Words Matter Posted by Michael Cohen

As a former foreign policy speechwriter one of the first things I learned is that words really do matter - and that when the President or any other foreign policy-maker is speaking being as precise as possible in your language is critically important.

So for example, in March the President clearly laid out a mission statement for US policy in Afghanistan - it involved defeating, dismantling and disrupting Al Qaeda. Yesterday in Phoenix he expanded that mission statement to include defeating, dismantling and disrupting Al Qaeda AND its extremist allies. (And Pat's post below gets to the problem with an amorphous phrase like extremist allies. If Obama is just talking about the core Taliban he mentioned in March that's fine, but he didn't. Who precisely are these extremist allies that are now receiving the same mission focus as Al Qaeda?)

Now none of this is a surprise or even new; the mission has been expanding ever since that speech in March. But if the goal is to disrupt, dismantle and defeat "extremist allies" as well as Al Qaeda then the President should have clearly said that in March. He didn't.

He also said this in March "We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future.  We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and our allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists."

The simple fact is that what Obama said yesterday in regards to the mission statement for Afghanistan is more expansive than what he said in March; unfortunately and ironically as both Pat and Spencer point out, considering what is happening on the ground, this is not new.

What is also troubling about the President's speech yesterday are these words:

But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is a -- this is fundamental to the defense of our people.

I'll turn this over to Spencer who makes the point I wanted to make but he beat me to it:

If the phrase "war of necessity" is to have any meaning, it's to mean that Country X either has to fight or die, which is not a meaningful choice. And since wars of survival are wars of limitless cost -- you fight until the existential danger expires -- Obama is exaggerating the danger emanating from Afghanistan to the public. And doing so needlessly! Wars short of existential dangers can still be justified wars. Not only is Obama misrepresenting the war, he's depriving himself of the justification for an off-ramp if it exceeds the acceptable costs.  

Right. But also, I think the President is just hyping the nature of the threat from a possible Al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan. Since 2002, Al Qaeda has had a safe haven. It's in Pakistan - and the United States, even with virtual benign neglect, has been more than able to contain that threat to the American people.

Perhaps it might be time to revisit the notion of a safe haven for AQ being an existential threat to the United States. It's not that we should just ignore the issue or do nothing to attempt to dismantle such a safe haven, but to fight a long drawn out counter-insurgency so that Al Qaeda won't be able to set one up in the future in Afghanistan seems like a colossal misallocation of resources. If we have been able for 7 years to contain the threat from an Al Qaeda safe haven in Pakistan couldn't we theoretically do the same thing in Afghanistan?

Juan Cole takes this argument a bit further:

The old al-Qaeda of Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri appears to have been effectively disrupted. Terrorist attacks in the West are sometimes still planned by unconnected cells who are al-Qaeda wannabes, but I don't see evidence of command and control capabilities by al-Qaeda Central. There is frankly no reason to think that if the anti-Karzai guerrillas did gain more territory in Afghanistan, they would suddenly start hosting al-Qaeda operatives who were sure to bring the West back in once they attacked it.

Comments

[Zathras]

I don't recall Cohen, Ackerman or Juan Cole making any of these points about Afghanistan at any time during the last Presidential campaign. This lasted nearly two full years, during which then Sen. Obama repeatedly -- as in several hundred times -- made the distinction between the war of necessity in Afghanistan and the war of choice in Iraq, and criticized the Bush administration for short-changing the first while emphasizing the second.

If they now think President Obama should declare one of his principal campaign themes inoperative that is fine, but they won't get anywhere by not acknowledging that this is what they are urging him to do.

[Michael Cohen]

Zathras, you're right. And I have acknowledged repeatedly here on DA. In fairness, the critique of the Bush Administration's conduct on Afghanistan remains correct and if you go back and look at what I wrote on March 27th I was supportive of the President's new policy on Afghanistan- which I believed to be primarily a CT mission. My problem is with the ramping up of that mission into a COIN operation . . .

[Zathras]

Michael Cohen's 3/27 post also notes that the "minimalist" approach he and others are calling for now would be politically impossible for President Obama. It seems as if Obama was persuaded that a strategy of holding on for 18 to 24 months and then declaring victory and going home around the time of the 2010 midterms was impossible as well.

I'm not entirely surprised that Obama has bought into the logic that leads to the current mission parameters in Afghanistan: if you don't keep al Qaeda out of Afghanistan without beating the Taliban, and you don't beat the Taliban without building up the Afghan state and protecting the Afghan population, you need to build up the Afghan state and protect the Afghan population. It looks to me as if some of the people criticizing him now for this based their earlier ideas about his Afghanistan policy as much on the assumption that he shared their policy preferences as on anything he actually said at the time.

As a matter of "gotcha," this is unimportant. What matters, substantively, is that the objections being raised as to the length and cost of the American commitment in Afghanistan, our dependence for its success on Afghans, its impact on our alliances and on our military are all valid ones. To act on them, the President needs an alternative -- either a recommendation to explain straightforwardly to the American people that his campaign rhetoric was wrong and our Afghanistan commitment must be quicky drawn down, or a suggestion of some politically non-impossible way to make sure that the situation the last admininstration confronted in Afghanistan when it took office does not reemerge while Obama is still President. So far, Obama's critics haven't done either one.