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Expert opinion in the foreign policy think-tank worldâyour American Enterprise Institutes, your Councils on Foreign Relations, etc.âruns, on balance, hawkish. The Iraq War debate provided ample evidence for this claim, and Les Gelb, the president emeritus of CFR, owned up to it in an essay in Democracy (PDF) that has recently sparked some interesting commentary from Glenn Greenwald and Justin Logan. (Gelb: “My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate
tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”) With appropriate caveats in place, this can be taken as one of the background conditions of contemporary political debates.
So, for observers of a more dovish bent, the preponderance of think-tank types on the panel that advised Gen. Stanley McChrystalâs review of American policy in Afghanistan is matter of some concern. By all accounts, that review will soon lead to a formal request for a substantial increase in American troopsâa necessity for the counterinsurgency approach that, as CJR has noted, is favored by the Center for a New American Security, a recent addition to the foreign policy think-tank scene.
Thereâs a media angle here, too: with the Afghanistan war at a crisis point, Washington is debating whether to go big and provide more troops for counterinsurgency, or go small with a pared-down counterterrorism effort. (Going home seems not really to be on the table.) Think-tank types who favor going big will likely be popping up on major op-ed pages with greater frequency over the next month, and their views will have influence even when their bylines donât appearâDavid Brooks cited Stephen Biddle, a fellow at Council on Foreign Relations and a member of McChrystalâs advisory panel, in his recent New York Times column arguing that âonly the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success.â*
But there are also some tentative signs that, on this particular debate, the think-tankers wonât all fall in line behind more the hawkish option. Consider Richard Haass, Gelbâs successor as CFR president and a man who, though he served in the early years of the Bush administration, has said he was â60 percent againstâ the Iraq War. Last month, in an op-ed for The New York Times, Haass batted down Barack Obamaâs claim that Afghanistan is a âwar of necessity,â noted the risks of the counterinsurgency approach, and outlined alternatives. Then, having stepped right up to the line, Haass retreated: âMy judgment is that American interests are sufficiently important, prospects for achieving limited success are sufficiently high and the risks of alternative policies are sufficiently great to proceed, for now, with Mr. Obamaâs measured strategy.â
This was essentially the tightrope another of the Timesâs columnists, Thomas Friedman, has been walking for months now: I donât really believe in the counterinsurgency effort, but I canât bring myself to give up on it. Still, Haass was conspicuously leaving himself room to maneuver, and he seemed to be taking advantage of that room in an interview with the German publication Spiegel, posted online Monday. Much of the interview covers the same ground as the op-ed, which is almost repeated verbatim at one point. Again, Haass does not make a declarative statement against deploying more troops, and he disavows any plan for withdrawal, or âabandoning Afghanistan.â
But neither, this time, does he say he supports the current strategy. As for what he does say, highlights include âwe need to challenge the assumption that what happens in Afghanistan is critical for the global effort against terrorism,â and âI am no longer sure what happens in Afghanistan is still essential to the war on terrorism.â And then thereâs this exchange:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t that effort [against global terrorism] doomed if Afghanistan remains a safe haven for terrorists? That is why the West invaded the country, after all.
Haass: That is not clear either. Even if terrorists were to be denied Afghanistan, they could operate out of other countries. We should also reconsider whether what happens in Afghanistan is essential for the future in Pakistan which, frankly, matters more to the United States.
In other words, the president of the very establishment, very centrist Council on Foreign Relations is starting to sound a little bit like a liberal blogger.
It would be a mistake to make too much of these statementsâHaass is only one individual, and an interview with a European publication is probably not the first place one goes to try to influence American policymakers. Still, itâs hard to see how these comments could be reconciled with support for an escalation of the war effort. Given widespread disillusionment with the Karzai regime, if Afghanistan is not a central front to the war on terror, and it is not essential for the future of Pakistan, what is a counterinsurgency for?
It will be interesting to see, the next time Haass takes to the pages of a major news outlet, how far he goes in pressing this logic. It will also be interesting to see how many of his brethren in the think-tank world take up this line of thinking. The answers to those questions could have real consequences for how the debate over the warâs future plays out in the press.
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