Obama's speech shows a better understanding of Americans than of Afghans

By William Davnie

Retired Foreign Service officer, Minneapolis

(Retired Foreign Service officer, Minneapolis.)

Famed House Speaker Tip O'Neill taught us that "all politics is local." Seen from that perspective, the United States doesn't have a foreign policy; we have domestic policies about foreign countries.

And that's what we saw in President Obama's address on Afghanistan. His policy offers a better response to the domestic political calculus than it does to the challenges of Southwest Asia.

As domestic politics, the speech bordered on brilliant. Delivered before a military audience, replete with paeans to American blood spilled on multiple continents, with no search for world domination -- open to debate in most of the world, but self-evident truth for most Americans -- President Obama confounded his critics and silenced his supporters.

The critics can hardly complain, given that he has essentially granted Gen. Stanley McChrystal's troop request, made the requisite nod to the military's "unbroken line of sacrifice" and quoted from (Republican, to remind younger readers) President Dwight Eisenhower. His supporters, meanwhile, have no place to turn, and only a limited desire to oppose a man they may be disappointed in, but still hold out hopes for.

Many thought he could use Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry's leaked message -- opposing more troops until the Karzai regime demonstrated itself as worthy of increased support -- to deflect a troop increase. He didn't; military use of force won again over a more civilian-, development-based policy -- but that may be the point, or part of it.

Obama and his team may calculate that he cannot afford to alienate Republicans any further if he's to make progress reforming health care, reregulating Wall Street, and addressing global warming. Having dispatched troops with a call to rally around the flag and overcome the "rancor and cynicism and partisanship" abroad in the land, Obama will be harder to label as dithering or weak.

That seems to be the basis for this policy, because it looks confused in several ways in its analysis of the situation in Afghanistan and its neighbors.

First, the speech never clearly states why the Taliban is our enemy. Yes, the Taliban has maintained common cause with al-Qaeda in seeking the overthrow of the Kabul government -- but U.S. sources estimate perhaps 100 al-Qaeda personnel remain in Afghanistan. How much help can they be?

More to the point, the Taliban has a clear goal of ruling Afghanistan, and adamantly denies anything further. Al-Qaeda, truly an international terrorist organization, wants and needs a place to operate, but under existing pressure has already moved some amount of its activities out of Southwest Asia and back to Yemen, likely Somalia, and elsewhere. It has become a 21st century, non-geographic, networked threat -- one that requires serious attention, but that cannot be targeted through traditional understandings of war and victory.

Second, President Obama links Afghanistan and Pakistan, but mistakes their connection. The Taliban, largely a Pakistani creation, served Pakistan's foreign policy interests by providing "strategic depth" balancing Pakistan's tense relationship with India. Much as the U.S. has supported dictators where we had, in our view, bigger fish to fry, Islamabad did the same thing in Afghanistan.

When we toppled the Taliban we upset that system, and inflamed Pakistani opinion against us. Pakistan has not handled all of this well, to be sure, and faces domestic risks it must address. But its failures will not be overcome by our assumption that what we want Pakistan to do makes sense for Pakistan.

Finally, Obama's timeline meets political needs but neither military nor developmental ones. We can likely suppress (not defeat) the Taliban for a time -- but a feudal society does not change fundamentally in 18 months, and perhaps not in 18 years.

Afghanistan is not a "basket case," or ungovernable, so long as Afghans are doing the governing. But it is profoundly different from anything we understand, and cannot conceivably change in the dramatic way it would need to if U.S. troops are to withdraw in the time Obama has outlined. Iraq, a far more developed society, has not changed greatly during the American presence there, and may now be slipping backward a bit. But given a troop surge, America's attention deficit disorder and progress on other priorities, by 2011 all this will be forgotten.

Or so the White House seems to hope.

William Davnie retired after a 26-year diplomatic career in the U.S. Foreign Service and now lives in Minneapolis. He has traveled in Afghanistan and served in its northern neighbor, Tajikistan, as well as in Russia and Iraq.

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