamlessly with liberal internationalist doctrine stating that terrorism was bred in the hopelessness of failed impoverished states.
Afghanistan was to be the test case. Iraq was the bad war, but Afghanistan was the good one. Our allies were there, NATO somehow being tricked into showing up. The United Nations was there. Humanitarian groups were there. Next door was a threatened Pakistan, the Muslim nation with nuclear weapons and an extremist presence. We had to get Afghanistan right.
The new administration was for it. The new security team was filled with advocates recruited from the think tanks and academia, people who had done the articles and conference volumes on the subject. Most of the correspondents covering the war were on board. There was a consensus as much as consensus exists these days.
Nation-Builders Vanish
And today it all seems so long ago. There is hardly anyone beyond the few neo-cons left standing and some Republican commentators who is willing to endorse the military's plan for the full nation-building deal. Counterinsurgent advocates are silent. Liberal interventionists are silent. We hear only how corrupt the Afghan government is and how backward Afghanistan is, as if this is news.
The Obama administration is supposedly mulling its options, ignoring the nation-building goals it was proclaiming for Afghanis-tan in March and still giving speeches about as late as August.
I think the U.S. health care debate did it. The Obama administration is having a much harder fight to gain enactment of health-care reform than seemed likely in the spring. The big Democratic majorities it has in Congress are apparently not big enough to get it done. The cost of reform is being questioned, especially after the series of expensive bailouts for the nation's banks, housing market and auto industry. War and domestic reform don't mix well.
In the modern parade of Democratic Party presidents, Franklin Roosevelt did reform first, then war; Harry Truman did war, not reform; Lyndon Johnson tried reform and war simultaneously, and essentially lost both and a Democrat majority for a generation. Jimmy Carter did nothing, and President Bill Clinton tried but gave up on both reform and war.
I think President Obama is going to downplay the war, not surrendering outright but finding a way to make the war less important politically than reform or less visible until reform is secure domestically. More troops perhaps, but deployed more slowly than requested. More aid for Afghanistan, but dependent upon the demonstration of the Afghan government's own improvements. Most of the nation-builder advocates are loyal Democrats and will hold their tongues. The war, and certainly the application of the full counterinsurgency manual, has been postponed until health care reform is in place. ■
Harvey Sapolsky is a professor of Public Policy and Organization Emeritus at MIT, and co-author, with Eugene Gholz and Caitlin Talmadge, of "U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy."
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