Nagl is the latest high-profile shift by CNAS veterans in an out of government. Co-founder Michele Flournoy was Pentagon policy chief under Defense Secretary Robert Gates for three years but has announced she is leaving in February. Similarly, Colin Kahl ended his extended term as deputy assistant secretary of defense, keeping watch over middle east policy, to return to CNAS as a senior fellow and to teaching at Georgetown University.
Nagl will become a research fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy, teach counterinsurgency to midshipmen, and "investigate the influences of culture upon warfare." He will maintain a status with CNAS as a non-resident senior fellow.
The most promising route seems to be the one that appears the most difficult—helping settle the India-Pakistan conflict. Such a settlement would free Pakistan to focus its forces on the insurgency, reduce its sense that it must control the course of events in Afghanistan, possibly scale back its military nuclear program and better secure its nuclear arms. It would also reduce the importance of the military. Detailed and rather widely shared ideas have been put forth on how this conflict might be settled, and various tension-reduction moves and negotiations between the two nations have already taken place. That indicates this road can be navigated.
For the West to influence the conflict settlement, it will need to show Pakistan that the United States and its allies are no longer tilting toward India. Doing so will require a geopolitical reassessment, one which acknowledges that China is best treated as a regional power (although not a regional hegemon) with few, if any, global ambitions and a power with which the West can deal on many international matters. This reassessment, moreover, would recognize that balancing is a concept that applies poorly to the twenty-first-century age of weapons of mass destruction, cyberwarfare, long-range missiles, unconventional forces and terrorism. Thus there is no reason to try to cast India in the role of a China balancer.
In short, both the links between Afghanistan and Pakistan and Pakistan’s internal dynamics are affected by the India-Pakistan entanglement. This entanglement, in turn, is affected by the India-China-West relationship. Although at first it may seem far-fetched to argue that a promising way to break the persistent morass in Afghanistan and Pakistan is to reexamine Western assumptions about China’s course, this avenue might well be worth exploring in its own right and for the sake of all the parties involved.
Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international affairs at The George Washington University. He is the author of Security First (Yale University Press, 2007). He is indebted to Julia Milton and Marissa Cramer for research assistance on this article.
"China: Making an Adversary"
Abstract:
Commentators in the Western media, the United States Congress and academia are increasingly contending that China is on its way to becoming a threatening global force, an adversary, if not an enemy. This article examines whether those views are justified, after first establishing the importance of critically assessing all claims that a nation is turning into an adversary. The examination proceeds by summarizing the arguments of those who consider China an adversary in the making - the 'adversarians' - and the responses of those who hold China is leaning toward a peaceful development and should be engaged - the 'engagers'. The discussion is organized into three segments, each analyzing the debate with regard to the different sectors of power: military/geopolitical, economic and ideational. The concluding sections explore alternative American responses to China's rising power in each of the three sectors.
Find the article in International Politics Volume 48, Issue 6 (November 2011).
This is the fundamental principle of American international relations: do whatever you can to prevent a foreign affairs disaster from harming your reelection chances, even if it hurts America in the long run. The Cold War defined this practice. From Egypt to Vietnam to Chile, America supported and funded anti-Communist governments, be they democratic or autocratic. It even overthrew regimes which it didn’t like, like Iran. (This SWJ post pretty much describes how the failure of Iran is one of constant short term priorities replacing a long term goal mindset. ) America fought the Cold War as if it would never end. When it did, plenty of people around the world didn’t like America, or at least they felt America might be a hypocrite.
Then 9/11 happened. Had it happened on President Clinton’s watch, our response might have been subtly nuanced with post-Cold War thinking. Since it was President Bush’s team of all former Cold War-riors, the response was straight out of the “stop the USSR” playbook. First, the CIA found all its old autocratic friends in north Africa like Egypt, Algeria and Yemen who could hold terrorism suspects indefinitely, while possibly torturing them, and letting the CIA listen in. Then we launched two wars, one of which made sense, the second of which did not, to stop “state sponsored” terrorism. Then the Department of Defense started launching attacks into other countries where we could not put troops, like Pakistan and Yemen.
With the Arab Spring overthrowing some stalwart American terrorism fighting allies--Egypt and Tunisia--and threatening others--Qatar and Saudi Arabia--many Muslims across the Middle East have a choice: what type of government do I want? It turns out, they want democracies, and not American-style democracy. Those democracies will probably not be friendly to U.S. interests, either, because in their minds, America is linked to supporting military regimes like Pakistan, Egypt or Qatar, which had just been preventing those people from living in freedom.
In other words, our short term goals--fighting the Cold War or capturing terrorists--and our responses to those threats--overthrowing unfriendly regimes, torture, extraordinary renditions and supporting dictators--have hurt what should be America’s long term foreign policy goal: spreading democracy (and free markets) around the globe. It isn’t very hard for Islamic political parties to discredit so-called “universal” American values when they only apply to Americans in America, an un-universal caveat.
As we said last week, we believe the world is getting better. We believe democracy is spreading, and the world is getting less violent (in part because of democracy, and the spread of international institutions). If President Obama aligned our foreign policy more with our long terms goals, and worried less about preventing another terrorist attack, then democracy and peace would spread even faster.
I admit it: When I was writing The Gamble I thought for awhile that such a residual force was the way to go. But with the passage of the years since then I increasingly have come to believe that Iraqis were simply sitting around keeping their powder dry and waiting for Uncle Sam to get out of the way, so they could sort themselves out. Remember, the surge was half a war ago-it began four years ago, in January 2007. Iraq was given a lot of time. I do not see what keeping 15,000 troops there for another year or two would do that it did not do in 2009 or 2010. Plus, President Obama was not elected to keep us in Iraq, he was elected, in part, to get us out. So it would be pretty hard to keep troops there without a clear indication that it would do any good. Especially since Iraqis seemed to want us out.
Great powers (and the US is certainly one) tend to privilege stability or order over justice or just relations. To maintain order and stability the US has supported dictators and regimes that if we had privileged justice we would not have supported. We know the argument that one does what is possible. But justice deferred becomes a festering sore and source of instability eventually. So rather than having to choose between inappropriately interfering in the life of another country or being isolationist and concentrating only on ourselves, how do we creatively engage the larger world so as to increase justice?
What can the United States actually do to restore order to the world without having to engage in either global policing or nation-building?
Are their gaps and disconnects between what the United States says and what it does, how it wants to be perceived, and how it is perceived?
What should be the United States military role in foreign policy?
Outside of the United States mlitary, what other institutions MUST be fixed in order for the United States foreign policy to be successful?
What reforms are needed within the United States military?
This thread is active in both the Blog and Council
However, when it comes to our wars overseas, concern for the victims is limited to U.S. troops. When concern for the native populations is expressed, it tends to be more strategic than empathetic, as with Gen. David H. Petraeus’s acknowledgment in late 2006 that harsh U.S. tactics were alienating Iraqi civilians and undermining Operation Iraqi Freedom. The switch to counterinsurgency, which involves more restraint by the military, was billed as a change that would save the U.S. mission, not primarily as a strategy to reduce civilian deaths.
The wars in Korea and Indochina were extremely deadly. While estimates of Korean War deaths are mainly guesswork, the three-year conflict is widely believed to have taken 3 million lives, about half of them civilians. The sizable civilian toll was partly due to the fact that the country’s population is among the world’s densest and the war’s front lines were often moving.
The war in Vietnam and the spillover conflicts in Laos and Cambodia were even more lethal. These numbers are also hard to pin down, although by several scholarly estimates, Vietnamese military and civilian deaths ranged from 1.5 million to 3.8 million, with the U.S.-led campaign in Cambodia resulting in 600,000 to 800,000 deaths, and Laotian war mortality estimated at about 1 million.
Paddy Ashdown claims that we are living in a moment in history where power is changing in ways it never has before. In a spellbinding talk at TEDxBrussels he outlines the three major global shifts that he sees coming.
Analysis (unattributed). The future is less likely to be what "we" want and more of what others demand. Neither of these solutions, which appear to be two ends of a continuum of US intervention policies, appear to be workable from my perspective. Policy is likely to be grounded in context and the worldwide context is very different. The US will most likely be pulling out of certain regions, developing coalitions in others, and pursuing some unilateral interventions (broadly defined to include MOOTW) in others. We also are in Age where grassroots movements worldwide are toppling oligarchy. What will replace them is uncertain, but it will be a very different world and very difficult to make unilateral policy. The US no longer has the ability to "control" what is going on although we will continue to try to shape things.
Analysis (David Betz). My question is whether this is still insurgency or has it evolved into something else sufficiently different as to be actually something else?
Clausewitz allowed for this with two observations:
(1) "War is more than a chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case."
(2) "We can thus only say that the aims a belligerent adopts, and the resources he employs . . . will also conform to the spirit of the age and to its general character."
Our current enemies have adopted wars of insurgency as the form they use to challenge us.
Analysis (Mike Few). I wonder how the U.S. military and government should be organized to adapt to this environment?
For the past four years, I wanted to find reoccurring patterns throughout history that reflect today. Initially, I narrowed it down to 1866-1910, but I am now convinced that we are literally in a period that reflects the beginning of the twentieth century-small protracted wars of limited ends, contested global hegemony, economic shifts with the rise of the middle class and the Industrial Revolution, and the Rise of the West with an nascent American Empire blossoming. Theodore Roosevelt rose to the challenges of the day by building the Panama Canal and sailing the Great White Fleet.
Personally, I feel that the military lessons of Iraq, A'stan, and even Vietnam are not so much on the tactical level, but on the operational bureaucratic level- organization, planning, personnel, leadership, training, processes, etc.
