The Afghanistan Problem
Eric, Matt and Anne-Marie are right that “dovishness” versus “hawkishness” does not, on its own, get you very far in defining a liberal foreign policy. Sometimes, to my mind, the doves have been right: as on the Spanish-American War, Bay of Pigs, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq. Sometimes the hawks have been: on Panama, the Gulf War, World War II, Korea (although the doves were right to oppose going north of the Yalu), the Balkans. (On World War I, which bitterly split my own magazine, The New Republic, I’m thoroughly confused). And on economic and environmental questions—which seem destined to play an extremely large role in Obama’s foreign policy—the terms themselves are beside the point.
But to pick up on Todd Gitlin’s entry, the old “hawk” versus “dove” split may gain new relevance in the coming years in one place in particular: Afghanistan. For seven years now, Afghanistan—unlike Iraq—has largely united the left. Almost everyone (Michael Moore excepted) believed the war was justified as self-defense, and applauded the fact that we overthrew a hideous regime, and did so with substantial multilateral support. The fact that Afghanistan offered liberals a chance to attack the Bush administration from the right, and remind Americans that liberalism does not equal pacifism, probably boosted support even higher.
But multilateral wars—even though preferable—are difficult to fight, especially when your allies are even more casualty averse than you are. And Afghanistan is an extraordinarily difficult nation to build. Most liberals genuinely believe that Karzai’s government is superior to the Taliban (something many didn’t believe about Diem versus Ho Chi Minh, for instance), but that may not matter if those liberals—and many other Americans—start to see the war as hopeless. If it starts to look that way—because Pakistan cannot or will not cut the Taliban off, because the Taliban retains significant Pashtun support, because Afghanistan can’t be effectively governed from the center—I suspect more liberals will turn against the effort, not because they considered the initial intervention immoral (like Vietnam or Iraq), but simply because they consider the current effort costly, bloody and futile (like, say, Somalia). Even if the motivation is good, after all, it doesn’t really matter if you can’t succeed. It’s even possible that some conservatives might also turn against the war. The right has never been as invested in Afghanistan as in Iraq, partly because it doesn’t have Iraq’s strategic significance (read: oil). Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, according to some accounts, wanted to skip Afghanistan altogether in fall 2001 and go straight to Baghdad. And the right is almost always less interventionist out of power than in.
Right now on the left (as in the country at large), Afghanistan hawks still clearly hold the upper hand. Even negotiating with the Taliban in hopes of isolating hard liners and Al Qaeda remains a fairly marginal position politically, although it strikes me as having real merit. (Anbar province shows the possibilities). Morally, letting any former Taliban into the government might be repugnant, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves: Some of our allies in Afghanistan aren’t a whole lot better.
But what if the occupation loses some of its multilateral cover? What if we kill more innocent civilians, and prompt riots against the NATO presence? What if polls show that a majority of Afghans want us out? What if even Karzai begins demanding a timetable for withdrawal? The literature on occupation suggests a cruel irony: Occupations have to last a very long time to create stability, but the people being occupied are rarely willing to wait that long, for understandable reasons.
So the question I’d throw out is this: Is there anyone in the group who thinks Obama’s proposal to increase troop deployments to Afghanistan is a mistake, and that maybe we should start moving in the other direction? If not, what would it take to push you to that position? For my own part, I find losing in Afghanistan too morally awful to even contemplate. And I suspect it would also be a serious blow to America’s prestige, and a major victory for Al Qaeda (who were always a bigger factor in Afghanistan than Iraq). Military defeat might also cripple NATO forever. For those reasons, I’m inclined to want to throw everything possible at the problem: troops, money, diplomacy. But ultimately, it does little good to talk about the horrors of failure if you don’t have a reasonable chance of success. I don’t think we’re at that point now, but that may be a statement based more on faith than evidence. And I suspect the issue will become increasingly contentious among liberals—and perhaps all Americans–in the years to come.
