Short Shrift for the Long War
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| Author | Carl Cavanagh Hodge |
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201006500109 |
| Subject Matter | Over the Transom |
| International Journal | Winter 2009-10 | 143 |
Carl Cavanagh Hodge is professor of political science at the University of British Columbia-
Okanagan.
BARACK OBAMA’S PRESENT TENSE
Toward the end of President Barack Obama’s first year in office it had become
a commonplace of commentary in Europe and North America that NATO’s
nation-building mission in Afghanistan had entered a critical phase. Indeed,
informed observers on the mission agreed that almost nothing in 2009 was
going particularly well. They disagreed, to pick the two most divergent nodes
of opinion, over whether the president should radically increase the number
of American combat troops dedicated to the mission or set a timetable for
graduated withdrawal and concede that the United States and its NATO
allies had no hope of prevailing against an insurgency operating from the
mountains in the east and south of the country and increasingly capable of
contesting territory assumed hitherto to be under control. On the face of it, it
seems absurd that NATO could lose a war with mujahid fighters spawned by
madrasahs along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, purporting to bring Islamic
Carl Cavanagh Hodge
Short shrift for the
long war
NATO’s neglect of the Afghan mission
| 144 | Winter 2009-10 | International Journal |
1 “Remarks of Senator Obama: The war we need to win,” Washington, DC, 1 August
2007, www.barackobama.com.
rule to Afghanistan’s people yet contemptuous of a millennium of Muslim
spiritual and intellectual achievement. This was nonetheless a valid concern
on the day Obama was sworn into office, and the policy choice before him
ever since has been either to salvage the mission or to fashion a plan for
dignified withdrawal.
There is nothing fair about the burdens that newly elected leaders inherit
from their predecessors. The Afghan circumstance of January 2009 was not
of Obama’s making, yet he more than anyone will bear responsibility for
its rectification. As a candidate for the presidency in August 2007 Obama
actually embraced that challenge, deriding the Bush administration’s
invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as a rash misadventure in contrast to “the war
that has to be won” on “the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”1
The inclusion of Pakistan testified to an awareness of Afghanistan’s regional
and international strategic significance and simultaneously ratcheted up the
expectation that Obama would, if elected, attempt a decisive turnaround.
Since assuming office he has discovered how difficult such an attempt will
be. His predecessor bears a large portion of the responsibility for the state of
affairs, whether or not one agrees that the commitment to Iraq was directly
responsible for the neglect of Afghanistan. A review of the mission’s origin,
however, reveals that this is somewhat beside the point. From the outset, the
Afghan mission has enjoyed an international political legitimacy that should
have ensured robust support not only from the United States but more
importantly from what we now strain to call the “international community.”
This support has gone missing. This article will argue that the Afghan
mission has been the victim of a failure of multilateralism, specifically the
inability of the NATO alliance to evolve beyond the strategic debates of the
early post-Cold War into a community of democratic states prepared to
defend the democratic way of life on its violent periphery.
NATO FROM KOSOVO TO KABUL
The opening phase of the Afghan mission, operation Enduring Freedom, was
the immediate international response to the terrorist attacks in Washington,
DC and lower Manhattan on 11 September 2001 carried out by the al
Qaeda organization of Osama bin Laden, to whom the Taliban regime in
| Carl Cavanagh Hodge |
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