The United States of Fear

heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.” Such consequences would evidently include a halt to the flow of U.S. aid to a country in economically disastrous shape. So much for the carrots.

According to the Washington Post, General McChrystal delivered a “similar message” to the chief of staff of the Pakistani army. To back up Clinton’s public threats and McChrystal’s private ones, hordes of anonymous American military and civilian officials were ready to pepper reporters with leaks about the tough love that might now be in store for Pakistan. The same Post story, for instance, spoke of “some officials… weighing in favor of a far more muscular and unilateral U.S. policy. It would include a geographically expanded use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan and pressure for a stronger U.S. military presence there.”

According to similar accounts, “more pointed” messages were heading for key Pakistanis and “new and stiff warnings” were being issued. Americans were said to be pushing for expanded special operations training programs in the Pakistani tribal areas, while insisting that the Pakistani military launch a major campaign in North Waziristan, the heartland of various resistance groups including possibly al-Qaeda. “The element of threat” was now in the air, according to Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador, while in press reports you could hear rumblings about an “internal debate” in Washington that might result in more American “boots on the ground.”

Helpless Escalation

In other words, in the space of two months the Obama administration had flip-flopped when it came to who exactly was to be pressured and who reassured. A typically anonymous “former U.S. official who advises the administration on Afghan policy” caught the moment well in a comment to the Wall Street Journal. “This whole bending over backwards to show Karzai the red carpet,” he told journalist Peter Spiegel, “is a result of not having had a concerted strategy for how to grapple with him.”

On a larger scale, the flip-flop seemed to reflect tactical and strategic incoherence—and not just in relation to Karzai. To all appearances, when it comes to the administration’s two South Asian wars, one open, one more hidden, Obama and his top officials were flailing around. For all the policy reviews and shuttling officials, the surging troops, extra private contractors, and new bases, Obama’s wars were worsening. Lacking was any coherent regional policy or semblance of real strategy—counter­insurgency being only a method of fighting and a set of tactics for doing so. In place of strategic coherence there was just one knee-jerk response: escalation. As unexpected events gripped the Obama administration by the throat, its officials increasingly acted as if further escalation were their only choice, their fated choice.

This response was eerily familiar. It permeated Washington’s mentality in the Vietnam War years. In fact, one of the strangest aspects of that war was the way America’s leaders—including President Lyndon Johnson—felt increasingly helpless and hopeless even as they committed themselves to further steps up the ladder of escalation.

We don’t know what the main actors in Obama’s war have been feeling. We don’t have their private documents or their secret taped conversations. Nonetheless, it should ring a bell when, as wars devolve, the only response Washington can imagine is further escalation.

Pragmatism Goes to War

One thing can be said about the Bush administration: it had a grand strategic vision to go with its wars. Its top officials were convinced that the American military, a force they saw as unparalleled on planet Earth, would be capable of unilaterally shock-and-awing America’s enemies in the oil heartlands of the planet. Its two wars would bring not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Iran and Syria to their knees, leaving Washington to impose a Pax Americana on the Middle East and Central Asia (in the process of which groups like Hamas and Hezbollah would be subdued and anti-American jihadism ended).

They couldn’t, of course, have been more wrong, something quite apparent to the Obama team. Now, however, we have a crew in Washington that seems to have no vision, great or small, when it comes to American foreign or imperial policy, and that seems, in fact, to lack any sense of strategy at all. What they have is a set of increasingly discredited tactics and an approach that might pass for good old American see-what-works “pragmatism.”

The vision may be long gone, but the wars live on with their own inexorable momentum. Add into the mix American domestic politics, which could discourage any president from changing course and de-escalating a war, and you have what looks like a fatal—and fatally expensive—brew.

We’ve moved from Bush’s visionary disasters to Obama’s flailing wars, while the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq continue to pay the price. If only we could close the curtain on this strange mix of farce and tragedy, but evidently we’re still stuck in act four of a five-act nightmare.

The Question Mark Over Afghanistan

All of this leaves the massive American investment of its most precious resources, including lives, in Afghanistan an ongoing mystery that is never addressed. Somewhere in that country’s vast stretches of poppy fields or in the halls of Washington’s national security bureaucracy, lurks a great unasked question. It’s a question asked almost half a century ago regarding the war in Vietnam, the lost war to which David Petraeus turned in 2006 to produce the army counterinsurgency manual that became the basis for his surge strategy.

The question then was: Why are we in Vietnam? It even became the title of a Norman Mailer novel. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration produced a government propaganda film solely in response to that question, which was already threatening to drive down his polling figures and upend his Great Society at home. The film was called Why Viet-Nam. While it had no question mark after the title, the question of whether to add one was actually argued out in the most literal way inside the administration. The film began with the president quoting a letter he had received from a mother “in the Midwest” whose son was stationed in Vietnam. You hear the president, in his homey twang, pick up that woman’s question as if it were his own. “Why Viet-Nam?” he repeats three times as the title appears on the screen, after which, official or not, a question mark seems to hover over every scene, as it did over the war itself.

In a sense, the same question mark appeared both before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it has never been associated with Afghanistan. Because of 9/11, Afghanistan remained for years the (relatively) good (and largely forgotten) war, until visible failure visibly tarnished it.

It’s far past time to ask that question, even as the Obama administration repeats the al-Qaeda mantra of the Bush years almost word for word and lets any explanation go at that. Why are we in Afghanistan? Why is our treasure being wasted there when it’s needed here?

Clueless in Afghanistan—and Washington

Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.

The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19, 2010, and was headlined, “U.S. Military Criticized for Purchase of Russian Copters for Afghan Air Corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan War and nation-