Day: December 22, 2010
Vanden Heuvel beats Boot but war will continue
I find it hard to imagine that any objective person reading Katrina vanden Heuvel on the costs of the Afghanistan war and Max Boot on the need to give General Petraeus a chance today would come out in favor of continuing the war for four more years, at great cost in money and lives. Boot’s Iraq analogy is stretched to the breaking point, as Nir Rosen made clear in spades yesterday. Vanden Heuvel’s enumeration of the opportunity costs is daunting.
This does not mean that vanden Heuvel is going to win the argument. Beyond Vice President Biden’s promise to be out of Afghanistan by 2014 “come hell or high water,” I detect no push in the Administration for accelerating withdrawal. As vanden Heuvel herself notes, the current time line enables the President to appease both hawks (with the continuing commitment) and doves (with the promised drawdown). Removing the Afghanistan war as a partisan issue, and a divisive one among Democrats, during the 2012 presidential campaign no doubt counts as a big plus for the Administration.
Vanden Heuvel goes wildly off track in appealing to John Kerry to put the wooden stake in the heart of the Afghanistan war, as Senator William Fulbright to the Vietnam war. Kerry has nowhere near the prestige of Fulbright; if anything, a move against the war by Kerry would be seen as one more dovish maneuver by the anti-Vietnam war protester (don’t get the wrong impression: I was one too). To get the U.S. to accelerate the withdrawal from Afghanistan would require a clarion call from a Republican hawk. Little chance of that.
Instead what we need to do is make the most of what military gains Petraeus manages over the next four years by increasing the civilian effort, establishing in at least some parts of the country enough legitimate Afghan governing authority to block reentry of Al Qaeda into communities as we withdraw, and continuing the effort to reintegrate individual Taliban and to negotiate an overall political reconciliation.
There is unlikely to be victory in Afghanistan, but there needn’t be defeat either.
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More evenhandedness needed
It is odd to me that those who are knocking Kosovo for unsubstantiated allegations against the Kosovo Liberation Army and current Prime Minister Hashim Thaci spare nary a sentence for Serbia’s continued failure to arrest and turn over to The Hague Ratko Mladic, indicted for well-established war crimes in Bosnia. Even for Belgrade’s supporters, this should be a serious embarrassment, never mind those who pretend to even-handedness.
In the meanwhile, it has emerged that Dick Marty, the Council of Europe rapporteur who made the allegations against Thaci and the KLA, was a vigorous opponent of Kosovo independence. His arguments, and others, have now been thoroughly and completely rejected by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion.
Clearly Marty’s allegations require a more even-handed and professional investigation. Thaci has agreed to cooperate–he can hardly do otherwise. In the meanwhile, it behooves us all to leave the Kosovars to sort out the political consequences on their own. Those who advocate using this moment to ram through solutions to serious problems–like the status of Kosovo’s Serb-controlled north–are only showing their own biases against Pristina and sowing the seeds of future resentment.
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Beyond DADT and New START
As New START heads for ratification and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell gets signed, I am feeling the need to explain why I’ve devoted so little time to both, even though my Twitter feed talks about little else.
In my way of thinking, both New START and DADT are peripheral to the main war and peace issues of our time. Even though New START was bought with a giant increase in funding for modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons, far more than even proponents of modernization envisaged at the beginning of the process, it can be argued that without the treaty efforts to strengthen the nonproliferation regime through measures like a cut-off in production of fissile material would be harder. It can also be argued that eliminating DADT will grow the pool of competent people interested in entering the U.S. military and eliminate a hypocritical restriction unworthy of a country dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
But these are indirect arguments, secondary effects that do not deal directly with the main war and peace issues of our day. People are fighting and dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia–if peacebuilding efforts are not handled well more will die. Iran poses a serious challenge to American goals in the Middle East, with consequences for friends and allies as well as ourselves. The United States faces difficult choices: are we right to devote so many troops and so much money to Iraq and Afghanistan, or should we be paying more attention to Yemen and Somalia, or Iran? Will our beefed up diplomatic efforts in Sudan avoid catastrophe there after the January 9 referendum on independence for the South? There are real trade-offs among the conflict issues of our day, with life and death consequences for real people.
Let me be clear: I support repeal of DADT as well as ratification of New START. These are good things that respectively improve America’s record of consistency with its own ideals and increase the prospects for controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons. But they are mainly about us: our foolish discrimination against people who want to serve the nation, our nuclear weapons and their modernization.
The Administration should not rest on these laurels, important and deserved as they are. There is a dangerous world beyond DADT and New START that needs American attention.
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