Category: Monkwire

The Presidential Agenda

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

In the 1990s, the manifest pull of domestic and foreign policies on Presidential decision-making, and the politics that surround it, was plain as day. Has the choice between the two really been forgotten or invisible since 9/11? I want to say that for the last eight years, domestic and foreign interests were subsumed under a newly expanded  national security rubric. Is that the case?  It’s worth considering as Obama and his team make their decision on next steps for Afghanistan. In The New Republic today, Washington Post columnist and Georgetown faculty E.J. Dionne, Jr., asks whether Obama should “let Afghanistan trample his domestic agenda”:

WASHINGTON–At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama.

“In my judgment,” he recalls saying, “war kills off great reform movements.”

The American record is pretty clear: World War I brought the Progressive Era to a close. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was waging World War II, he was candid in saying that “Dr. New Deal” had given way to “Dr. Win the War.” Korea ended Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and Vietnam brought Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to an abrupt halt.

Ground Truths at the AfPak Channel [UPDATED]

~ Michael A. Innes ~ 6 Comments

As of today, I’m a contributor at Foreign Policy magazine’s excellent AfPak Channel, edited by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation. My initial blurb is on David Martin’s 60 Minutes interview with COMISAF, General Stanley McChrystal, and a response to Michael O’Hanlon’s comments in the New York Times on the lack of face time between Obama and McChrystal. Stay tuned: I’ll be writing more about “The Two NATOs”, Fobbitism, and Afghanistan.

I’m writing on UK time right now; I’ll add direct links as soon as the piece is up (after our North American cousins get done with their morning coffee…).

UPDATE:  It was just posted – you can read it here.

The Smartest Man In the Room

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been a Holbrooke skeptic for years, unimpressed with his public responses to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s persistent failure to thrive. He faced years of criticism for the General Framework Agreement for Peace, an imperfect document that may have been the least bad of several possible outcomes of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. The GFAP, more colloquially known by the name  of one of the two places – Dayton (the other was a little town in France called Paris – you may have heard of it) – where it came into being, according to Holbrooke, was a sound plan. The failure, he repeated on several occasions, was in the implementation, a process during which he was conspicuously absent and for which he showed no sense of personal responsibility.

George Packer’s profile of Holbrooke in last week’s New Yorker is a fascinating exercise in contextualization, painting the career diplomat as a creature of privilege, ambition, and drive shaped not just by his role in the Balkans during the 1990s and now Afghanistan, but principally in Vietnam in the 1960s, where he cut his then junior teeth on the problems of state and war. I’m no less skeptical of the man now than before I read the profile – an inherent distrust of queue-jumpers and privilege, maybe – but it does put things into perspective, and I can certainly admire his intellect and dedication to service. 

There was a line in Packer’s article  – a Holbrooke quote – along the lines of the smartest man in the room not always being the rightest about things. That struck me as a pretty profound observation in its own right. Harper’s has now dredged up from its archives a Holbrooke essay on the subject originally published in 1975. In it, he took a hard swipe at the tyranny of quantification that held sway in McNamara’s Washington. It’s still relevant today. No matter how often or loudly politicians and generals deny that they’re focused on numbers as measures of success, it’s still what they demand in practice. The thirst for native-knowing advisors is strong these days, too, so one would hope that that’s an indication of progress in how we do things… but – to take one example – given how cultural knowledge has been reduced to a “human terrain” of digital cartography and data points, my reflex is to think there’s a pathology at work that insists on cybernetizing common sense and knowledge, a condition that runs counter to intuitive, gut level insight. 

Hobrooke, c. 1975:

…the smartest man in the room is not always right. The truism may have seemed all too obvious to some people, while others may have seen in it a logical contradiction: the rightest man in the room, they might say, is by definition smart. Regardless of semantics, I think that there is a real point to all this: Vietnam was not a special case, and in Washington smart men tend to put down people whom they regard as less smart with little regard for the substance of those people’s views. The way the government works, speed gets rewarded more than deliberation, brilliance more than depth.

Flipping the COIN

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies,  raises a few interesting points about counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in Afghanistan. “Counterinsurgency doctrine, or COIN,” he writes, “has captured the hearts and minds of many in the D.C. policy community. Upon close inspection, however, it becomes clear that COIN, at least as applied to Afghanistan, is built on a number of shaky assumptions.”

Hmmm, way to take a swipe at CNAS. I especially like this one:

…the COIN framework is built on the larger assumption that eliminating the Taliban and stabilizing Afghanistan is the best use of American resources in the broader effort to combat terrorism. Al Qaeda’s presence in a pre-9/11, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan has convinced many officials that a Taliban takeover would result in al Qaeda’s inevitable return to the state. But al Qaeda already has established itself in Pakistan’s semi-governed spaces. Along with Taliban and other extremist militants, the group enjoys the relative safety of these territories, where Pakistani sovereignty precludes any substantive U.S. ground force. Even if al Qaeda were to reenter Afghanistan sometime in the future, the United States would face the same basic terrorist threats that it does today. Critics will argue that Afghanistan served as a base and planning center for 9/11. True enough; but al Qaeda, in establishing a presence in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen has already developed numerous “safe havens.” In short, our overwhelming focus on Afghanistan fails to serve a more nuanced counterterrorism strategy that acknowledges the many other areas in which al Qaeda operates.

I’ve always maintained that a state-centric approach to networked transnational threats  – interventions that focus on fixing weak and failing states – is a fool’s errand. Nelson explains why pretty clearly, I think. Not that states are irrelevant; simply that the way armed non-state actors distribute their resources generally runs counter to – or more precisely flows around –  the organization of large footprint missions. 

Go read the rest.