dagblog - Comments for "Robert Kaplan: "Leave Afghanistan""

The last link is especially

artappraiser — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 22:22:46 +0000

In reply to And bracketing things, here's

The last link is especially good stuff, thank you. (Is the type of writer that goes on and on bouncing allover the place, but you can get a lot out of just picking out parts!)

Edit to add:

which makes me think we need to deconstruct more of what's going on, than just dismiss things - both because it's fun, and it provides much better insight into the mechanisms at play.

I for one welcome anyone who wants to join that club! I am so sick of advocacy, I can't tell you. It's always been beyond me why someone cares what anonymous pseudonymous on the internet advocates. Instead let's share brainpower to analyze what the non-anonymous are pushing and why.

And bracketing things, here's

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 09:21:00 +0000

In reply to Kaplan started arguing

And bracketing things, here's a great 2005 NY Times takedown of Kaplan when he was still heady & full of himself and embracing so many contradictions and flighty literary devices:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/books/review/appropriating-the-globe....

And here's a WaPo piece where perhaps he's seeing that the instigation of little "winnable" wars ain't as plush as it seemed, or else he's just still in awe of the tyrants who maintain stability, & "democracy" is just a pretension of the West (though perhaps an ever-present conflict in all of us):

Globalization and other dynamic forces will continue to rid the world of dictatorships. Political change is nothing we need to force upon people; it's something that will happen anyway. What we have to work toward -- for which peoples with historical experiences different from ours will be grateful -- is not democracy but normality. Stabilizing newly democratic regimes, and easing the development path of undemocratic ones, should be the goal for our military and diplomatic establishments. The more cautious we are in a world already in the throes of tumultuous upheaval, the more we'll achieve.

And a much longer pleasant read:

https://www.vqronline.org/euphorias-perrier-case-against-robert-d-kaplan

which makes me think we need to deconstruct more of what's going on, than just dismiss things - both because it's fun, and it provides much better insight into the mechanisms at play.

Kaplan started arguing

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 09:03:23 +0000

In reply to The only thing my own head

Kaplan started arguing himself at least back in 2008 (I didn't check back earlier):

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/iraq-the-counterfac...

and another insightful article from 6 years ago:

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/rethinking-iraq-war

He at least has the intellectual honesty to argue big picture and *still* come up with the more or less obvious conclusion that it wasn't worth it. But that big picture still needs to be there - there will be a Rwanda to avoid, or a Chinese-led World War III, and a simple "shrink the military, stay at home" will be 0 consolation.

As we've discovered with our new cyber/financial/subterfuge/socal media-based war with Russia (and suppose I should include economic sanctions from our side & the proxy military activity in Donbas, Crimea & Syria), the definition of "war" is taking a huge shift.

I suspect it would be nearly impossible for us to slide into a "Guns of August" full military mobilization. But our global interdependence and state-run methodologies are showing a huge negative side vs. an earlier optimism that globalization & open borders = Shangri-La. It still relies on the various actors having more benign intentions than negative, or being effectively hemmed in by the remaining consensus. But the deaths of the Soviet & Chinese military empires (& the irrelevance of the Gulf states except for oil) has been a bit too exaggerated.

While historically we like our interventions clean - we won in Germany & Japan, yay! the South was defeated and occupied - finished, done! it's possible that messier, less satisfying outcomes are an improved alternative to total war. The Bosnian War didn't spill over into the rest of Europe, or even much impact most of the ex-Yugoslavian states. Kosovo was quickly bombed into a stalemate. Hussein was pushed out of Iraq and we did overflights for a decade while he continued to posture. It's containment, in part preemption as in Kosovo, part responding timely.

For whatever rule we come up with to try to make war & foreign relations more civilized, someone will try to game that rule to their advantage. There is no set, critical set of values that will foresee all circumstances. We need to evolve our responses as our world evolves. As Clauswitz famously said, "Total War is just cyber-politico-economic trade war by other means".

The only thing my own head

artappraiser — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 06:06:33 +0000

In reply to Robert Kaplan: "Leave Afghanistan"

The only thing my own head exploded about is Kaplan taking 15 yrs., 15 yrs., to figure out they tried to reconstruct the wrong place at the wrong time, doing exactly what Osama bin Laden planned for them to do. Dumb little me, not zactly a foreign policy expert, screamed "noooooooooooo!" when I saw the Bush doctrine splashed across the front page of the NYTimes in 2003. No, wrong place, if you are gonna do that, you do Afghanistan and Pakistan and right now, get real schools in there, get rid of those madrassas, doncha know? Threaten that crooked military in Pakistan, get going. Is actually what drove me to the blogosphere!

Water over the damn. I don't really want to argue that past no more, "In theory" , "if we had a Kissinger" whatever, it's really not reality anymore. Let's move on to what we have in the present, I thought when I saw this on Twitter right now:

SWJ Today: "Private Parts: The Private Sector and U.S. Peace Enforcement" by Erk Grossman (@erik_grossman) - For the United States, which has so thoroughly woven PMSCs into its warfighting, engaging PMSCs in its peace enforcement contributions is a given. https://t.co/UX9r6e09HP pic.twitter.com/22F8rAZDyT
— Small Wars Journal (@smallwars) January 3, 2019

We can't do peacekeeping interventionism like we did it in the old days. It's complicated now. Every fucking thing is privatized. Bushies saw to that. So why even talk about it. Despite the fervid dreams of the MAGA nut, we are globalized already, the execution is corporate and it's complicated. The kumbayah Peace Corps world is done for, and pax americana and all that stuff. Why? First of all, everybody and his uncle across the world has a cell phone to take pics with and can eventually find the internet someplace. Start there...The problem, the problem, the problem: fake info. with agenda behind it. Facebook is the new WMD, like that.

Of course discussion is

moat — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 01:47:29 +0000

In reply to So is discussion allowed?

Of course discussion is allowed. I am trying focus on that "codification" and you seem interested in it too. I am not defending alternative decisions, just noticing what gets excluded in the course of events.

It is difficult to talk about because the subject is not just about what could have been done differently but is also about what could have been done differently.

The planning was bad (in Iraq and other places) but what made it bad was not purely operational. Shinseki was pointing to a strategic object in his objection to a tactical one. A grammar of possible change emerges. I am not on top of it but can note that something large is missing from the discussion when some elements just disappear.

And they did. They did disappear. That is what pisses me off.

So is discussion allowed?

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 22:32:28 +0000

In reply to So, I thought I had made it

So is discussion allowed? Oddly I halfway supported the invasion under the pool theory that sometimes you just gotta break up the table if you keep finding yourself with bad shots. I'd have trouble encouraging *that* as a formal policy. Trying to codify when it's ok to preempt a seemingly inevitable attack would to me be somewhat worthwhile to discuss, especially 16 years after we screwed the pooch (more by bad planning and staying than the invasion itself.)

So, I thought I had made it

moat — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 21:39:28 +0000

In reply to So you won't answer my

So, I thought I had made it clear that I am okay with deciding to do all sorts of things without checking if everybody else agreed but was trying to distinguish that sort of thing from making it an actual policy as regards the system of states. And doing that after a certain nation invested in the model in so many ways, rightly and wrongly.

If it that is a distinction without a difference for you, I get it. But drum me out of your circle on the basis I horned in on.

Silence is okay.

So you won't answer my

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 21:08:38 +0000

In reply to The Bush Doctrine did not

So you won't answer my question on Rwanda? How about, "would Poles have had a moral right to preemptively attack before Germany & Russia, having signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement in 1939, rolled in to split their country between them?"

The Bush Doctrine did not

moat — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 21:00:37 +0000

In reply to Would you pre-emptively

The Bush Doctrine did not invent cowboys deciding on their own to save one people or bomb others. It is not just about a decision tree that relates to one crisis or another. The insistence that the category of crime is not capable of responding to threats is a formative principle that limits the possibility of other means beside the use of force or different kinds of diplomacy. To consider that element is to open up a path not taken rather than contest any particular decision.

If all there is to discuss are rules of engagement, then my observation is worthless.

Would you pre-emptively

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 20:09:50 +0000

In reply to Perhaps I speak too broadly

Would you pre-emptively attack Hutus before they could kill 600,000 Tutsis? If not, why not?

I think Shultz jumped the shark on that policy, but only because he didn't maintain sensible limits and verification. Of course every cowboy sees himself as having a white hat - I only tend to trust coalitions of some sort, and even those like Bush's can be rigged (was it "Nauru" that joined the coalition of the obscure & willing?)