The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  COIN was at best a game of whack-a-mole: when U.S. troops poured into a district, the Taliban packed up and went somewhere else. Security improved where Americans were posted, and deteriorated where the Taliban moved. There were not enough American soldiers to be everywhere at once, and the Afghan government did not have forces that could relieve them, so the insurgency stayed alive.

  But the military told a different story. It focused on the favorable statistics for where American soldiers stood, and used that to tout COIN’s success. These claims of success gave Obama a basis for turning the tables on COIN. He was able to declare victory and ditch the policy that he did not like and that (more importantly) was not working. In June 2011, standing before the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, the president declared that the situation in Afghanistan had improved enough to talk of troop withdrawals. By 2014, the Afghan war would be no more. COIN had won, so we did not need it anymore.

  It was a stunning shift. COIN was over, not just in Afghanistan, but also as America’s strategy of choice. America no longer needed to win counterinsurgencies or put its shoulder to nation-building, Obama seemed to be saying; it just had to focus on decapitating terrorist organizations. CT-Plus was quietly supplanting COIN.

  This was more than a shift in strategy. It announced a new set of American priorities. Fighting terrorists and fixing the failed states that they might use as bases were no longer an American priority. We had won not just in Afghanistan, but more broadly against terrorism. Now we could go back to addressing global issues. And our military strategy would reflect that.

  Obama announced the new American stance in a January 5, 2012, speech on trimming the military budget. The president referred to “the end of long-term nation-building with large military footprints.” He announced that the U.S. military would be shifting gears and changing its focus to East Asia and the Pacific—a region where the higher-tech, lighter-manpower “blue” services (the navy and air force) will naturally take the lead as compared to the way boots-on-the-ground “green” services (the army and marines) bore the brunt of land combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a follow-up to that speech, the administration also announced an expansion of the Joint Special Operations Command (an endorsement of CT-Plus), and reiterated that America would not do any more nation-building of the kind that it had tried in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Switching strategies on the quick like this—announcing our imminent departure from Afghanistan—had a devastating impact within the region. Americans were not the president’s only audience. Power players all over the Middle East were watching carefully as America experimented with strategic plans and troop numbers, showed a will to fight, and then quickly tired of the whole affair. What they had seen had not impressed them. The dizzying pace of change in policy presented America as indecisive and unreliable. It also suggested that we really had no strategy or long-term goals. Our only goal seemed to be getting out, first of Afghanistan and then the whole region, under the cover of talk about a “strategic pivot” toward Asia.

  The Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad writes that in the 1960s German leaders defended the Vietnam War before protesting German students because they thought America was doing the right thing by sticking with its strategy and its South Vietnamese ally. It sent the right message; when the time came, America would stick by them too. “It came down unavoidably to the question if one could generally trust America.”26

  From Obama’s arrival in power in 2009 through 2011, our only leverage with the Taliban, and also Pakistan, had been the sense that we would stand behind our strategy.27 It is arguable that we should never have embraced COIN, but once we did, we should not have ditched it so quickly. After the president announced our withdrawal we lost our leverage and with it our influence over the final outcome in Afghanistan. What is more, who will now believe in our intentions or our commitment? Can CT-Plus alone work in the long run without our troops, or cooperation, trust, and support from our friends and fear from our foes? Not likely. The Taliban know that once our troops are gone they will not come back—the cost would be too high. If they press us then we would more likely fold our CT-Plus operations rather than deploy more troops to protect them.

  President Obama did not have good options during the strategic review, and ultimately decided that it would be better to reverse course and end COIN before its failings became evident and its costs mounted. Better to cut one’s losses, especially if one can claim some sort of victory by quoting the military. Had he had better options before him—had he demanded those options, as should be expected from the chief executive—then perhaps America could have avoided the costly COIN shuffle to start with.

  The option that the president did not consider, and which could have spelled a very different outcome for the war and how it reflected on the United States, was the diplomatic one.

  It was close to midnight on January 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, “Are you up, can you talk?” I called him. He told me the president had asked him to serve as his envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department and he wanted me to join his team. “No one knows this yet. Don’t tell anyone. Well, maybe your wife.” (It was on the Washington Post Web site the next day.) He continued, “Nothing is confirmed, but it is pretty much a done deal. If you get any other offers let me know right away.” Then he laughed and said, “If you work for anyone else, I will break your knees. This is going to be fun. We are going to do some good. Now get some sleep.” Before he hung up I thanked him for his offer, and said it would be a treat to work with him (which it was—the ride of a lifetime, as it turned out) and an honor to serve in government.

  I met Richard Holbrooke for the first time in 2006 at a conference in Aspen. We sat together at one of the dinners and talked about Iran and Pakistan. Holbrooke ignored the keynote speech, the entertainment that followed, and the food that flowed in between to bombard me with questions. We had many more conversations over the course of the next three years. I met him for lunch or visited him at his office in New York; and after I joined him on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007 we spoke frequently by phone.

  Holbrooke was a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger. He looked at a problem from every angle and then planned how best to tackle it. He knew what bureaucrats would say, how politicians would react, what headline would lead in the media, what the public reaction would be, and how history would render its judgment. He was a doer; that was his ambition—to do, not to be.

  Holbrooke held fast to American values. He was an idealist in the garb of a pragmatic operator. I never ceased to be astounded by his energy and drive; he was tireless in pursuit of his goals and relentless in standing up for American interests and values. In the words of his close friend and veteran diplomat Strobe Talbott, he was the “unquiet American,” who believed that America was a force for good in the world.1

  Fixing America’s broken foreign policy and correcting its jaded view of the Muslim world were the most important foreign policy tasks before the new president. Holbrooke told me that government is the sum of its people. “If you want to change things, you have to get involved. If you want your voice to be heard, then get inside.” He was telling me to “put your money where your mouth is.” He knew I preferred to work on the Middle East, and in particular on Iran. But he had different ideas. “This [Afghanistan and Pakistan] matters more. This is what the president is focused on. This is where you want to be.”

  Holbrooke was persuasive, and I knew deep down that we were at a fork in the road. Regardless of what promises candidate Obama made on his way to the White House, Afghanistan now held the future, his and America’s, in the balance. Holbrooke was seeing clearly into the future, well beyond where the rest of the administration was looking.

  The first month
s in the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) were a period of creativity and hope. Holbrooke had carved out a little autonomous principality on the first floor of the State Department, filling it with young diplomats, civil servants, and outside experts. Daily, scholars, journalists, foreign ambassadors and dignitaries, members of Congress, and administration officials walked in to get their fill of how “AfPak” strategy was shaping up. Even Hollywood got in on SRAP. Angelina Jolie lent a hand to help refugees in Pakistan, and the usually low-key State Department cafeteria was abuzz when Holbrooke sat down for coffee with Natalie Portman to talk Afghanistan.

  SRAP was an experiment in what Holbrooke called the “whole of government approach to solving big problems,” by which he meant doing the job of the government inside the government but despite the government—an idea that for obvious reasons did not sit well with the bureaucracy.

  But Secretary Clinton liked the idea and embraced SRAP. Had she become president she would have likely given Holbrooke the same kind of broad purview in the White House or as secretary of state. Rumor had it that she favored Holbrooke as her deputy secretary of state, but the White House said no. Creating a new office that cut across government agencies to formulate effective policy was the next-best option. The office worked very closely with her during my two years there. We met with her frequently, briefed her on the latest developments or what we were planning, got her input, and wrote memos and white papers that represented the State Department’s position in White House debates. She came to rely on SRAP, trust its judgment, and appreciate its work—SRAP came through for the State Department time and again at critical junctures. Clinton spent more time with SRAP than with any other bureau in the State Department, getting to know more of its people well.

  The idea of coordinating AfPak policies across government was also popular around the world. At a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Finland’s foreign minister teased Holbrooke, telling him, “Nowadays everywhere I go someone comes up to me and introduces himself as ‘some country’s Holbrooke.’ ” And soon there were many such Holbrooke equivalents, some three dozen by the time Holbrooke died. He started getting them together regularly, every six months, for consultations and to coordinate their activities—it was key to managing allies around the world. Hamid Karzai was impressed with the concept, and told Holbrooke that every Muslim country he could bring on board was worth ten NATO ones. And so soon there were Holbrooke counterparts in several Muslim countries. He did not live to attend a gathering of his counterparts in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the spring of 2011, hosted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

  SRAP was then full of energy and ideas. It had an entrepreneurial spirit, a bounce in its step. People started early and worked late into the night, making sure the trains ran on time, so to speak, but also to develop new ideas like how to cut corruption and absenteeism among the Afghan police by using mobile banking and cell phones to pay salaries; or how to use text messaging to raise money to help refugees in Pakistan; or how to stop the Taliban from shutting down cellular phone networks (which they did every night) by putting cell towers on military bases. Many of these ideas were eventually used to address problems in other areas of the world. SRAP then felt more like an Internet start-up than the buttoned-up State Department.

  Holbrooke encouraged the creative chaos. Soon after I joined the office he told me, “I want you to learn nothing from government. This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this. Anyone gives you trouble, come to me.” His constant refrain was “Don’t get broken down by government routine, forget about hierarchy; this is a team. You are as good as the job SRAP does.” On his first visit to SRAP, General David Petraeus, then commander of CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command), mused, “This is the flattest organization I have ever seen. I guess it works for you.”

  Holbrooke knew then that Afghanistan was not going to be easy. There were too many players and too many unknowns, and Obama had not given him enough authority (and would give him almost no support) to get the job done. It is an open secret that, oddly enough, after he took office, the president never met with Holbrooke outside large meetings, never gave him time and heard him out. The president’s advisers in the White House were dead set against Holbrooke. Some, like General Douglas Lute, were holdovers from the Bush era who thought they knew Afghanistan better and did not want to relinquish control to Holbrooke. Others (those closest to the president) wanted to settle scores for Holbrooke’s tenacious support for Hillary Clinton (who was herself eyed with suspicion by the Obama insiders) during the campaign; and still others begrudged Holbrooke’s storied past and wanted to end his run of successes then and there. There were times when it appeared that the White House was more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right. The sight of the White House undermining its own special representative hardly inspired confidence in Kabul or Islamabad.

  But still Holbrooke kept attacking the problem the president had assigned him from all angles. It was as if he was trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube; to get all its colored rows and columns into perfect order. In his mind he was constantly turning the cube, trying to bring into alignment what Congress, the military, the media, the Afghan government, and our allies wanted and how politicians, generals, and bureaucrats were likely to react. Just before he died, in December 2010, he told his wife, Kati Marton, that he thought he had finally got it; he had found a way out that might just work. But he wouldn’t say what he had come up with, “not until he told the president first”—the president who did not have time to listen.

  The die had been cast earlier, and there was not going to be too much out-of-the-box thinking or debate over grand strategy. The generals wanted a military solution to Afghanistan, and the president’s advisers thought the political fallout of going against the military would be too great. Holbrooke thought the impulse to hand over foreign policy to the military was a mistake; there was going to be fighting in Afghanistan, but diplomacy alone could bring that war to a satisfactory end.

  Holbrooke was no starry-eyed pacifist. He believed in the use of force: not as an end in itself, of course, but as a means to solving difficult problems. In the Balkans, he had wielded the threat of U.S. air power to compel the recalcitrant Serbian president Milosevic to agree to a deal. On one occasion he walked out of a frustrating meeting with Milosevic and told his military adviser to roll B-52 bombers out onto the tarmac in an airbase in England and make sure CNN showed the footage. Later, at a dinner during the Dayton peace talks that ended the Bosnia war, he asked President Clinton to sit across from Milosevic. Holbrooke said to Clinton, I want Milosevic to hear from you what I told him, that if there is no peace you will send in the bombers. Holbrooke was seasoned in the business of war and diplomacy.

  In Afghanistan, too, Holbrooke believed that the U.S. military had a key role to play—a role. But what the president was considering in the fall of 2009 was something altogether different. He was being pushed to sign on to a military solution to the conflict. Holbrooke was convinced then that such an effort would fail, and that in trying to avoid that outcome, America would deepen its military commitment, doubling down on a failing strategy in what might turn into a dangerous repeat of the Vietnam debacle that Holbrooke had witnessed as a young Foreign Service officer. Or we would end up abandoning Afghanistan in strategic defeat.

  It is the job of diplomats to end conflicts like Afghanistan, to solve big strategic problems facing America. Military might is supposed to be an instrument in the diplomat’s tool kit. That is how it worked in the Balkans, and that is how it had eventually played out in Vietnam. That war was waged on the battlefield for decades, but it ended around a negotiating table in Paris. Total battlefield victory is rare, and when it has happened, for instance at the end of World War II, it has required a level of commitment that is above and beyond what America was will
ing to give in Afghanistan. Iraq stands out as a rare case of a quick battlefield victory, an end to a war that did not happen around a negotiating table. But was Iraq really won? That proposition is yet to be tested by the departure of American troops.

  But diplomacy was conspicuous by its absence in the 2009 White House strategy review. Diplomacy was then seen narrowly as a useful tool for getting governments around the world to contribute soldiers and money to the Afghan war. It was not a solution to war, but its facilitator.

  This, Holbrooke thought, was a fundamental problem. The military was by its nature simply not the institution to define and run America’s foreign policy. I remember his reaction when General David Petraeus affectionately referred to him in an interview as his “wingman.”2 Holbrooke chuckled and said, “Since when have diplomats become generals’ wingmen?” In the same interview Petraeus had dismissed a role for diplomacy in ending the war, saying, “This [the Afghan war] will not end like the Balkans.”3 This imbalance at the heart of American foreign policy was Obama’s to fix, and the strategic review would have been the place to do it.

  From the outset, Holbrooke had argued for reconciliation as the path out of Afghanistan. But the military thought talk of reconciliation undermined America’s commitment to fully resourced COIN. On his last trip to Afghanistan, in October 2010, Holbrooke pulled General Petraeus aside and said, “David, I want to talk to you about reconciliation.” Petraeus replied, “That is a fifteen-second conversation. No, not now.” The commanders’ standard response was that they needed two more fighting seasons (two years) to soften up the Taliban. They were hoping to change the president’s mind on his July deadline, and after that convince him to accept a “slow and shallow” (long and gradual) departure schedule. The military feared that Holbrooke’s talk of talking to the Taliban would undermine that strategy. Their line was that we should fight first and talk later. Much later. Holbrooke thought we could talk and fight, and in fact that you should fight in order to make your foe find talking more appealing (not the other way around). Reconciliation should be the ultimate goal, and fighting the means to facilitate it.