If a Martian came down and read Charles Krauthammer and you asked him whether what he had read made any sense, he would be be baffled and would wonder why you had even asked the question. ”Of course not,” the Martian would say. “How can you earthlings read this junk on a regular basis?”
It seems to me that Krauthammer brings in his argumentum ad Martianum whenever he’s feeling particularly strapped for bad excuses for the policy he is defending in a column, but I have no solid evidence that he trots out his Martian friend with that much regularity (he has so many columns filled with bad excuses for general belligerence). Perhaps this is why he is so concerned to continue the space program and put a man on Mars? So that he can finally meet all those Martians who somehow always manage to support whatever cracked idea he happens to be selling? He certainly needs to find someone who thinks he knows what he’s talking about, so perhaps looking to inhabitants of other planets would be the way to go.
What follows seems like a pretty obvious objection, but it would appear that Krauthammer has so far largely gotten a pass on his most ludicrous column of this year. One of Ezra Klein’s guest bloggers takes a shot at it, but really doesn’t do much with it. What does Krauthammer’s conference with the Martian tell us? Iraq is much more important than Afghanistan! (How did I know he was going to say that?) Krauthammer writes:
Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer — a Martian — and point out to him that the United States is involved in two hot wars against radical Islamic insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources, no industrial and no technological infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure which, though suffering decay in the later Saddam years, could easily be revived if it falls into the right (i.e. wrong) hands. Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait ,and the Gulf states. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question.
If you were to then tell the “Martian” the rest of the information that would show the true significance of the two theaters, even the “Martian” would have to agree that Krauthammer doesn’t understand the first thing about geopolitics or strategy. What rather strategically significant country borders Afghanistan and could be affected rather signficantly by a resurgent Taliban in the borderlands? That would be Pakistan. That would be the Pakistan that has a nuclear arsenal, and which has a highly unstable authoritarian government and the Inter-Services Intelligence branch that is heavily compromised by sympathies with and ties to jihadis forged over decades of sponsoring jihadis in Afghanistan and India. Western Pakistan also now serves as the base for the Taliban and, to the extent that it is centered anywhere, the center of the leadership of Al Qaeda. Of course top Al Qaeda figures would talk up Iraq as the main front–all other things being equal, if you could convince your stupid enemy to fight you far away from where you are and make him think that he was dealing you a death blow in the process, you would do this, especially when the effect of this is to reduce his attention on the far more pivotal battle going on in the supposed backwater.
There is a very real possibility that jihadis of one sort or another could seize control of the government of Pakistan and its nukes, precipitate a war with India or use jihadis as couriers for nukes to attack targets abroad. There is virtually zero possibility of Sunni jihadis controlling any of Iraq’s oil resources, and no chance of them controlling a large, somewhat effective military or a nuclear arsenal, since Iraq doesn’t have either of these (on the military, Krauthammer is recycling things that used to be true about the relatively ”advanced” Iraqi military infrastructure, but which really ceased to be true in 2003).
American withdrawal from Iraq will very likely be bad for many Iraqis, but failure in Afghanistan and the added destabilisation of Pakistan that would result from it would probably create evils so many times greater and so much more numerous that even the comparison between the two might strike the thoughtful observer as rather silly. If you explained all that to the “Martian,” he would probably wonder why it is you are wasting so much time, energy, money and men in Iraq. Some of us aren’t even from Mars, and we already knew this.
Update: Writing a little bit after I wrote the above post, Michael Crowley at The Plank gets it:
But is Afghanistan really so “geographically marginal”? I would say that Martian might take careful note of Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan. He might wonder why Americans aren’t downright panicked that an unstable nation infested with Islamic radicals constantly trying to assassinate its dictator has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons. And moreover that a top Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, has shared nuclear secrets with America’s enemies. And that other Pakistani nuclear scientists are reported to have met with Osama bin Laden himself.
I see the Pakistani bomb as a greater near-term threat to my own life than anything that might happen in Iraq in the next few years. Given the proximity of Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the way Islamic radicals play the two countries off one another, it seems to me that creating stability and a climate inhospitable to anti-American terrorists there is no “marginal” thing at all. Surely Krauthammer’s Martian could understand that.
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March 30th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Grumpy Old Man
The educated population of Iraq is now in Amman, Damascus, and Dubai. Read George Packer’s account of how we treat people in Iraq to whom we owe a debt of honor, and weep.
Honor? How quaint!
March 30th, 2007 at 11:13 am
cyrus
Mr. Larison,
I hate to take issue with you in favor of Krauthammer, (Hammer of the Krauts? Malleus Germanorum?) but as far as his comparison goes, I tend to agree with him. Iraq is more important than Afghanistan in a geopolitical sense. He makes the mistake of believing that “victory” there is still possible, but you similarly seem blithely to assume that “victory,” whatever that means in Afghanistan, will come if the United States simply focuses its attention and weight there. To the contrary, the job of establishing a strong and not-too-hostile state in Afghanistan would, on the face of it, be far more difficult than in Iraq for logistical, geographical, and geopolitical reasons. It’s landlocked, it’s rugged, it’s ethnically diverse (the kind of diversity that issues not in a rainbow of strength, but in violent feuding), and surrounded by countries that are at best ambivalent to the American project there. Iraq, as insane as this sounds, was supposed to be the easy one. Being a superpower isn’t worth as much as it used to be, I suppose.
If you’re not proposing that the US send the 150,000 troops in Iraq over to Afghanistan to reprise the Soviet occupation, forgive me. But I fail to see what, precisely, you are suggesting be done with respect to Afghanistan.
GOM:
They’ll get here eventually, won’t they? Just ask all the unassimilated Hmong in Minnesota and Wisconsin, or the Vietnamese. We’ll no doubt invite millions of Iraqis here, too.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Grumpy Old Man
The ones who risked their lives to interpret for our troops, no doubt, at a minimum.
“Little Saigon” is in Westminster, CA. I wonder where “Little Baghdad” or “Little Falluja” will be.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Daniel Larison
First of all, I don’t assume “victory” is possible in either place, if by victory in the case of Afghanistan it means that there are no longer large numbers of armed fundamentalist Pashtuns threatening to overthrow the government in Kabul. That will exist so long as there is an entity called Afghanistan, and so long as Pashtuns are Pashtuns. What I am talking about is avoiding catastrophic failure, which is far worse for us and everyone else if it happens, as it very well might do, in Afghanistan-Pakistan than if it happens in Iraq.
I would be open to a persuasive case that Iraq is strategically more important. I am always open to persuasion–I do not reflexively reject what Krauthammer says because he is Krauthammer, but because he is almost always wrong. Krauthammer completely failed to provide a persuasive argument, since he takes it as a given that this is true. He cited as evidence of its greater importance several things that are no longer true about Iraq, if they ever were. Tell me why Iraq is more important. Besides oil, what makes it so important? Seriously, what?
As a matter of geopolitics, I simply don’t know how a relatively small, devastated country that has been impoverished by 27 years of war, sanctions, war and then some more war represents either a greater threat or a more pivotal or important place in the world than Afghanistan and Pakistan taken together (and I believe they must be taken together, or else I wouldn’t be taking the position I am taking). Pakistan has over five times as many people as Iraq does, it is situated in a vital point in populous and economically booming south Asia, it has a historic rivalry with the world’s second-largest country, both of these countries have nukes and large conventional armies. From the purely anti-jihadi side, let’s remember that Pakistan has a long history of actively sponsoring jihadi and terrorist groups, which has compromised their government significantly and may be the prelude to the Pakistani government eventually falling under control of anti-American jihadis. The country is beginning to fragment in dramatic and violent ways, and the army has shown that it cannot enforce the writ of Islamabad in either the Northwest or Baluchistan. Musharraf is facing a massive wave of popular discontent. The Pakistani Taliban operates with a more or less free hand inside Pakistan. Should there be another coup, or a revolution, or a break-up of the country, the consequences for us and the rest of the world will be a lot worse than whatever might happen if Iraqis keep having at each other. All these things make it seem obvious to me that Afghanistan-Pakistan are geopolitically more significant. If you took Afghanistan in isolation, you might be able to argue as Krauthammer does, but I believe this is a mistaken and tendentious way of viewing the matter.
On its side, Iraq has oil, all of which is controlled by our nominal allies and will continue to be controlled by Kurds and Shi’ites for the foreseeable future. Failure in Iraq is nasty but manageable. The ripple effects of an Iraqi civil war would be bad, but containable. Failure in Afghanistan/Pakistan (the two really must be taken together) probably invites nightmarish disaster on a far greater scale. The effects of a revolution in Pakistan might include anything from the complete rout of NATO in Afghanistan to jihadis armed with nukes to a new Indo-Pak war to a nuclear exchange that would sink all of Asia into an economic depression. In the list of priorities, this would have be at the top if we actually ranked these things based on their real significance. Right now, it isn’t because Iraq is at the top of the list. Getting out of Iraq is a good idea in and of itself, but getting out so that we can pay attention to the real priority for our foreign policy is not a bad or irrelevant reason.
For one thing, intelligence resources that have been pulled away from Afghanistan and Pakistan because they are being dedicated to Iraq could be freed up. Any officers trained for counterinsurgency and special operations currently dedicated to Iraq, many of whom aren’t being sent to Afghanistan, could be sent to aid in limiting the damage from the Taliban’s resurgence. Shutting down the counterproductive and insane drug war against Afghan farmers, which only aids the Taliban, would be an important policy change that would have to be implemented from the top down.
Obviously, I’m not talking about redeploying the army stationed in Iraq to Afghanistan. If the administration and all relevant departments and branches of the military spend most of their time working on Iraq, that’s time that they’re not spending on other things. It’s a question of priorities and attention as much as it is a question of where soldiers are physically deployed. Theoretically, Krauthammer is right that we have plenty of resources to do both, but those resources are mostly potential right now. The actual administration we have is manifestly incompetent at doing anything, so they can hardly be expected to multitask effectively. The military *is* already overstretched, and if there were ever a prudent need for additional forces in Afghanistan it would be difficult to find them and move them there in a timely fashion. Unless the resources of the nation are mobilised to some greater extent than they have been, America can claim to be a superpower, but it will not be one that is able to do the myriad things that the superpower is currently trying to do. Obviously, we are trying to be on a global war footing with a military that was reduced to post-Cold War levels. Either extraneous, pointless deployments (such as Iraq is) are ended, or we will be compelled to make major changes.
The desirability of withdrawing from Iraq has to do with preserving our armed forces from the endless rotations, the multiple, morale- and recruitment-killing deployments and providing us some time to begin rebuilding in terms of equipment and recruting after all the damage that Iraq has already done. Withdrawing from Iraq is something that would need to be done regardless of the situation elsewhere, because the occupation of Iraq serves no real national interest and has definite, unnecessarily negative effects on our military.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
cyrus
Excepting oil, there’s nothing important about Iraq. Excepting a handful of primitive and barely-deliverable atomic bombs, there’s nothing important about Pakistan, either, and excepting opium, there’s nothing important about Afghanistan at all, unless you happen to share a border with it. Oil, however, is a pretty important thing. So, too, are nuclear weapons, but I have some faith that any likely Pakistani government can be deterred by India from mounting a full-scale war. Now, such a war might, if it came, cause a pan-Asian depression, but so too might a replay of the 1970’s oil crunch. More likely would be continued terrorist outrages against India (the jihadis already run Pakistan’s intelligence services, or so we’re told), and perhaps surreptitious proliferation. Of course, we have had all that under Musharraf already.
Yes, Afghanistan is linked to Pakistan, but more in the sense that a tail is linked to a dog. It is certainly not, to mix a metaphor, the cockpit of Pakistan. What happens in Pakistan has a great deal more influence on Afghanistan than vice-versa. Which is to say that the ability of the United States to prop up relatively responsible government in Pakistan via its activities in Afghanistan seems, well, nugatory. Imposing law and order on Afghanistan, were it in America’s power, would not in itself suffice to reimpose Musharraf’s control on the NWFP. It’s true that “losing” Pakistan would probably doom NATO efforts in Afghanistan, but if the point of the occupation of that country is to keep Pakistan afloat, it would be moot when Pakistan fell. US involvement in Afghanistan needs to stand on its own merits vis-a-vis Afghanistan.
Frankly, I think we’ve achieved most of what we could hope to achieve in Afghanistan. Such success as we’ve had is largely owed to how little we’ve attempted to do. The US could, and ought, to scale back its efforts at opium eradication - this takes merely the stroke of a pen, and has nothing to do with what happens in Iraq. It couldn’t hurt to have more intelligence personnel dedicated to the counterinsurgency there, and perhaps even to have more advisers on the ground, so long as they don’t become too numerous, but it’s just as well that we haven’t attempted anything too grand. There would be little to gain, and much to lose from the effort.
Agreed. That could be done now with a stroke of Mr. Bush’s pen. It won’t be, of course, but it has nothing to do with Iraq.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Daniel Larison
Two points: many other countries produce and export oil, and even if a hostile government possessed the oil resources of Iraq it would not have the ability to induce a 1970s-style oil shock on anyone; very few countries have nuclear weapons, and even fewer have actively marketed their nuclear technology to other hostile or potentially hostile states, and even fewer of those are Islamic countries with ties to jihadis. A “handful of primitive and barely-deliverable atomic bombs”? I’m sorry, but you are grossly mistaken. Pakistan probably has a nuclear arsenal of something on the order of 50-100 nuclear weapons, though the actual number is likely to be on the lower end of that. Pak has the option of delivering these weapons via F-16 or by Ghauri missile that can certainly deliver those weapons to targets within at least 1,500 km. If they have not yet assembled most of their weapons, they have the fissile material and the expertise to do so in relatively short order.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:PcjPaZzNIYoJ:www.fas.org/news/pakistan/2000/e20000609pakistan.htm+Pakistan,+nuclear+arsenal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/733162.stm
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/index.html
http://www.the-south-asian.com/Nov%202003/world_nuclear_arsenalsfact_sheet.htm
If a reconstituted Taliban and a safe base of operations for Al Qaeda inside western Pakistan are more of a threat, and a threat that can be countered by shifting resources away from a wasteful and irrelevant campaign, it seems plain that anything that takes attention and resources away from countering that threat is a mistake and the wrong allocation of resources. Afghanistan is in a crucial part of the world, more so than Iraq. If the argument is over which place is more strategically important–which is what we’ve been arguing about–it seems clear that it is Afghanistan that “wins” the contest.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Daniel Larison
More recently, Pak has been developing the means to build bombs with plutonium, and has built a reactor potentially capable of providing material for as many as 50 bombs per year. That seems to me to make Pakistan’s part of the world a lot more important than the squabbling of militias in Iraq, and that includes what goes on in its borderlands with Afghanistan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/24/AR2006072400995.html
March 30th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
cyrus
Pakistan’s nuclear capability is about that of the US circa 1948, though with less reach. A B29/B50 had a longer combat radius than an F16. But let’s accept that even a primitive nuclear capability is quite fearsome.
Only if one accepts the premises that Afghanistan is linked to Pakistan in such a way that what happens there controls the latter to a great extent, while Iraq is somehow relatively isolated from its neighbors, and that furthermore, the subcontinent is more important to American interests than the Persian Gulf. I doubt these propositions, but I have also attempted to argue that even if they are taken as given, the United States lacks much ability to influence events in Pakistan, whether we persist in our Mesopotamian folly or not. Indeed, it occurs to me that American presence in Afghanistan, insofar as it is dependent on Pakistani cooperation, gives us less power over Pakistan, not more. It is also likely that our presence in Afghanistan makes Pakistan less stable, too. Pakistan is an awful place, and might well fall under the official control of jihadis, but we probably can’t stop it. Best to give up on the interventionist fantasy.