President Obama mismanaged two wars, oversaw the collapse of order across the Middle East, and left the United States and the world less safe.
By Paul David Miller
This month President Barack Obama gave a valedictory on his foreign policy at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. It was a perfect synopsis of the myths he wove to justify his foreign policy legacy—a legacy that urgently needs demythologizing. Obama mismanaged two wars, oversaw the collapse of order across the Middle East, and left the United States and the world less safe.
To obscure this reality, Obama’s speech was replete with distortions, oversights, and exaggerations. Here are a few.
1. He Mismanaged the War in Afghanistan
“I believe that the United States military can achieve any mission,” Obama said last week, just a few paragraphs before saying “the United States cannot eliminate the Taliban or end violence in that country,” oblivious to the contradiction. If we can achieve any mission, surely we can defeat a two-bit insurgency.
Obama (and a good portion of columnists and talking heads) have consistently exaggerated the difficulties in Afghanistan to excuse America’s failures there: you can’t blame us if the mission was impossible from the start. Obama said, “War has been a part of life in Afghanistan for over 30 years,” implying it is some sort of natural phenomenon genetically and geographically ingrained in the Afghan people and invincible to the efforts of any human to change.
Whether this is ethnic essentialism or historical determinism, it is a condescending and shallow way to assess the challenges Afghanistan faces, and a dishonest way to excuse lackluster leadership in America’s longest war. Before pessimism about Afghanistan became chic, Senator Obama, then campaigning for president, sounded a much more optimistic and, frankly, presidential note. In July 2008 he said of the war in Afghanistan, “I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.”
Eight years later, The New York Times headlined a story: “Afghan Security Crisis Sets Stage for Terrorists’ Resurgence.” As I have written about extensively elsewhere, Obama’s failure in Afghanistan is a scandal of historic proportions and a major part of the legacy he leaves the world.
2. His Approach to Stability Operations Was Strategically Incoherent
Obama failed in Afghanistan (and Iraq) partly because of a strategic incoherence and a failure to understand the ultimate conditions of victory: stability in the societies that gave rise to jihadism.
In his MacDill speech Obama said, “I have also insisted that it is unwise and unsustainable to ask our military to build nations on the other side of the world, or resolve their internal conflicts,” echoing an increasingly fashionable critique of stability operations.
Obama is speaking from the same script that most politicians have been for the past five years. Everyone from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to Donald Trump have given voice to the obligatory damnation of “nation building” since the withdrawal of U.S. troops from in Iraq in 2011. The only problem is that this is completely wrongheaded and strategically counterproductive. Someone put the counterargument extremely well:
Any long-term strategy to reduce the threat of terrorism depends on investments that strengthen some of these fragile societies. Our generals, our commanders understand this. This is not charity. It’s fundamental to our national security. A dollar spent on development is worth a lot more than a dollar spent fighting a war… Our military recognizes that these issues of governance and human dignity and development are vital to our security. It’s central to our plans in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Who said this? Surprisingly, it was Obama, in the exact same speech where he said we would not “build nations on the other side of the world.” So which is right? Should be avoid “building nations,” or should we make “investments that strengthen fragile societies” to improve “governance and human dignity”?
Obama was apparently completely unaware of the flagrant contradictions in his rhetoric, a contradiction that suggests an incoherence of strategic thought in his administration. I happen to think he was right to defend the importance of stability operations and wrong to condemn nation-building.
But when it came time to make decisions about budgets and deployments, there was no contradiction. Obama’s Defense Department said back in 2012—when Obama was on the second of his four secretaries of Defense—that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”
Foreign aid declined from $3.5 billion in 2009 to $2 billion in 2015. Obama eliminated funding for the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. And, despite Obama’s glowing account of how “We’ve helped Afghan girls go to school. We’ve supported investments in health care and electricity and education,” his administration actually cut civilian assistance to Afghanistan every year since 2010.
By his own logic, Obama underinvested in the long-term strategy necessary to achieve sustainable security and undermine the appeal of jihadism. Maybe that is why both Iraq and Afghanistan are worse off now than they were eight years ago, still in the throes of political violence, state weakness, corruption, and sectarianism.
3. He Contributed to the Collapse of Iraq and the Rise of ISIS
Use link for the rest) http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/19/4-reasons-rejoice-end-obamas-myth-based-foreign-policy/
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