The president's left hand

In response to those who paint Richard Nixon as a master of liberal domestic policy, Elizabeth Drew cites his approach to formation of the Environmental Protection Agency:

He’s given credit for signing into law several bills to improve the environment, including establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. But in fact, Nixon wasn’t very interested in the subject and he fobbed it off on his aides to handle, saying at one point: “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.” He privately called the then-rising environmental movement “crap” for “clowns.” 

That jogged a memory.  according to Nick Kotz in Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws that Changed America, shortly after the Kennedy assassination, LBJ met with U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge and told him, "I am not going to lose Vietnam."  Afterward,

The mind is a cold, calculating Polyanna

I am somewhat ashamed to have reacted instinctively to this news with a rather grim calculus:

In a semiannual report, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said the number of civilians wounded and killed in the conflict had increased by nearly a third, 31 percent, in the first six months of the year.

Seventy-six percent of the civilian casualties were attributable to “antigovernment elements,” the report said, using United Nations terminology for insurgents. That was an increase of 53 percent over the same period, Jan. 1 to June 30, in 2009, it added...

Since 2009, when the United States military made it a priority to reduce civilian casualties, the trend has been for far fewer of them to be caused by the military, and far more by the Taliban and other insurgents. 

Gideon Rachman on Richard Milhous Obama

Gideon Rachman levels a serious (if slightly conditional) charge against Obama and his AfPak policymakers:

"When western politicians talk about “credibility” in Afghanistan, it is often their own credibility they are worrying about most."

Rachman compares the US approach to Somalia, where the "central government controls little more than a few blocks around the presidential palace in Mogadishu and the airport," and implicitly suggest that the US should

apply the Somali model to Afghanistan. That would mean accepting that outside military intervention is often counter-productive, that its human costs are too high, that state-building is unlikely to work and that the west should concentrate on bottling terrorism up, rather than trying to defeat it on the battlefield.

Rick Perlstein on the dark side of democracy

As a child of the 1960s, I found Rick Perstein's wonderful Nixonland a compulsive read. On one level it's a moment-by-moment replay of the era's seismic events as they appeared on the street, in newspapers and on TV, in the national party convention centers, in the counsels of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and to a significant extent, in Richard Nixon's head.  But it is not a shapeless panorama; rather, it's relentlessly focused on the question Perlstein poses in the preface: what motivated ""the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason" (p. xiii).  While that voter is his "main character,"Perlstein asserts,  Nixon's "story is the engine of this narrative. Nixon's character--his own overwhelming angers, anxieties and resentments in the face of the 1960s chaos--sparks the combustion" (p. ix).


Perlstein succeeds, page after page, in drawing the connections between riot and rebellion, the spectacles as they played out on TV and in the news, and Nixon's masterful manipulation: his securing of Southern support by slow-walking enforcement of Johnson's civil rights legislation; his training of the cameras on uncouth anti-war protesters as backdrop to his staged counter-spectacles of clean-cut loyal youth;  his combination of phased U.S. troop withdrawal and savage bombing in southeast Asia; and finally, his dirty tricks manipulation of the Democratic nomination process in 1972.


Reading Nixonland recalled me to my earliest political perceptions --rooted in the conviction that the Vietnam War was wrong and couldn't be won -- and led me to meditate on the limitations of my own blogging credo that the electorate is smarter than all of us.  It is true I think only in the broadest sweep of history, in that democracy provides the means of self-correction, so that manifest policy failure is eventually punished at the polls. The blunt instrument of the popular vote (and public debate) keeps societies from going all the way on the road to ruin.  But that doesn't mean that most of us are not fooled much of the time, often for a very long time. Or worse, that we don't collectively will evil -- as Nixonland suggests we did in Vietnam. 

Attn, David Brooks: Where the "culture of exposure" came from

Once again today, Times readers are treated to a bit of sanitized cultural history by David Brooks.  Tracing the progress of American media from a "culture of reticence" about the private lives and off-the-record grousing of public figures to a "culture of exposure," Brooks recounts:

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances.

Gee, I wonder where that assumption of "secret corruption deep down" came from?  Rick Perlstein's Nixonland has answers on almost every page, documenting ten years of relentless government lying about Vietnam as well as the pervasive criminality and war criminality of the Nixon White House.

Take, for example, the response of Nixon's henchman to columnist Jack Anderson's exposure of a memo documenting ITT's swap of a $400,000 campaign donation for a promise that the Nixon Justice Department would lay off on antitrust enforcement:

Unfinished business: Obama's case for renewed effort in AfPak

A few structural notes on Obama's speech at West Point laying out his strategy for Afghanistan:

1) Obama made an interesting dual use of the U.S. experience in Iraq.  First, he used it to explain why "the situation has deteriorated in Afghanistan" --  because "Throughout this period [of Taliban resurgence] our troop levels in Afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in Iraq."  At the same time, he used the template of what he characterized as a successful surge in Iraq to build out his vision of success in Afghanistan: 

Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s Security Forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul. But it will be clear to the Afghan government – and, more importantly, to the Afghan people – that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country.

This analogy was Obama's chief device for arguing the claim that the swiftness of an envisioned drawdown of forces in Afghanistan will be almost directly proportional to the swiftness of the coming troop buildup.

A lesson in humility from Robert Gates

A month ago, commenting on the G-20 meeting, the FT's Philip Stephens credited Obama with recognizing that "to understand the extent of US power – and it is still unrivalled – a president must also map its limits."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates elaborated that principle as the core strategy of U.S. foreign policy in a long interview with CNN last week.

He began with a primer on the power of apology and self-correction:

Q You've heard a lot of Republican criticism that he's going around the world apologizing about America. Do you accept that?

SEC. GATES: Well, I like to remind people that when President George W. Bush came into office, he talked about a more humble America. And, you know, you go back to Theodore Roosevelt and his line about speaking softly but carrying a big stick. I think that acknowledging that we have made mistakes is not only factually accurate - I think that it is unusual because so few other governments in the world are willing to admit that, although they make them all the time, and some of them make catastrophic mistakes.

And in speeches myself, I have said that at times we have acted too arrogantly. And I didn't feel that I was being apologetic for America. I just was saying because - I was just saying that that's the way we are in terms of being willing to recognize our own limitations, and when we make a mistake, to correct it, because I think the next line that I always use is, no other country in the world is so self-critical and is so willing to change course when we feel that we've strayed from our values or when we feel like we've been too arrogant.

So I think - I have not seen it as an apology tour at all, but rather a change of tone, a more humble America. But everybody knows we still have the big stick.

Gates proceeded to model this humility when discussion turned to Pakistan. He not only refused to patronize or denigrate Pakistani efforts against the Taliban but equated their failures with American failures in counter-terror and counterinsurgency over the past sixteen years:

Q But you do think that the [Pakistani] leadership gets it? Because I look at what's happened, Mr. Secretary. They have these Taliban forces, insurgency, 60 miles from the capital, 100 miles from the capital. And what they've done so far is move 6,000 troops from the eastern border to the western border out of an army of about a half-million.

This does not strike one as a full-throated response at every level that mobilizes the nation and its defense forces. Do you think that there is still a way to go for the Pakistani military in terms of focusing on this threat?

SEC. GATES: Well, I think what you have to do is look at it in some historical context. For 60 years Pakistan has regarded India as its existential threat, as the main enemy. And its forces are trained to deal with that threat. That's where it has the bulk of its army and the bulk of its military capability.

And historically, the far western part of Pakistan has generally been ungoverned. And the Pakistani governments going back decades would do deals with the tribes and the Pashtuns and would play the tribes against one another, and occasionally, when necessary, use the army to put down a serious challenge.

I think that - and partly it's because the Punjabis so outnumber the Pashtuns that they've always felt that if it really got serious, it was a problem they could take care of. I think the - that's why I think the movement of the Taliban so close to Islamabad was a real wake-up call for them.

Now, how long it takes them to build the capabilities, the additional military capabilities and the training that goes into counterinsurgency and so on and to develop the civilian programs that begins to push back in that part of the country, I think, is still a period ahead of us.

But I would just remind that, you know, the first al Qaeda attack on the United States was in 1993. We really didn't change much of anything we did until after we were hit on September 11th, 2001. So al Qaeda was at war with us for eight years, at least eight years, before we acknowledged that we were at war with them as well. And I think a little bit of the same denial has been going on in Pakistan. But I think that the recent developments have certainly got their attention.

Q Do you think they have the counterinsurgency capacity? Because at some level armies don't like to fight these kind of wars, as you well know. What armies like to do is have a big enemy so they can have a big budget and never have to fight a war. And that is, in effect, what has happened with Pakistan with India, which is they have this big enemy. It justifies a very large budget for the Pakistani military. But they don't actually have to fight, whereas this one, the insurgency, is one which they have to fight. They could lose. And so they worry, I think, that they even have the capacity. Do they have the capacity for real counterinsurgency?

SEC. GATES: Well, I think that they are at the beginning of the process of developing that capacity. But again, to provide some perspective, in 2003, when we went into Iraq, or even in 2001 and '02, when we went into Afghanistan, our Army didn't have that capacity either. We had forgotten everything we learned about counterinsurgency in Vietnam. And it took us several years to change our tactics and to get ourselves into a position where we could effectively fight a counterinsurgency.

So institutions are slow to change even in the face of a real threat. And I think that the Pakistanis are beginning to open up to others, to get additional help. I certainly hope that's the case. But I don't - it's not something where I would sort of blame the Pakistani army, because we went through the same process ourselves as we confronted a building insurgency in Iraq.

We had to learn all over again how to do this, and we had to acquire the equipment to do it effectively, completely outside the normal Pentagon bureaucracy, for the most part. So perhaps I have a little more understanding of the challenges that our Pakistani counterparts face than perhaps others.

Finally there was this discussion of the limits of our capabilities in Afghanistan -- and how to leverage the power that we do have:

Q You once said that the chief lesson you learned from 40 years in government was the limits of power. So apply that lesson to Afghanistan today. What do you think of - what are the limits to what America can do in Afghanistan?

SEC. GATES: Well, I have been quoted as accurately as saying I have real reservations about significant further commitments of American military - of the American military to Afghanistan, beyond what the president has already approved. The Soviets were in there with 110,000, 120,000 troops. They didn't care about civilian casualties. And they couldn't win. If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience. And I think there's a lot we can learn from that. And so I worry - it is
absolutely critical that the Afghans believe that this is their war. It is their war against people who are trying to overthrow their government that they democratically elected.

For all of its flaws and shortcomings, it is theirs. And they - we must be their partner and their ally. If we get to the point where the Afghan people see us as occupiers, then we will have lost. So the way we treat the Afghans, the importance of keeping the Afghans in the lead in many of these activities, the military as well as the civilian, I think is absolutely critical, so that they know - so that these villagers know that it's their people who are leading this fight. This isn't some foreign army coming in there, like all the previous foreign armies, to just occupy them.

Q But that means that a year from now, six months from now, you are unlikely to approve a request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

SEC. GATES: I would be a hard sell; there's no question about it. And I have not made a secret of that, either publicly or in government meetings. I think we will have - between the American military commitment and our coalition partners, the ISAF partners, we will have about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. That's only about 10,000 shy of what the Russians had. And I think we need to think about that.

My view is it would be a far better investment to focus on building the strength of the Afghan army and the Afghan police, making sure that of the numbers of people we have there, there are adequate trainers so that we can accelerate the growth of those forces.

It's that combination of a certain level of international support for the Afghan military effort and the growing of the Afghan security forces themselves. It's that partnership that I think eventually will be successful in Afghanistan. As long as - if we try to do it all ourselves, I think it won't work.

If we try to do it all ourselves, I think it won't work. What was that, up top, about the U.S. learning from its mistakes?

Vietnamization?

In a comment on Matt Steinglass's blog, a certain Nick spins out the parallels between U.S. engagement in Vietnam and in Afghanistan:

From what I’ve read, US troops [in Vietnam] generally had a 10:1 kill/loss ratio in confrontations with enemy fighters. So if we lost 58,000 men, presumably a good 580,000 Vietnamese soldiers were killed.

A 10:1 kill/loss ratio seems to be the standard number for US forces since world war II...But ...It doesn’t matter how many of the enemy you kill if they have more to replace them. Ho Chi Minh understood that Americans weren’t willing to sacrifice 100,000 men in Vietnam, but he was willing to sacrifice a million if he had to.

I believe WE lost the war because we weren’t able to defeat the north and make them stop attacking the weaker south. Now, arguably our hands were tied politically, since we couldn’t launch a full scale invasion of the north, for example. But that is irrelevant. You fight a war within certain political parameters which are there whether you like it or not. Within those parameters, the North Vietnamese were able to prevail.

Afghanistan is a similar situation. In fact, for years I’ve said we have a better shot in Iraq than we do in Afghanistan, even before the surge. This is because the problem with Iraq is mostly local, and non-ideological. Afghanistan is like Vietnam. In both, the ideology of our foes makes them willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of men for their cause. The Taliban are doing this in the name of religion; its harder to negotiate with them than the Sunnis in Iraq who were doing it for money and power.

But the most important similarity between vietnam and afghanistan is the sanctuary of insurgents...

Assessing salvage

Today David Brooks made the case that George Bush & co. "got one right" with the surge, and that "if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today." Andrew Sullivan, acknowledging that Brooks is right "up to a point," offers up a litany of caveats:

We do not know what the long-term implications of the last year will be. History is unpredictable like that. It may be that historians in the future will look back at the surge and argue that it was the chimera that kept America in a no-win imperial province for decades, precipitating a wider and unnecessary war for oil when we should have been using our own unique skills to forge a post-oil future. It may be that a withdrawal by now would have forced more quickly a resolution of the power-struggles within Iraq, with more short-term cost and horror but less long-term agony and drain on the West.

While Sullivan insists that he doesn't "fall into the camp of those denying the surge's progress" - also true "up to a point" -- I think there's still a degree of denial in stressing that we don't know how history will judge the surge. Whatever happens in years ahead, the surge has been a catalyst of real improvement and has created real opportunities. With violence way down, the Mahdi army pulling back, Sunni cooperation increasing and the Sunnis visibly impressed by the government going after Shiite militias -- what more could have been asked of U.S. policy 18 months ago?

There's always indeterminacy in judging the effect of given policies. Rudolph Giuliani's support for new policing methods was one of many reasons for the crime drop in NYC in the 1990s, but Giuliani did deserve credit for taking action that capitalized on positive demographic and cultural changes. The surge benefited from the Sunni awakening and from the Mahdi rope-a-dope, but it also created conditions that made those decisions by Sunni leaders and Sadr possible.

More specifically, I don't think it's fair (or will have been fair, if Iraq deteriorates), to imagine the surge responsible for keeping us in Iraq for decades or for diverting us from solving our energy problems. Those decisions depend on future leaders. The next President is in a better position to extricate the U.S. from Iraq than he would have been minus the surge. McCain was right in December '06 when he said that the Iraqi government would not have the capacity to make political progress unless violence was reduced and a measure of stability achieved first.

The U.S. fought on in Vietnam on Nixon's watch for years after Nixon stated positively that we couldn't win. That's a crime. But that's not what's happened in Iraq. Brooks is right. The same character traits that led Bush to start a war under false pretenses and drastically mishandle it for four years also led him to choose an unpopular policy that has a reasonable chance of salvaging something from the wreckage.