Necessity or choice?
By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 15 Sep, 2009
WHILE contesting for the nomination of the Democratic Party and campaigning for the country’s presidency, Barack Obama took a position on the Afghan conflict that clearly distinguished him from his two rivals, Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s nomination and John McCain for the presidency. Both Clinton and McCain had voted for the Iraq war resolution.
Obama gave a speech in which he strongly opposed the war, arguing that there was no reason for the US to get involved in Iraq. It was Afghanistan where it had to fight the Al Qaeda responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He called the Iraq conflict a war of choice and the one in Afghanistan a necessary war. If elected president, he promised that he would pull America out of Iraq while getting more involved in the conflict in Afghanistan.
Once he became president he stuck to his position. The United States has reached a point where it has to take important decisions on Afghanistan. Will the American political system allow Obama to lose more American soldiers in Afghanistan without clearly defining what Washington expects to achieve in that difficult country?
The sentiment against the continuous involvement of the US in Afghanistan is growing and while the president is fighting on a number of other fronts — especially trying to get Congress to reform the health system at home — he may not have much political capital left. Already his approval rating has fallen precipitously, faster than that of any other president in the first six months of his tenure. What are then the choices for Obama in Afghanistan?
One suggestion offered is that Obama should take his cue from former Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson who almost single-handedly won the support of the Democratic legislators who were deeply troubled by the Republican President Ronald Reagan’s involvement in the civil war in Nicaragua. Wilson persuaded his fellow Democrats that while involvement in the Central American country went against US interests and was not legal, the ‘war’ against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan was just and in America’s strategic interests.
Will President Obama prove to be the Charlie Wilson of this story, confident of what he has been saying all along about Afghanistan and committed to victory over the Taliban? As the US withdrawal from Iraq proceeds and challenges in Afghanistan mount, it won’t be long before we learn the answer.
The Charlie Wilson analogy is interesting since it would mean having Obama clearly identify the enemy — in Wilson’s case it was the Soviet Union — and spell out the US mission in no uncertain terms. In Wilson’s case it was to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
In August, Obama seemed to be moving in that direction. Al Qaeda and the Taliban
who supported it were the enemies and their removal not only from Afghanistan but also Pakistan was the twin mission. Speaking at a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona the president could not have been more explicit. “We must never forget,” he said of the conflict in Afghanistan, “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.”
The US would now “take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east”, in effect to the borders of Pakistan. The area of American involvement was expanding. It was now both Afghanistan and Pakistan — the region for which the policymakers in Washington already had a shorthand, Af-Pak.
There are voices in the policy establishment that have begun to question these assumptions and the strategy based on it. “Wars of necessity must meet two tests,” wrote Richard Haas, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations in a recent article, “They involve, first, vital national interests and, second, a lack of viable alternatives to the use of military force to protect those interests.”
Haas has written a book on America’s two Iraq wars, the first launched by President George Bush in 1991 to expel Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. This was a short engagement. Bush did not go into Iraq and stopped his forces at the border. Haas calls that one a necessary war. The second Iraq war was started by the younger Bush in 2003 for no apparent reason. It is still not over six years later. This was a war of choice.
The Second World War, Haas says, “was a war of necessity, as were the Korean War and the Persian Gulf War. In the wake of 9/11, invading Afghanistan was a war of necessity. The United States needed to act in self-defence to oust the Taliban. There was no viable alternative. … But even if the United States were to succeed in Afghanistan — with ‘success’ defined as bringing into existence an Afghan government strong enough to control most of its territory — terrorists could still operate from there and would put down roots elsewhere. And Pakistan’s future would remain uncertain at best. Afghanistan is thus a war of choice — Mr Obama’s war of choice.
“In this way Afghanistan is analogous to Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo and today’s Iraq. Wars of choice are not inherently good or bad. It depends on whether military involvement would probably accomplish more than it would cost and whether employing force is more promising than the alternatives.”
Haas believes that at this point the war in Afghanistan has become a war of hard choice. There are alternatives available which Washington should try including limiting the possibility that Afghanistan could ever be used to launch another attack on the US. Pakistan could also be saved from collapsing if non-military tactics were deployed, including strengthening democracy and the country’s economy. The choices are clear and the right ones should be made.