by Gwynne Dyer
So, tell Lord Tennyson to come back in another hundred years, and maybe we’ll have something to show him.
32.
CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE
My hope that we may be escaping from the miserable decade just past rests, to a worrisome extent, on the slim shoulders of Barack Obama. If he can change the way the United States behaves in the world, a great deal else will change for the better as well. So I wrote about him quite a lot during his first year in office, trying to figure out whether he was up to the challenges he faced. But I was well aware that he had already given one big hostage to fortune.
January 27, 2009
OBAMA’S VIETNAM?
You aren’t really the U.S. president until you’ve ordered an air strike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now: two air strikes on Afghanistan in his first week in office. But now that he has been blooded, can we talk a little about this expanded war he’s planning to fight in Afghanistan?
Does that sound harsh? Well, so is killing people, and all the more so because Obama must know that these remote-controlled Predator strikes usually kill not just the “bad guy,” whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. They also annoy Pakistan, whose territory the United States violated in order to carry out the killings.
It’s not a question of whether the intelligence on which the attacks were based was accurate (although sometimes it isn’t). The question is: do these killings actually serve any useful purpose? And the same question applies to the entire U.S. war in Afghanistan.
President Obama may be planning to shut Guantanamo, but the broader concept of a “war on terror” is still alive and well in Washington. Most of the people he has appointed to run his defence and foreign policies believe in it, and there is no sign that he himself questions it. And yet, even fifteen years ago, the notion would have been treated with contempt in every military staff college in the country.
That generation of American officers learned two things from their miserable experience in Vietnam. One was that going halfway around the world to fight a conventional military campaign against an ideology (Communism then, Islamism now) was a truly stupid idea. The other was that no matter how strenuously the other side insists that it is motivated by a world-spanning ideology, its real motives are mostly political and quite local (Vietnamese nationalism then, Iraqi and Afghan nationalism now).
Alas, that generation of officers has now retired, and the new generation of strategists, civilian as well as military, has to learn these lessons all over again. They are proving to be slow students, and if Obama follows their advice Afghanistan may well prove to be his Vietnam.
The parallel with Vietnam is not all that far-fetched. Modest numbers of American troops have now been in Afghanistan for seven years, mostly in training roles quite similar to those of the U.S. military “advisers,” whom Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent to South Vietnam between 1956 and 1963. The political job of creating a pro-Western, anti-Communist state was entrusted to America’s man in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the South Vietnamese army had the job of fighting the Communist rebels, the Viet Cong.
Unfortunately, neither Diem nor the South Vietnamese army had much success, and by the early 1960s, the Viet Cong were clearly on the road to victory. So, Kennedy authorized a group of South Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem (although he seemed shocked when they killed him). And Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy soon afterwards, authorized a rapid expansion of the American troop commitment in Vietnam, first to two hundred thousand by the end of 1965, ultimately to half a million by 1968. The United States took over the war. And then it lost it.
If all this sounds eerily familiar, it’s because we are now at a similar juncture in America’s war in Afghanistan. Washington’s man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, and the Afghan army he theoretically commands, have failed to quell the insurrection, and are visibly losing ground.
So, the talk in Washington now is all of replacing Karzai (although it will probably be done via elections, which are easily manipulated in Afghanistan), and the American troop commitment in the country is going up to sixty thousand. Various American allies also have troops in Afghanistan, just as they did in Vietnam, but it is the United States that is taking over the war.
We already know how this story ends. There is not a lot in common between President John F. Kennedy and President George W. Bush, but they were both ideological crusaders who got the United States mired in foreign wars it could not win and did not need to win. They then bequeathed those wars to presidents who had ambitious reform agendas in domestic politics and little interest or experience in foreign affairs.
That bequest destroyed Lyndon Johnson, who took the rotten advice of the military and civilian advisers he inherited from Kennedy because there wasn’t much else on offer in Washington at the time. He still had time to get Medicare and Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, federal aid to schools, and Head Start and food stamps through Congress before Vietnam brought him down, but he could have accomplished much more if he had not been brought down by the stupid war.
Obama is drifting into the same dangerous waters, and the rotten advice he is getting from strategists who believe in the war on terror could destroy him, too. He has figured out that Iraq was a foolish and unnecessary war, but he has not yet applied the same analysis to Afghanistan.
There are two questions he needs to ask himself. First, did Osama bin Laden want the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in response to 9/11? The answer to that one is: yes, of course he did. Second: of the tens of thousands of people whom the United States has killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, would a single one of them have turned up in America to do harm if left unkilled? Answer: probably not. Other people might have turned up in the U.S. with evil intent, but not those guys.
So, turning Afghanistan into a second Vietnam is probably the wrong strategy, isn’t it?
I had particularly high hopes of Obama on the climate front, and the appointments he made to the key science and energy jobs in his administration confirmed my feeling. I never actually drew up a short list of the ideal five people to put in those posts, but he chose exactly the people I would have put there. I know what those people think because I have interviewed most of them. If he chose them, then he presumably agreed with them. So he really does get it.
But if he gets it, why hasn’t he acted on it?
November 12, 2009
OBAMA AND CLIMATE
It is taking much longer than the Obama administration thought to get legislation on climate change through Congress. Even if the health-care legislation finally passes in a form that more or less fulfills Obama’s hopes for it, that will mean that he only got two major pieces of new legislation out of the Congress in 2009. (The other was the $787 billion stimulus package to fight the recession.)
Congress will not pass legislation imposing cuts on greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States this year, so Obama goes to Beijing empty-handed. The Chinese will not deliver on their part of the deal until they are sure that Obama can deliver on his part. So the world’s two largest emitters will arrive in Copen hagen next month without having made any official commitment to curb their emissions.
With no bilateral U.S.-Chinese deal to serve as a framework for a wider agreement, the Copenhagen conference is very unlikely to succeed. How upset should we be about that?
If failure this December means permanent failure, then we should be very upset indeed, but the problem is one of scheduling, not of bad intentions. Given another six months or so, Obama will probably succeed in getting Congress to agree to significant cuts in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.
The cuts will not be as deep as he wants: only a 4 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared to the 1990 baseline used in the Kyoto treaty. They are certainly not as much as the other developed nations are willing to make: the European Union countries are committed to 20 percent cuts in emissions by 2020, and the Jap
anese to even more. But everybody understands that Obama is dealing with an electorate largely still in denial about global warming, and that as a matter of practical politics he simply cannot make the same kind of commitments others have made. They will be glad if he can just sign the U.S. up to the principle of cutting its emissions.
In particular, the Chinese will be very grateful if he does that, because they are very frightened about the probable impacts of climate change on their own country. They badly want a global deal that keeps warming under control, but it is politically impossible for them to make any kind of firm commitment so long as the United States had made none.
The best thing to do now, therefore, would be to postpone the Copenhagen meeting for a year, but it has become a diplomatic juggernaut that cannot be stopped. The next-best thing is to ensure that it fails now, leaving the way open for a follow-on conference that revisits the issue in twelve or eighteen months’ time with a much better chance of success.
The best is often the enemy of the good, but patching together an inadequate climate treaty at Copenhagen just to avoid the stigma of failure would repeat the mistake of 1997, when the botched Kyoto accord locked the world into an unambitious climate policy for fifteen years. If the problem lies mainly in the political timetable in the United States—and it does—then just change the international schedule to deal with that reality.
In the end, Obama’s health-care bill didn’t make it through Congress until March 2010, and it’s still unclear when or even if his (very unambitious) climate change bill will be passed.
But I begin to hope that he might actually be learning about Afghanistan.
December 1, 2009
OBAMA: IN SEARCH OF A “DECENT INTERVAL”?
It can’t have taken three months to write the speech that President Barack Obama gave at West Point on Tuesday, but clearly much thought went into his decision to send thirty thousand more American troops to Afghanistan. Some aspects of his strategy even suggest that he understands how little is really at stake there for the United States.
This is despite the fact that his speech is full of assertions that al-Qaeda needs Afghanistan as a base. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of terrorist operations but it permeates American thinking on the subject. Even if Obama knows better himself, he cannot hope to disabuse his fellow Americans of that delusion in the time available.
Instead, he goes along with it, even saying that Afghanistan and Pakistan are “the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda … Since 9/11, al-Qaeda’s safe-havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali.” This is utter nonsense, but, even if he knows it is nonsense, he cannot say so publicly.
Al-Qaeda doesn’t run training camps anymore; it leaves that to the various local groups that spring up and try to follow its example both in the Muslim world and in the West. The template for Islamist terrorism is now available everywhere, so al-Qaeda no longer needs a specific territorial base. For the purpose of planning actual terrorist attacks, it never did.
The operational planning for the 9/11 attacks was done in Germany and the United States. The London attacks were planned in Yorkshire, the Amman attack probably in Syria, and the Bali attacks in Jakarta.
If the Taliban conquered all of Afghanistan and then invited al-Qaeda to set up camps there—neither of which is a necessary consequence of an American withdrawal—what additional advantages would al-Qaeda enjoy? Well, it could then fly its people in and out through Kabul in addition to using Karachi and Lahore, but they’d face even stiffer security checks at the far end of the flight. It hardly seems worth it.
The leaders of al-Qaeda would certainly like to see the Taliban regain power in Kabul, since it was al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States—specifically intended to provoke a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—that brought the Taliban regime down in the first place. But al-Qaeda takes no part in the Taliban’s war in Afghanistan: it is strictly an Afghan operation.
Even if Obama does not believe the Washington orthodoxy, which insists that who controls Afghanistan is a question of great importance to American security, his short-term strategy must respect that orthodoxy. Hence the “surge.” But the speed with which that surge is to be followed by an American withdrawal suggests that he may know better.
July 2011 is not a long time away: all the Taliban leaders have to do is wait eighteen months and then collect their winnings. If they are intelligent and pragmatic men—which they are—they may even let the foreign forces make some apparent progress in the meantime, so that the security situation looks promising when the time comes to start pulling the U.S. troops out.
In fact, the Taliban might not even try to collect their winnings right away after the foreigners leave. There’s no point in risking a backlash in the United States that might bring the American troops back.
This is actually how the Vietnam War ended. The United States went through a major exercise in “Vietnamization” in the early 1970s, and the last American combat troops left South Vietnam in 1973. At that point, the security situation in the south seemed fairly good—and the North Vietnamese politely waited until 1975 to collect their winnings.
In doing so, they granted Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to President Richard Nixon, the “decent interval” he had requested. A “decent interval,” that is, between the departure of the American troops and the victory of the forces that they had been fighting, so that it did not look too much like an American defeat. In practical political terms, that is also the best outcome that Barack Obama can now hope for in Afghanistan.
If that is Obama’s real strategy, then he can take consolation in the fact that nothing bad happened to American interests after the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. Nothing bad is likely to happen to American interests in the event of a Taliban victory, either. Nor is a Taliban victory even a foregone conclusion after an American withdrawal, since they would still have to overcome all the other ethnic forces in the country.
The biggest risk Obama runs with this strategy is that it gives al-Qaeda a motive to launch new attacks against the United States. The Taliban want the American troops out of Afghanistan, but al-Qaeda wants them to be stuck there indefinitely, taking casualties and killing Muslims. It’s unlikely that al-Qaeda can just order a terrorist attack in the United States, but if it looks like the U.S. troops are really going home, then it may well try.
On the other hand, maybe all this analysis is too clever by half. Maybe Obama just thinks he can win the war in Afghanistan in the next eighteen months. In that case, his presidency is doomed.
Maybe I’m just grasping at straws but he certainly seems to be more intelligent than that.
GWYNNE DYER has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster, filmmaker and lecturer on international affairs for more than twenty years but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland, he earned degrees from Canadian, American and British universities, finishing with a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London. He went on to serve in three navies and to hold academic appointments at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and at Oxford University. Since 1973, he has written a twice-weekly column on current events that is published in more than 175 newspapers worldwide and translated into more than a dozen languages. Dyer is the author of the award-winning book War (1986), which was updated and reissued in 2004, Ignorant Armies (2003), Future: Tense (2004), With Every Mistake (2005) and Climate Wars (2008). He lives in London, England.
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