Rot at the Top: Why U.S. foreign policy seems unlikely to improve any time soon

Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.S. had a Middle Eastern expert who was, you know, actually from the Middle East? Someone who understood Islamic culture from the inside out, someone with wide experience and education in western academia but also well-traveled throughout the Islamic Middle East and Asia, someone with long years of hard experience in the unglamorous job of developing and executing diplomatic policy in such unfriendly terrain as Afghanistan? Someone perhaps who had written several well-received books on Islam and the Middle East, and, as icing on the cake, enjoying some such glittering academic title as Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies?

Well, we do have such a person, and his name is Vali Reza Nasr, born in Tehran and currently sipping coffee at 1740 Mass Ave., just around the corner from my little condo. The downside is, as far as I can see, all the big answers Vali has to our big questions are wrong.

Vali’s current opus is The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat , whose title pretty much says it all. I confess that I haven’t read it, but Vali gives the gist in his long article for Foreign Affairs, “The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan.” At the New York Review of Books, Steve Coll offers a balanced and measured take. Mine will be more strident.

At the start of the Obama Administration, Vali signed up for what turned out to be a political education he did not much appreciate when he agreed to be an assistant to Richard Holbrooke, selected by Obama to serve as envoy to Afghanistan. Holbrooke had won his spurs during the Clinton Administration. He was closely associated with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and probably would have become secretary of state if Hillary had beaten out Obama for the nomination. It’s likely that he got the position as envoy in part to appease Hillary. Holbrooke was smart, and tough, and had worlds of experience, but he also had an ego too big to see that he and his ego were never going to fit inside the Obama Administration, aka the not-Hillary Clinton Administration.

What makes Nasr’s take on this so disappointing is that it’s so simplistic. Holbrooke and Clinton? Good! Obama? Bad! He faults Obama for choosing the military method over diplomacy in Afghanistan, yet this is how he describes the situation on the ground when Obama first takes office:

Excuse me, but since when do unstoppable juggernauts bother to negotiate, to cooperate with the “patient diplomacy that Nasr persistently advocates as the solution to every problem? Nasr faults Obama both for sending in 30,000 troops and for setting a deadline for their withdrawal. All the Taliban had to do was hunker down until the deadline for departure arrived. But without the troops, why would the Taliban have to hunker down at all?

As is so often the case, when a war is going poorly, those involved try to change the subject. Yes, Afghanistan is a mess. But the cause of it all is Pakistan! That’s the key! That’s where we need to make our major effort. Because, when you’re pouring billions into a sinkhole, the one thing you really need is another, larger sinkhole.

According to Nasr, Holbrooke’s “solution” to the Afghan War was a $100 billion “Marshall Plan” for Pakistan. It’s very disappointing that Nasr would think this was a good idea, for several reasons. The first, and most obvious, is political. The idea that a Democratic, or a Republican Congress, would pour virtually unchecked billions into an Osama-hiding, faction-ridden, fanatical, far-away Hell-hole like Pakistan in the midst of the greatest economic downturn since World War II is so far from reality that no sane person, it would seem, would entertain for a second. But Nasr’s loving it.

Second, and in many ways worse, is that someone with Nasr’s broad knowledge of foreign policy and recent history could imagine that a “Second Marshall Plan” would succeed in the first place. There have been many Marshall Plans since the first, both foreign and domestic, and they all have failed. In fact, there are many cogent studies arguing that they have been counter-productive, simply subsidizing and empowering ruthless authoritarians gifted in exploiting western credulity and guilt.

Someone of Nasr’s learning might be expected to understand that the Marshall Plan succeeded for several very specific reasons. First of all, we were rebuilding the second most-advanced industrial economy in the world, not building a new one from the ground up. In addition, the deep and abiding fear of communism motivated the American people to support such unprecedented extravagance and also motivated Europeans to accept American leadership. Given a choice between gum-chewing American cowboys and gat-wielding Soviet thugs, Europe knew whom to choose. Where these advantages have been lacking—in Latin America, in Africa, and in Asia—the results, in terms of long-term economic development as opposed to purchase of short-term political influence with autocrats, have been nil, the equivalent of pouring out billions of gallons of water on stony ground.

If that isn’t reason enough—and it certainly is—pouring money into Pakistan, if that were remotely feasible, which it isn’t, would certainly have one direct effect—provoking India. Losing India to gain Pakistan to “gain” Afghanistan is unimaginable “realpolitik” folly. Although Nasr imagines China as our great foe (like so many experts, he requires foes), he’s happy to enrage the one sure, great counterweight to China to gain Afghanistan, which is useless to us.

Nasr attributes Obama’s failure to follow Clinton and Holbrooke’s advice on every occasion to politics, pure and simple, and he’s not half wrong. Obama’s real purpose in Afghanistan, I would say, was to keep Gen. Petraeus inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in, and, to the Republicans’ dismay, he succeeded. Now a war that Americans did not want, or need, to fight is slowly winding down—slowly to avoid embarrassing the military—and no one’s complaining, particularly not the dead, who are condemned to silence.

Obama’s conduct of the Afghan war is supremely ugly, but one wonders if it could have been managed any better. John McCain would surely have sent in 40,000 troops instead of 30,000, and kept them there. As for Nasr’s beloved quiet diplomacy, as I’ve said before, why would the Taliban throw in a winning hand, to please a few diplomats? Simply leaving was the only sensible option, and no “sane” person would suggest that, because of the inevitable hysterical outcry it would provoke.

Despite his love of “quiet diplomacy,” Nasr has fantasies of an omnipotent U.S. that have the flavor of Kennedy-era hubris,* despite Vietnam, despite Iraq, despite everything. The Middle East is, it seems, ours for the taking. If we back progressive, democratic forces, why, then, everyone will love us. If we continue to act as we currently do, looking exclusively for short-term gain (what I would call “achievable gain”), we will be displaced by, of course, the Chinese, who Nasr obsessively dresses in the moth-eaten skin of the Great Russian Bear—the Great Dead Russian Bear.

In the 1860s, not the 1960s, Abraham Lincoln remarked “I confess plainly that I have not controlled events. Rather, events have controlled me.” One looks in vain for such wisdom from Dr. Nasr.

Afterwords
One gets the impression, though this is mere speculation, that Dr. Nasr believes that Islam will never enter the modern world without American leadership. We should never depart from our ideals of intellectual freedom (if only we had not done so already!), but the notion that we can force Muslims to transform themselves into secular humanists strikes me as woefully wrong-headed. The Islamic reaction to the modern world often takes shockingly reactionary forms—the oppression of women being the most obvious and most repulsive—but “revolution from above,” particularly when promulgated by detested foreigners, is a recipe for disaster. It is dismaying that this painfully unrealistic brand of thinking, which almost guarantees another Middle East collision, with the current bogyman de jour—Iran—is the conventional wisdom in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. One would almost think that these people are afraid that, without a continuing crisis of “world historical” proportions, they would be out of a job.