What's Acceptable to Say About Afghanistan?

While Adam is right to point out the need for more focus on what is actually happening on the ground in Afghanistan, he's overstating, or rather, misidentifying the reasons why Matthew Hoh's arguments about the war don't seem to have the same inevitably that escalation has in the debate over Afghanistan. Adam writes:

My issue is that Hoh's view is one that hasn't been taken seriously because it's not within the spectrum of acceptable political opinion within the Beltway--believing there's a limit to what American military force can achieve is seen as "unpatriotic.

That's not what's happening, though. Many people have announced this view, and not just skeptics like Sens. Russ Feingold and Robert Menendez or experts like Rory Stewart. Sen. John Kerry has talked about this problem, and administration officials like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have made this argument in public and in private. Interestingly, the reason the idea that more troops are spurring the Afghan insurgency rather than controlling it hasn't gotten much traction isn't because of the Cheneys of the world. It's because military experts, like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, are arguing from Afghanistan that it's not true. That's, for instance, why Gates has slow-walked his take on troop levels -- because he found McChrystal convincing. It's the military that's insisting that more troops can quell the insurgents; while there are always concerns about demagoguing war votes, especially on the right, it's clear that reducing forces is definitely part of the Washington conversation, and certainly the public one. This isn't 2003, or even 2006 -- even nominal escalation proponents like Andrew Exum and Stephen Biddle are very circumspect in their analysis of what escalation can produce.

The other reason that troop reduction and small footprint strategies don't seem as likely to be adopted as escalation is because there has yet to be a compelling description of what an alternative strategy would be -- advocates of counter-terrorism have a hard time responding to the problem of obtaining human intelligence, for instance. Kerry has described one middle-ground option in a speech yesterday, which seemed similar to the "enclave" strategy of using the troops we have for counterinsurgency and capacity-building in Afghanistan's urban areas, with the idea of letting Afghans eventually take the lead in fighting insurgents in the rest of the country. None of these options sound very promising, which is why this debate is so hard.

-- Tim Fernholz