Two familiar storylines are casualties of Obama's Afghan decision

Posted By Peter Feaver Monday, June 27, 2011 - 11:24 AM Share

President Obama's Afghanistan decision sounded the death-knell to two storylines. They are dead, at least for now, but not, I suspect, gone forever.

The first storyline is one I had peddled myself: the curious disappearance of the vice president from the major foreign policy action of 2011. Whether it was the Arab Spring, the war (excuse me, the minor overseas contingency operation that doesn't rise to the level of armed hostilities) in Libya, or the tough-but-right call to take out bin Laden with SEALs rather than with airstrikes -- in all of those dramas, Biden played no more than a bit part.

Well, whether that storyline ever had much validity before, it sure does not now. Biden is back. In on the record briefings, White House officials are touting Biden's role in Obama's decision to overrule his generals and shift backwards to a light-footprint-focus-on-terrorism posture. (By the way, this "new" posture bears more than a passing resemblance to the one Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld put in place from 2002-2006 -- the one that candidate Obama decried as inadequate.)

It is surely significant that this is the first major foreign policy move in a long time that White House handlers are linking to Biden's influence. If it turns out well, then perhaps the where-is-Biden storyline will be buried for good. If not, perhaps he will fade into the background in much the way Obama's campaign arguments about Afghanistan have faded away.

Which brings us to the second OBE storyline: the old "war of necessity, war of choice" trope. I never bought into it because, as a framework for analyzing national security, it was hopelessly tautological. All wars are wars of choices. Even if the enemy is pouring across the Rio Grande -- or parachuting into Colorado -- one always has the choice of whether to fight or surrender. If the "war of necessity" concept had real analytical content, then no serious policymaker would oppose launching the war and every serious policymaker would insist on fighting the war until successful. But that is not how the framework is used. At least, that is not how Obama has used it.

Instead, Obama deployed the language to demonstrate that his ongoing opposition to the Iraq war -- he both opposed launching the Iraq war and opposed implementing the surge which was intended to end the war on a successful basis -- did not mean he was soft on national security. On the contrary, he merely opposed waging and winning wars of choice. As proof, he promised to reject the Rumsfeldian light-footprint-focus-on-terrorism posture and implement instead a fully resourced COIN campaign designed to end the war of necessity, the war in Afghanistan, on a successful basis.

Such "necessity" language, and the conviction that goes along with it, was missing from Obama's latest Afghanistan speech. And with good reason. If the war were so necessary, wouldn't it be necessary to win it? Obama didn't talk about winning. He talked about leaving.

I suppose a war of necessity can be one that it is necessary to launch, but not necessary to win. If so, that is a nuance that I have not seen explicitly explained before.

The "war of necessity, war of choice" storyline is dead, but it will be revived again and again because the framework, while a poor guide to strategy, is a useful rhetorical device. It neatly simplifies tough national security decisions into bumper-sticker labels. It allows a politician (or pundit) to praise wars he supports and criticize wars he does not support and make it sound like he is doing so for strategic reasons that go beyond "this is a war I support and that is a war I do not support."

In the meantime, however, the Obama team is not likely to talk about Afghanistan as a war of necessity. If the last three years are any guide, they might not talk much about Afghanistan at all. And if they do, it now appears that it will be Vice President Biden who will do most of the talking.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais-Pool/Getty Images

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
 

RANDAL

7:17 PM ET

June 27, 2011

Convenient sophistry

"The "war of necessity, war of choice" storyline is dead"

You wish. Of course, in reality just about everyone understands that a "war of choice" means one you choose to initiate, as opposed to one you are forced into in response to an attack that leaves you no reasonable alternative.

Yes, the option of surrender is always there, but that doesn't mean that if you don't take it up then you have "chosen" to wage war, except in the most ridiculous and argumentative sense. Responsibility for a war does not rest with the party which refuses to surrender to aggression. That would be to suggest that Soviet Russia "chose" to wage war with Nazi Germany in 1941 because Stalin didn't surrender to the initial surprise attack, or that the US "chose" to wage war with Japan in the same year because Washington declined the option of surrendering to Japan after Pearl Harbor.

Literally true, if you twist the words hard enough, but nevertheless pure sophistry intended to blur otherwise reasonably clear ethical lines. There are obviously difficult cases, such as Britain and France going to war with Germany in 1939, but the reality that it can often be hard to cleanly categorise things in complex real world situations certainly does not mean that the categories do not exist.

 

MALICEIT

8:11 AM ET

June 28, 2011

Why is...

....war of choice is always only american way ? Because for the rest of the world wars are generally for necessity.

 

MARTY MARTEL

4:04 AM ET

June 30, 2011

Pakistani and American perfidy

The seeds of the ‘current Afghan tragedy’ were sowed in Washington when Bush administration decided to allow Musharraf to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz in November, 2001. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan (now relocated to Karachi by Pakistani ISI to protect them from possible US drone attacks) and Haqqani network (HQN) in North Waziristan from where Mullah Omar’s QST and Haqqani’s HQN have been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

Duplicitous Pakistan has poor U. S. over the barrel of a gun. US can NOT use its aid leverage to force Pakistan to stop supporting terrorist groups who kill US/NATO troops in Afghanistan day in and day out because US needs Pakistan’s help in ferrying supplies to those very US/NATO troops.

Adm Mullen had following to say about America’s primary ally in its fight against terrorism, to the foreign news media on 1/13/2011: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it [Pakistan] is the epicenter of terrorism in the world right now. It is absolutely critical that the safe havens in Pakistan get shut down. We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without that. It’s not just Haqqani Network anymore, or Al Qaeda or TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan), the Afghan Taliban, or LeT (Lashkar-e-Tayyeba), it’s all of them working together.”

And previous US ambassador Anne Patterson to Pakistan, wrote in a secret review in 2009 that ‘Pakistan's Army and ISI are covertly sponsoring four militant groups - Haqqani‘s HQN, Mullah Omar‘s QST, Al Qaeda and LeT - and will not abandon them for any amount of US money‘, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show.

However US has been deliberately ignoring Taliban’s Pakistani connections in fueling and sustaining Afghan insurgency as reported by Matt Waldman in ‘The sun in the sky‘ on 6/13/2010, corroborated by WikiLeaks leaks on 7/25/2010 and then further corroborated by Chris Alexander, Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009 in his article on 7/30/2010 titled ‘The huge scale of Pakistan‘s complicity‘.

American soldiers are dieing in Afghanistan because of their own government’s misguided policies. For deliberately ignoring Taliban’s Pakistani connections, US deserves to be duped by Pakistan.

At this stage in the game, as far as the US is concerned, the war on terror is over; feeble clarifications by the State Department, that the larger war on Al Qaeda shall continue, are inconsequential. Pakistan knows that by skillfully holding out till now, it is close to getting its proxy regime in place in Kabul. If it is able to sell the idea of an Islamabad-friendly Government as being of strategic utility to Washington, there’s no reason why the Americans should object to that. Pakistani and American interests, both short-term and medium-term, converge at this point; a broke America cannot afford to look at long-term interests, not at this moment.

And thereby hangs a tale — of Pakistani and American perfidy. The US has been, and shall remain, mindful of the “paranoia of Pakistan”; Islamabad’s sensitivities, its faux victimhood, will always take precedence over Afghanistan in Washington.

Obama administration is already asking Pakistan to provide access to Afghan Taliban leaders safely ensconced under Pakistani ISI's protection. A facade of peace deal will be reached with Afghan Taliban leaders chosen by Pakistan and as dictated by Pakistan. US will begin its drawdown and finally exit the theatre of a war it is desperate not to be seen as having lost, not so much to the Taliban and Al Qaeda as to the wily Generals of Rawalpindi who have proved to be smarter than the Americans.

That facade of peace will crumble within few years after the departure of US troops and Pakistan will bring Afghanistan under its suzerainty with reimposition of Taliban rule just as it did in 1996 as Uncle Sam helplessly will look the other way.

 

Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.

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