Worldmaking

by David Milne

  Wolfowitz did not state precisely what the president should have done instead. Another U.S. intervention in the Middle East might have midwifed a permanent democratic revolution in Iran. Or it might have drawn the United States into a civil war as bitter and intractable as the one in Iraq. Or it might have raised and then dashed the expectations of ordinary Iranians—alienating everyone. What we do know is that Obama’s inaction looked weak and unprincipled and Wolfowitz’s critique was easy to make but difficult to own. Henry Kissinger strongly backed Obama: “I think the president has handled this well. Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Mousavi, would be a handicap for that person. And I think it’s the proper position to take that the people of Iran have to make that decision.”45

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  In 1895, the Swedish chemist and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel established a peace prize in his will, to be awarded annually to individuals who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Some believe that Nobel added peace to chemistry, physics, medicine, and literature as penance for the dynamite that his factories had brought to the world. Whatever its rationale, the Nobel Peace Prize became one of the most significant accolades in world affairs. Previous American recipients include Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Elihu Root in 1912, Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Frank B. Kellogg in 1929, Jane Addams in 1931, Cordell Hull in 1945, Emily Balch in 1946, George Marshall in 1953, and Henry Kissinger in 1973. The Nobel Committee awarded prizes to each in homage to previous efforts and achievements—whether apparent or real, durable or ephemeral—in making the world more peaceable. But in 2009, the committee decided to reward promise rather than achievement. In recognition of “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” and for having “created a new climate in international politics,” Barack Hussein Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.46

  Obama’s political opponents had some fun with the announcement, mocking the committee’s ulterior motive—this was clearly a swipe at Bush, not a reward for Obama—and the president’s slight achievements. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, was not alone in expressing disbelief: “The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished.’”47 It was a prize that Obama might have done without.

  “To be honest,” Obama said upon learning the news, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.” But it was also impossible for him to decline such an honor. And besides, the award assisted certain of his aspirations, particularly in regard to the restoration of America’s reputation. “I also know … that throughout history,” Obama added, “the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.”48 The acceptance speech itself was a wonderful opportunity for the president to build momentum, to explain to a world audience what he wanted to achieve.

  Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech developed some of the themes present in his “antiwar” speech of October 2002. In Chicago he had to distinguish his opposition from that of Jesse Jackson. In Oslo he had to pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi while dismissing the nonviolence they practiced as inapplicable to someone holding his office. Obama had to dim the crowd’s ardor by asserting that while peace is the ultimate aspiration of humankind, meting out violence against “evil”—the precise word he used—is often necessary:

  We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified … I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

  Obama spoke directly to the tension in America “between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists—a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world.” The president maintained that there was fluidity across that boundary, that the pure application of either made for bad foreign policy. “I reject these choices,” said Obama, and he celebrated those individuals in recent history who had transcended the dogmas conventionally ascribed to them—alienating many traditional supporters along the way—in pursuit of larger goals:

  In light of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors, Nixon’s meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable—and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies. Pope John Paul’s engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa. Ronald Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. There’s no simple formula here. But we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.49

  “There’s no simple formula here” was the most revealing line in the speech. It signaled that the Obama Doctrine was the absence of one.

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  In the weeks after Obama’s election victory in the fall of 2008, Doug Lute, a three-star general, briefed the transition team on Afghanistan. A tall and imposing man, Lute did not pull his punches. As Tom Donilon, who became Obama’s deputy national security adviser, recalled, the very first PowerPoint slide stated an uncomfortable truth: “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve. We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.” For Donilon and others, this was a startling revelation. What had the Bush administration been doing these past six years? What precisely was America trying to achieve in Afghanistan beyond the eradication of al-Qaeda training camps (which had been achieved by 2002)? As David Sanger asks in Confront and Conceal, Was it “a full-blown democracy with the rule of law and respect for human rights? A divided country in which every warlord runs his own piece of turf? A state-in-name-only that survived on revenue from opium, minerals, and foreign aid? Something else?”50 No one in the Bush administration appeared to have figured this out. It fell to the Obama administration either to provide an answer or head for the exit.

  Members of the administration had different answers to these questions. Vice President Joe Biden believed that the conflict between the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government was unresolvable—he began with the requirement for a swift American withdrawal and worked from there. President Hamid Karzai was an Ngo Dinh Diem–type figure who lacked popular legitimacy and whose government would fall quickly without U.S. support. Biden feared that Afghanistan could become Obama’s Vietnam, leading to a lingering foreign-policy death by a thousand cuts. Instead he recommended a strategy of “counterterrorism plus,” requiring the withdrawal of conventional U.S. ground troops and the increased use of Special Forces–spotted drone and cruise missile strikes. America’s focus should solely be on those individuals who seek to do the nation harm; anything more was fantastical. Biden was worried by those who did not care to remember their history. Susan Rice’s observation that Vietnam “is not the frame of reference for every decision—or any decision, for that matter. I’m sick and tired of reprising all of the traumas and the battles and the psychoses of the 1960s” was a source of concern to Biden and other like-minded colleagues.51 George Santayana’s observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seemed apposite in the circumstances.

  Hillary Clinton rejected the Vietnam analogy as misleading�
�embedding gains rather than cutting and running was her goal. Her preference was for a policy of “sustained counterinsurgency,” transferring General Petraeus’s successful surge in Iraq to Afghanistan. She and Petraeus believed the United States could actually win over the Afghan people by protecting them, through pressuring Karzai to reform and delegitimizing the Taliban by displaying the competence and durability of an alternative. If Clinton had a time scale in mind, however, it was undoubtedly shorter than the two generations that Petraeus had identified as a possibility in private discussions: “You have to recognize … that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually … This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”52 Her perspective was close to that of Petraeus but perhaps not that close. A key motive behind Clinton’s preference for sustained counterinsurgency was her desire to render permanent the progressive gains that had permitted some 2.4 million Afghan girls to attend school for the first time since the communist era.

  President Obama was placed in a quandary. There was no obvious median point between stay and go. The ranking commander in the field, General Stanley McChrystal, made the president’s decision all the trickier in September when he requested forty thousand additional troops, noting that not doing so “will likely result in failure” in Afghanistan—namely, the collapse of the Karzai government and victory for the Taliban. More cheerily, McChrystal observed that while “the situation is serious, success is still achievable.” All General McChrystal needed was what he wanted and all the time in the world to use it.53 To older, more cautious hands, there was a distinct echo of General Westmoreland in March 1968.

  But during the campaign, Obama had identified Afghanistan as the central theater in the ongoing fight against Islamist terrorism. It was well-nigh impossible for him to decline McChrystal’s request without looking shabbily opportunistic. And besides, Obama’s views on Afghanistan’s importance were sincerely held. Bush had taken his eye off the ball; Afghanistan was the war of necessity. Yet the president did not want to be bounced into a decision by a pair of generals acutely aware of their political power. Colin Powell, with whom Obama met frequently during his first term, furnished some sound advice on this subject:

  Mr. President, don’t get pushed by the left to do nothing. Don’t get pushed by the right to do everything. You take your time and you figure it out … If you decide to send more troops or that’s what you feel is necessary, make sure you have a good understanding of what those troops are going to be doing and some assurance that the additional troops will be successful. You can’t guarantee success in a very complex theater like Afghanistan and increasingly with the Pakistan problem next door.54

  Powell had served in Vietnam, had strategized the first Iraq War, and had better cause than most to lament the origins and course of the second. He was a man who commanded Obama’s respect. This made it doubly pleasing that Powell’s advice amounted to a triangulation of sorts—it was a call to ignore both the left and the right and follow his own instincts. Maybe there was a plausible middle point between Stanley McChrystal and Joe Biden.

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  On December 1, 2009, at West Point, Obama announced his policy decision on Afghanistan and spoke broadly about America’s role in world affairs, which the president believed had to become more modest. He would send thirty thousand additional troops to Afghanistan but on a strictly time-limited basis: they would begin leaving in the summer of 2011. Obama made clear that he would not accept “a nation building project of up to a decade” while at the same time rejecting the Vietnam comparisons that had been drawn frequently by the press—and indeed by members of his administration. The Vietnam analogy “was a false reading of history,” Obama said. “Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan.” On America’s place in the world, Obama noted that since “the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs … We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades.” But times were changing and the nation had to refocus its energy on self-improvement: “That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”55

  This Beardian flourish was one of the few aspects of the speech cheered by the left of his party. The right, meanwhile, excoriated Obama for setting a deadline for withdrawal—surely the Taliban would now simply wait America out—and for not furnishing all the troops that McChrystal requested. There was certainly something in the speech to annoy everyone, a quality that Obama shared with Henry Kissinger. But it was a typical Obama performance in its methodical nature, its precision, restraint, and apparent reasonableness. It was surge and withdrawal at the same time, a final roll of the dice before he pulled the troops home—come what may.

  But there was also sufficient material there to stoke the concern of America’s allies. One European journalist observed, “For the first time, I can envision the United States returning to isolationism.”56 It is no challenge to surmise why Obama’s preference for rebalancing toward the domestic sphere caused this reaction. The president had approvingly quoted Eisenhower’s farewell address on national security—“Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs”—before adding ominously, “Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.” The president did his best to bathe the speech in optimistic rhetoric and references to the American fundamentals: “freedom,” “justice,” “hope,” “opportunity,” which taken together form “the moral source of America’s authority.”57 But the core message was jaded, its deliverer battle-worn.

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  The year 2010 was the deadliest of the conflict—499 American troops were killed in Afghanistan. The McChrystal surge was not replicating the Petraeus one in Iraq in terms of impact. How could it? The antagonists, political context, and terrain were so different. Obama began to worry that he had made a mistake in escalating the war, even on this time-limited basis. “You know,” warned Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration, in the summer of 2010, “he could lose the presidency on this one.”58 On the decision to order a surge in Afghanistan, New York Times journalist David Sanger observed that Obama “regretted it almost instantly.”59

  In the summer of 2010, Obama was forced to put General McChrystal to the sword—for reasons quite unrelated to battlefield tactics. Rolling Stone had run an article titled “The Runaway General” in which McChrystal and his advisers were quoted deriding President Obama and Vice President Biden. After McChrystal’s first meeting with the president, one aide noted that Obama “clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” Biden was lampooned—“Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?”—and his hostility to counterinsurgency doctrine was rubbished. (Obama had earlier reprimanded McChrystal for stating that Biden’s retrenchment would create “Chaos-istan.”) More generally, according to McChrystal, Obama was unsure of himself when surrounded by military brass: “uncomfortable and intimidated.” The impression the article conveyed was that President Barack Obama was weak-minded and effete, compared, at least, to that hard-headed, nunchuck-carrying leader of men: Stan “the Man” McChrystal.60

  It is hard to believe that McChrystal did not realize by the end of the interview that the article might spell the end of his military career. No president could ignore that level of insubordination—a perspective that carried broad bipartis
an support. Obama fired McChrystal the day after the article appeared, following a tense meeting at the White House. Afterward, Obama said, “I welcome debate, but I won’t tolerate division,” adding that it was essential that individual soldiers and officers—no matter what their rank—observe “a strict adherence to the military chain of command and respect for civilian control over that chain of command.”61 The president said that McChrystal’s departure would not alter his strategic priorities in Afghanistan, appointing the like-minded David Petraeus to take his place. Others were not so sure, sensing a gradual disillusionment with the course the president had launched at West Point. Reflecting on the Rolling Stone article, Bruce Riedel observed, “The description that it portrays of how our commander in the field is operating, and how some of the people around him are behaving, will definitely undermine support for the war.”62

  By late 2010 there were one hundred thousand troops in Afghanistan, a significant increase over the thirty-eight thousand stationed there when Obama assumed the presidency. Throughout 2011, however, Obama moved sharply toward de-escalation in pursuit of a final withdrawal. Riedel’s prediction had been right. On June 22, the president returned to West Point to make another major speech on Afghanistan. Over the course of the address, Obama did precisely what George Ball and others had urged LBJ to do in 1965 and 1966. He declared victory and announced his intention to get out: “When I announced this surge at West Point, we set clear objectives: to refocus on al Qaeda, to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, and train Afghan security forces to defend their own country. I also made it clear that our commitment would not be open-ended, and that we would begin to draw down our forces this July. Tonight, I can tell you that we are fulfilling that commitment.”