How did you spend your day?
Mine was spent inside the Willard Hotel (down the street from the White House) where I sat through a full day of panel discussions at the 3rd annual CNAS conference.
Without getting all teary-eyed, the overflow audience (the usual DC national security types minus the NEOCONS) was treated to some truly intelligent and enlightening debates over how America might approach the specific national security challenges in places like Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and North Korea.
After a pretty good preamble by John Nagl who is the new president of CNAS, it was on to the the keynote address by General David Petreaus. The general, who is clearly smart and savvy, made his case for the success of the surge in Iraq and for using a similar approach (COIN) going forward in Afghanistan.
Now let me state for the record I am not predisposed to leave the fight in Afghanistan immediately.
However, I have a deep reservoir of skepticism that we can accomplish our goals in anything like a politically feasible time frame, nor substantially remake the country into a self sustaining democracy that is capable of providing a minimum level of security and services to its citizens. More on this later.
I don't have the time or energy to review all of the sessions (Iraq, Natural Security (a relatively new concept), Strategic Communications, North Korea) but if you are interested you can can find out more about them here.
So let's talk Afghanistan. To my mind the panel discussion titled: TRIAGE: THE NEXT 12 MONTHS IN AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN will be of most interest to DKers because of the political implications embodied in how we proceed on this issue.
The war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is the critical issue upon which President Obama's entire progressive agenda will rise or fall. It is so filled with political IEDs it has the capacity to blast away and undermine all or most of his incredibly important agenda (Climate Change, Health Care Reform, Education, et al). And that's to say nothing about what it might do to the long term political strength of the Democratic Party. If you think getting Afghanistan right isn't important please reference LBJ, Vietnam, and the Great Society.
I for one remain supportive of Obama's currently stated Afghanistan policy.
However, I do recognize this is not a view shared by all Dems (and probably not by many or most DKers). It could strain the Democratic Coalition to the breaking point and may provide the Republican Party a way out of the political wilderness. It's the one issue that keeps me up at night. Not only because of the cost of blood and treasure, but also for the long term damage it could do to the progressive movement
So back to the panel discussion which included the ex-military men and co-authors Andrew Exum (aka Abu Muqawama) and Nathan Fick as well as a former head of the US military forces in Afghanistan General Barno, a soon to be returning brigade commander Colonel Cavoli, and the highly regarded historian Andrew Bacevich.
There was some interesting discussion about tactics and metrics but I think the most relevant discussion was prompted by Prof. Bacevich's critique of the entire premise upon which the paper was based, that ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban through the application of a COIN (counterinsurgency) strategy is in America's national interest.
He clearly thinks it is not and states that we could accomplish our stated goals (protecting America from attack by Islamic extremists based in Afghanistan, FATA, and NWFP) by improving our national defense capabilities on US soil. He is very skeptical of nation and democracy building projects and believes that Afghanistan especially (as the graveyard of empires) is one of the most difficult nuts to crack.
So this for me goes to the heart of the matter. If this is just a fools errand than we should get out quick. If however we have a chance to create a stable nation that provides protection to woman and minorities, does not harbor extremists with malice towards America and the west, can work with its neighbors to create a more stable region then perhaps it's worth the effort.
This then is the central question.