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ANDREW McCARTHY:KERRY DOES AFGHANISTAN

Posted By Ruth King on October 29th, 2009

Kerry Does Afghanistan
Suddenly, the nation-builder isn’t so sure about nation-building.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

‘What America needs today,” Sen. John Kerry insisted, “is a smarter, more comprehensive and far-sighted strategy for modernizing the Middle East.” We have to “draw on all of our nation’s strengths,” including “military might” and “the immense moral prestige of freedom and democracy.” Plus, he said, “the world’s largest economy” must invest heavily in education and infrastructure in the Middle East’s developing countries.

Dissections of counterinsurgency’s fine points were not yet in vogue when Kerry laid out this ambitious blueprint for nation-building — indeed, region-building. Other than that, though, he could have easily been describing the McChrystal plan for Afghanistan.

But this was at Georgetown University in early 2003. At the time, Afghanistan seemed to have been won, our war objectives — routing al-Qaeda and toppling its host regime, the Taliban — having been achieved. It would take more than six years, and a shift in Washington’s conventional wisdom to Kerry’s way of thinking, before there was a McChrystal plan. Now that that’s finally happened, what a surprise to find Senator Weathervane . . . opposed!

Kerry has become one of President Obama’s top advisers on Afghanistan. This goes a long way toward explaining why administration policy is ever more incoherent as the central Asian basketcase — where 19 soldiers and three DEA agents have been killed in the last few days — becomes ever more lethal for American troops. It also means Kerry’s speech Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations can’t be dismissed as the usual yawner. It’s a reflection of the commander-in-chief’s thinking from an insider.

There’s an interesting symmetry between Kerry’s meanderings on McChrystal and the growing critique of Obama by nervous Democrats and moderates. After years of preaching the same gospel the general has proposed, Kerry is unable to bring himself to the conclusion that maybe nation-building in the Arab world isn’t such a great idea after all. So he is reduced to complaining that McChrystal’s plan to create a functional nation-state from scratch in a seventh-century society “reaches too far, too fast.”

Clearly, Kerry is signaling that the 40,000 in additional forces McChrystal has requested will be trimmed down if not rejected outright. The rationale he offers for this recent evolution in his thinking is not very convincing. The senator frets that “we do not yet have the critical guarantees of governance and development capacity,” as though corrupt and incompetent rulers in Afghanistan were something new. He also now realizes, he says, that our own strapped government lacks a civilian capability to dole out goodies (“tangible benefits”) to the hapless population we are struggling to protect — and without enough welfare, how can you expect Afghans to buy into their new welfare state?

And get this: It has suddenly dawned on Kerry (and Obama) that Afghanistan is without security forces and reliable government officials who can “partner” effectively with our troops — to “restore Afghans’ faith in their own government,” as if they ever had such a thing. This last epiphany is especially rich. President Obama selected General McChrystal and had him conduct a soup-to-nuts study of Afghanistan precisely because it was understood that the rudiments of governance were lacking. The general was not sent to deny al-Qaeda safe haven and topple the Taliban. We already did that — eight years ago.

There may be good reasons to doubt McChrystal’s strategy. I have done that myself (see, e.g., here, here, and here). But let’s bear in mind that the general is faithfully carrying out the assignment Obama gave him. He was not asked what it would take to win the war — a task that would involve killing our enemies and attacking their support systems outside Afghanistan. McChrystal was directed to report on what it would take to build — not rebuild, but create — a modern nation-state. It would be disingenuous to use the lack of competent Afghan forces — as opposed to the overall imprudence of the mission — as an excuse for denying the general’s request for more troops. As Brookings Institute scholar (and McChrystal-plan enthusiast) Michael O’Hanlon points out in a Washington Examiner op-ed, “the idea of hastening [the] training” of Afghan security forces “is perhaps the most important reason for which [McChrystal] wants additional American forces.” To postpone the escalation until more Afghan forces can be trained, O’Hanlon argues, misses “the core logic of the general’s own strategy.”

Like many Democrats, Kerry is a self-styled “progressive internationalist.” For that bent of mind, nation-building and democracy promotion are naturals. Unlike staid statesmen in the George W. Bush 2000 mold, such leftists are unapologetic about their zeal to remake the world. They are neither skeptical when it comes to complex foreign entanglements nor phased by hard questions about the toll in blood and treasure. Though instinctively hostile to considerations of religion in matters of public policy, they make exceptions for Islam — holding as an article of faith that it is a religion of peace, and that its adherents are certain to assimilate to Western values and forms of governance. There is no clash of civilizations for progressive internationalists: Western civilization, being the root of all evil, is always negotiable.

So what has happened to Kerry and the great nation-builders of the Left? It is a combination of their vengeful politics and inescapable reality.

First, Iraq happened. That was the mission Kerry favored or opposed as dictated by the shifting winds of opportunism, the reductio that left the senator in “for it before I was against it” absurdum.

In 9/11’s wake, a Democratic presidential hopeful had to appear tough on rogues like Saddam Hussein. For Kerry, that was hardly a stretch: For years, he had supported President Clinton’s saber-rattling against the Iraqi regime. But then the weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize in the anticipated quantities, and the antiwar Left — a dispositive faction in today’s Democratic politics — found its voice.

In response, the Bush administration shifted the mission to progressive-internationalist turf. The war became more about Iraqi political development and less about American national defense. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this was sheer political calculation on President Bush’s part. Democracy promotion had long threaded his War on Terror rhetoric. After 9/11, he became a convert to progressive internationalism (it’s not materially different from the core that leads to such treacle as “compassionate” conservatism, comprehensive immigration reform, or the notion that whenever someone “hurts,” government is obliged “to move”). As the second inaugural address demonstrated, the president took to the “march of freedom” with the zeal of a convert. But even assuming I’m wrong and that the Bush of 2004 embraced nation-building for purely political reasons, it was a poor calculation: It turned out that the Left despised Bush more than they revered their own Wilsonian pieties.

For Democrats, nation-building has thus lost its luster as a political calling. Still, the brakes are being applied by the always-adaptable Kerry for the most practical of reasons: Now that years of rhapsodizing have given way to the grisly reality of modernizing a resistant Islamic world, the prospects don’t seem so good. And Afghanistan is not like Obamacare. Administration insiders can’t schedule catastrophe for 2013, when being re-elected is no longer a concern. If catastrophe happens in Afghanistan, it will happen on its own schedule — soon. Right now, Obama and Kerry figure they can still blame Bush for the mess. If Obama himself sets the McChrystal strategy in motion, they know the mess is theirs.

But here’s the problem: Obama is commander-in-chief now. It’s not like his responsibilities are suspended while he votes “present” on the McChrystal plan for still more weeks. Undermanned American forces are in grave danger today. More have been killed this month than in any since 2001. As the nation-builders get cold feet, the enemy gets bold feet. It’s beyond time to give our commanders what they need — in resources, time and space — to crush al-Qaeda and the Taliban once and for all. If Obama doesn’t have the gumption to give that order, he ought to say so and bring our troops home. Leaving them in this limbo is irresponsible.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

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