Will Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize force his hand in Afghanistan?

I was at the U.S. Army’s big annual conference this week, where all the top Army officials, and the many defense contractors who want their money, gather in Washington to hobnob and talk about the state of the Army. Of course much of the hallway talk was about the ongoing review of the U.S.’s Afghanistan strategy, and what direction President Obama is going to take. Whatever Obama ultimately decides, the key — both in terms of the effectiveness of the new strategy and in how it’s perceived, which is probably equally or more important — is going to be whether there is an escalation or a drawdown.

It was at this conference where Robert Gates slapped down the top commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, for publicly saying that the U.S. should send more troops there. But CENTCOM commander David Petraeus was by far the star attraction there, and although in his speech he said he wasn’t going to discuss the ongoing review, it wasn’t hard to read between the lines of his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan; he talked about how the security situation has already improved in the places where the U.S. has sent additional troops.

Petraeus said that McChrystal’s assessment is that the situation in Afghanistan is “serious but doable, and that is an assessment we agree with,” adding that Afghanistan requires “a sustained, substantial commitment. I’m not going to get into whether that means more or less or what number of forces, enablers, trainers and civilians.”

But Petraeus noted that the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan has increased from about 30,000 to 68,000 in recent months and “that has enabled some tactical gains” in the areas in which security had been especially bad, such as Helmand and Kandahar.

It was difficult to imagine, if Obama even wanted to draw down, he could do it politically in the face of generals who obviously wanted to double down instead. But now he has another, possibly even more powerful force bearing down on him in the other direction: the Nobel Peace Prize. How is it going to look in a week or whenever Obama announces his new strategy, if the strategy is to escalate the war there? Is that becoming of a Nobel Peace Prize winner? (Of course the answer to that is “yes” if you’re Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat or Shimon Peres… But let’s play along.)

I know some people will argue that continuing to fight is the peaceful thing to do, that leaving Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban will only beget more violence. I disagree, but that’s an argument for another time. And I like to imagine that the Nobel committee agrees with me, that they awarded him the prize this early in his presidency for the promise that he presents for the U.S. to change the imperious, interventionist way it engages with the world. Their actual justification was a bit vague, but seems to suggest this, saluting his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” And escalating in Afghanistan is very much the old way of U.S. engagement in the world.

I really thought it was a joke when I first read this morning that Obama had won. (This is the risk you run when you get your news from your friends’ facebook status updates.) I think it’s a terrible decision by the Nobel Committee, and I think Obama ought to decline it and say that it should be given to someone who actually has accomplished something rather than someone who simply has a lot of promise. But we can hope that it has at least one positive effect: making him really think about peace in Afghanistan.

UPDATE: There is now more information from the Nobel committee on why they picked Obama. (Or possibly it was there before and I missed it; it was early.)

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

“Are to be strengthened”? And what exactly have we done to meet climatic challenges? Oh well, I guess this is about as useful as getting angry at the Grammys.

And anyway, all of that — Obama’s promise on nuclear weapons, climate change, a unicorn in every pot — is going to go nowhere if we get bogged down in Afghanistan. This might be the most critical foreign policy decision he’s going to make, and it’s shocking that he gets the Nobel Peace Prize immediately before he makes it.