Does Nicholas Kristof understand American foreign policy?
Kristof has a recent op-ed in the New York Times called, “More Troops are a Bad Bet.” For those that have reached enlightenment, have realized their political knowledge has no effect on the world, and therefore haven’t been following the news, he is referring to the Obama administration’s long deliberation in deciding whether or not to grant, partially grant, or deny General McChrystal’s request for more troops (40,000) on the ground in Afghanistan.
Kristof says that
[Y]ou’d think we might be more sensitive to nationalism abroad. Yet the most systematic foreign-policy mistake we Americans have made in the post-World War II period has been to underestimate its potency, from Vietnam to Latin America.
It is unclear why Kristof thinks policymakers have “underestimated” the potency of nationalism abroad. The documentary record is replete with concerns from policymakers about nationalism abroad, since it is so often the greatest obstacle to intervention. As President Eisenhower acknowledged, support for nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam was overwhelming, hardly underestimated.
Indeed it seems that U.S. foreign policy has quite accurately understood the nature and strength of nationalist sentiment. That’s why it’s important to have a “strong man” in power in various places, as Saddam Hussein was for many years, under American supervision. That’s why it’s important to undermine democratic governments, in Chile and Guatemala, and to isolate upstart countries like Cuba when overthrow fails. These efforts in general have been quite successful, precisely because the dangerous threat of people wanting to control their own countries is well-understood; it is not underestimated, let alone systematically underestimated.
Kristof says:
When Pakistani troops enter Pashtun areas, the result has sometimes been a backlash that helps extremists. If Pashtuns react that way to Punjabis, why do we think they will react better to Texans?
Kristof seems to think, without evidence, that American policymakers operate under the delusional assumption that Pashtuns are elated when American troops enter their territory. To me it is outlandish to think policymakers are under these fantastical delusions.
Kristof warns that “a heavier military footprint almost inevitably leads to more casualties, irritation and recruitment for the Taliban.” This sort of thing is well-known. The National Intelligence Estimate has said, since the onset of the War on Terror, that our engagements inflame our enemies against us, as is widely known. In fact, policymakers are so aware of this particular issue (civilian casualties) that in the past year there has been (it seems to me) an unprecedented amount of attention given the topic by public officials. One wonders who Kristof thinks he is correcting.
In any case, Kristof has his own strategy.
My suggestion is that we scale back our aims, for Afghanistan is not going to be a shining democracy any time soon. We should keep our existing troops to protect the cities (but not the countryside), while ramping up the training of the Afghan Army — and helping it absorb more Pashtuns to increase its legitimacy in the south. We should negotiate to peel off some Taliban commanders and draw them over to our side, while following the old Afghan tradition of “leasing” those tribal leaders whose loyalties are for rent. More aid projects, with local tribal protection, would help, as would job creation by cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan exports.
Kristof thinks one of our aim is to make Afghanistan a “shining democracy.” I wonder what his evidence is for this, and whether or not it consists solely of public statements of good intentions.
It is hard to see what Kristof’s goals are in Afghanistan. In his article, he seems concerned about two things, expressed as reasons to not withdraw completely. (1) Not signaling “American weakness” and (2) not destabilizing Pakistan. The first goal is either evil (mafia-style establishment of credibility) or factually off-base (no one doubts our ability to destroy a countryside) or distastefully colonial-minded (after all, why is it important that we project American strength around the world?). The second goal will be quite interesting to Afghans, who might want to be something other than a third wheel, subjected to the torments of Kristof’s favorite warlords.
This post is interesting. I usually like Kristof but you are right, his article seems sort of redundant and confused.
I’m not very well read on Afghanistan, but if I may refer to its companion war, by chance have you read Mark Danner’s piece “Iraq: The War of the Imagination”? After reading that, the notion that American foreign policy makers operate under fantastic delusions does not seem outlandish to me. There’s a copy of the article here:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/142383/mark_danner_how_a_war_of_unbound_fantasies_happened
I would distinguish between the vision of military decision-makers such as generals who are actually on the ground and policy-makers who are removed from the countries they are making decisions about, with the former being much more accurate. I think it’s possible Matthew Hoh was correct in his September 2009 letter resigning from his position as senior state department official in the province of Zabul in Afghanistan: “I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque, and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf?sid=ST2009102603447
From the point of view of somebody whose current job forces her to daily face the horrific consequences of OEF/OIF on U.S. service members, I may well be biased, but I think U.S. policymakers have underestimated all kinds of very important things including the nature and strength of nationalist sentiment. (I admit I don’t have adequate knowledge of the area to demonstrate that these misapprehensions are systematic.) You may be cynical enough to say U.S. policy makers were acting in full knowledge of what they were doing, in the selfish interest of $ and oil or whatever, and therefore never really cared about the presence of WMDs or the reactions of Iraqi and Afghan civilians or that they were tasking their military with a “complex, opaque, and Sisyphean” mission. Your examples of our prior support for Saddam Hussein and overthrow of democracies support this interpretation. But even if American policy makers are all that thoroughly and insanely evil, surely at some level if they are operating under such a full understanding they must have realized the inevitable consequences of their decisions–that the absence of WMDs would become evident, that civil war and ethnic strife and terrorist bombings would break out, that the unbelievable stresses upon the troops would be revealed. It’s similar to what Richard Feynman said: “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” (Feynman said this after investigating the Challenger crash, and while perhaps our failures abroad are not quite as immediately dramatic as the disintegration of a space shuttle mid-air, their much more far-reaching consequences are rather difficult to sweep away and warrant just as much scrutiny to say the least.)
I find it rather remarkable that you are willing to ascribe such a clear-eyed vision to U.S. policy makers in the service of criticizing Kristof. I am more interested in what their goals are in Afghanistan than in Kristof’s.
According to a 2008 Reuters report, Bush essentially claimed that an aim in Afghanistan was democracy building, but that was not the most absurd part of the statement. Here’s what he said in his videoconference to the personnel serving in Afghanistan.
‘”I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.”‘
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1333111120080313?
He again referred to this sort of mission in Aghanistan in December 2008: “to help this young democracy to develop the institutions so it can survive on its own”
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900E4D9153FF936A25751C1A96E9C8B63
I know it can be hard to take Bush’s words seriously. But given that these statements come from the commander-in-chief who initiated the war and conducted it for most of his eight years in office, they should be viewed as serious evidence of our intentions in Aghanistan. “Shining democracy” may be an exaggeration but I think you ought to cut Kristof a little editorial slack there: it’s not an unreasonable bit of hyperbole, certainly no worse than some rhetorical flourishes you indulge in.
Has there been a single invader in history who didn’t claim to have noble goals? Declarations of good intentions can’t constitute evidence, because they are predictable no matter what the actual intentions are.
It is not very cynical to think that policymakers, who have rooms full of experts, even military people, telling them what is going on in the world, know what they are doing. It is more astonishing to me to think that they are so dumb as to not understand the human consequence of wars. It is furthermore astonishing to think that they don’t know what almost everyone else knows, that nationalist sentiment is very strong. How do a bunch of hippies know these things, and policymakers don’t? Eventually, the “we didn’t know” excuse isn’t credible anymore. It is also interesting that our military actions are always discussed in this redeemable strategic light. Basically the Afghan war is bad strategy. There is less discussion of whether or not it is immoral in the first place.
I really think particular cases belie the suggestion that policymakers are ignorant. It is not cynical, for example, to think policymakers didn’t care about WMD’s in Iraq. Several lines of evidence virtually demonstrate this: (1) American foreign policy has targeted Iraq since WWII, (2) Intelligence regarding WMD’s was fudged, (3) everyone following the issue before the propaganda campaign began knew that Iraq was already disarmed by international authorities.
First I don’t think it is a matter of being explicitly evil. Policymakers are just indifferent to many things, some of them fine – e.g. policymaker are relatively indifferent to France’s medical system. But one thing they are indifferent towards is whether or not there are WMD’s in Iraq. As for the consequences you mention, it seems to me like we know that they knew those things ahead of time – after all, they were told those things by many people, including their own intelligence agencies. And who is unaware of the stress war causes for soldiers? In any case, you left out several other consequences American intervention – such as, for example, the installation of a U.S.-friendly government in one of the most resource-rich areas of the world. There are other consequences too – added credibility for American threats (something Kristof cares about).
I don’t ascribe a morally clear-eyed vision to policy-makers. But I think it would be both counterintuitive and counterfactual to suppose that they are idiots. This really is the point – they have to be idiots for the “we didn’t know” theory to work.
It could be that this two-part Danner analysis will change my mind, or part of my mind. I’ll let you know.
Hey Joshua, thanks for your response, it helped clarify your thinking for me (my need for clarification was due to deficiency of my imagination, not of your presentation).
I think you’re almost certainly right that a number of policymakers were indifferent to the presence–and/or actively fudging the numbers–of WMDs, and that this does not imply that they were all explicitly evil. That was a bad example, and worse, I think my comments are in danger of setting up a false dichotomy of complete idiots versus evil geniuses (or completely insane monsters) when the reality is necessarily far, far more complicated both between and within individual human beings. For a simple illustration, I’d suspect Bush is closer to the ignorant end of the spectrum and Cheney closer to the indifferent side, and as you point out, the hellish outcomes don’t necessarily imply that the decision-makers themselves are explicitly evil. [I should also add that I consider myself forbidden by the moral rules I try to follow in my pathetic way to dare to judge the inner hearts of other human beings, so please take the comments about the former P and VP as merely an example.]
All that being said, based on my reading and my limited experience working in government bureaucracy, if I have to choose between two far-fetched possibilities of A) the policymakers are idiots or B) the policymakers are both aware of and are indifferent to negative facts and consequences, I stubbornly continue to choose A as simpler and less outlandish. I’ll be interested to know whether the Danner piece affects your ideas on this at all, but in the meantime I’ll expand on my current thinking.
You say: “It is not very cynical to think that policymakers, who have rooms full of experts, even military people, telling them what is going on in the world, know what they are doing.”
In addition to my skepticism of the sorts of claims these sorts of authorities often make for themselves (they may be “experts” but when they pretend to be able to take into account all sorts of unknown quantities and then predict the multiple long-term consequences of their far-reaching decisions in a realm filled with inevitable uncertainties I don’t buy it), I think the transfer of knowledge of what is really going on in the world to the decision makers is not nearly so direct as you imply. As Danner describes:
“Information obtained by dedicated but deeply fallible humans travels from places like Fallujah by cable and e-mail and word of mouth into the vast four-mile-square bunker of the Green Zone, with its half-dozen concentric layers of concrete blast walls and sandbags and barbed wire, and from there to the great sprawling labyrinth of the Washington national security bureaucracy, up through the thousands of competing staffers in the layers of bureaus and agencies and eventually to the highly driven people at the tops of the organizational pyramids: the people who, it is said, “make the decisions.” In the best managed of administrations there exists, between those on the ground who listen and learn and those in the offices who debate and decide, a great deal of bureaucratic “noise.” And this, alas, as so many accounts of decision-making on the war make all too clear, was not the best managed of administrations.”
Again, I’ll take the Challenger disaster as an example. The decision makers at NASA had “rooms full of experts” on space travel, some of the top scientists in the world. It seems to me that applying your thinking might lead to the conclusion that the decision makers there knew what was going on but that (for whatever other consideration) they were indifferent to the predictable likelihood of explosion by OK-ing the shuttle launch on a cold day. To use your fancy philosophical terms, I find that counterintuitive and counterfactual. Indeed I would contend that the shuttle break-up was far more predictable (thanks to the math and science you like to debunk) than foreign policy outcomes so often dependent on individual, irrational, unpredictable human behavior and the general vagaries of history. I think it’s been pretty clearly shown by my hero Feynman and others that the decision makers were operating in a system full of bureaucratic noise (like what Danner described) and that the engineers who actually realized there might be a problem were limited, and then those who attempted to communicate that knowledge were fewer, and then the knowledge itself got lost in the bureaucratic maze before it got to somebody who did something about it. To me, it is inconceivable that expert decision makers could have both anticipated and desired the explosion: it was hugely expensive and a public relations disaster, not exactly the same but still comparable to the ridiculously expensive public relations disaster Iraq became for Bush, first with most of the rest of the world and then (in an appallingly delayed and partial manner) among Americans.
In a similar way, I find it unbelievable that our policymakers understood all the forces at play, anticipated the sectarian strife etc., but were indifferent to the negative outcomes when weighed against the positive outcomes that you claim: “the installation of a U.S.-friendly government in one of the most resource-rich areas of the world” and “added credibility for American threats”. This is perhaps because I didn’t express well at all just how negative I consider those negative outcomes to be, and because I don’t think we have even really accomplished the positives. You asked, “And who is unaware of the stress war causes for soldiers?” I need to go beyond the word stress. The PTSD, ruined bodies and so on are horrifying (google “nina berman” and “marine wedding”) but I agree that policymakers could have been aware of and indifferent to them. I mean more than the suffering of individual service members–I mean that right now if a serious unanticipated security threat comes from another direction (pick your axis of evil country that we aren’t currently bombing), we won’t have the forces to deal with it. I mean that our military might has been almost fully dedicated (and spent and exhausted) to OEF/OIF. Exhausted is probably a better word than stressed. And that seems like an insane policy decision by policy makers who supposedly know what they are doing. Forget about national security, that could be catastrophic for oil interests and America’s image. (Regarding the positives you claim, now my knowledge gets even weaker, but I think the extent of the sectarian strife has makes the notion of a functionning government in Iraq a bit unclear. And I probably shouldn’t even get started on what I think is our **reduced** credibility problem–clearly we have a different interpretation there. In any event, Osama bin Laden is still at large.) I just don’t think that (what I perceive as) failures in both policy as well as human terms can be explained without sheer bumbling incompetence. Sheer bumbling incompetence also characterizes my meager knowledge of bureaucracy, and strikes me as the simplest and most reasonable explanation for much of the mess that we’re in.
Again, I am driven to acknowledge that reality must be more complicated than simple idiocy. The indifference you describe no doubt played a role, but I still don’t think it comes close to accounting for what happened. Much can also be ascribed to the bureaucratic labyrinth rather than to individual failings, and that goes further, but even that doesn’t cover it for me. I truly believe that human hubris, stupidity and incompetence were the primary forces at work. Perhaps this merely puts me into a different category of cynic.
Maybe they don’t actually consitute evidence for actual intentions (in your opinion what kind of evidence does?) but they *should*. In that sense I believe they entitle Kristof to the term “shining democracy.” If we can’t trust what our commander-in-chief says, we should at least be able to use his language when we make arguments on the topic.
To answer the question: Genghis Khan. (Source: my brother.)