Define Victory

The big bosses here at True/Slant–is that how you type it?–threw out a question to us foreign affairs-minded folk, the question being: What are some of the biggest pratfalls the Obama administration must guard against as it goes forward with its foreign policy? Something along those lines, the corollary of which is, what should they do?

My answer is fairly simple: They have to know what they want to do. That is to say, they have to define their goals, so they, and the populations of countries in which they are involved, understand when they’ve succeeded and when they have not.

For me, this comes out of years spent moving across Asia and the Middle East, years during which the Bush administration offered up rhetoric worthy of a moderately successful, somewhat compelling high school football coach (A digression: I found the movie version of “Friday Night Lights” to be one of the most educational films about America in recent years. Anyone have other nominations?). Freedom, democracy, evildoers and all that came our sounding to me akin to “ram it down their throats,” “show ‘em who’s boss,” and remember, we are the Titans, er, Americans. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield et al really did seem to think that because we showed up somewhere, and because we had America on our jerseys, the people in these places would fall into line and become social democrats, good members of civic societies based on the things we like to think our civic societies are all about (and sometimes are). There was no real sense of what victory meant in Afghanistan, so no one, especially the locals, could tell if we were winning or losing. They didn’t know how to balance the fact that more kids were going to school with the fact that some of the same thug-life warlords and child-thieving gangsters were back in power. They didn’t know how to reconcile the creation with some new infrastructure with the ongoing lack of other big projects that seemed like they should be of equal importance. And they didn’t know how to think about the fact that there was obviously so much new money in the country, like all those white SUVs the NGOs drive, but that so little of it was finding its way into their pockets. That screws people up. It creates a place quite unlike the one they had imagined when they heard the richest nation in the world was coming to town. They had a lot riding on those expectations, and when it didn’t work out, they didn’t think, well, maybe we were a little unrealistic there. They got pissed.

Likewise, there was no sense of what victory or success meant in Iraq. Or Iran. Or North Korea. Or with China, Latin America, Egypt, Israel and Palestine, Uruguay, Botswana, East Timor or any other place. The Bush folk tried to peddle vaguely defined morality, strangely inappropriate economics, foolishly imagined cultural ties, often employing as their messengers people who exposed themselves in a matter of sentences as confused, ignorant, lazy, or all of the above (think of that dope Paul Bremer, or Karen Hughes in Saudi Arabia).

So, this administration needs to really know what they’re after. The roster of people they have on the case(s) seems promising. The rhetoric has thus far been a good mix of humility and aspiration. They are showing some spine as well. The vision on Afghanistan remains iffy, however. And I have to hope they’re planning for the possibility that Iraq could once again devolve and explode. Oh, and Pakistan, as messy as a country right now, where the vision of the baddies gets bigger with every day and every new success.

Wherever we go, we will need the help of the local populations. It is a recruiting war, same as happens between North Carolina and Duke. We want the best players out on the farms and from the inner cities and the suburbs. And we want to make sure the opposition doesn’t get them because they–the Taliban, say–offer a motorbike, a Chinese-made gun, and $5 a day. That will take better propaganda on our part–Obama himself and Hilary Clinton are key here, naturally–better outreach, and a more effective manner of telling the Afghans and Iraqis and Iranians what we’re after. I used to find myself thinking that after the Marines and soldiers pulled in to Baghdad, they should have totally papered the place with flyers that spelled out their goals, that recognized that it wouldn’t always be easy and they wouldn’t always get it right, and that made it clear that this was still the Iraqis’ country, their land, and that we’d be getting out soon as we could. These little pieces  of paper wouldn’t have changed things all by themselves, but they could have at the very least given the population there–and could give the populations elsewhere–benchmarks against which they could measure progress. Otherwise, the arrival of the international community cavalry creates outsized, wholly unrealistic expectations, which inevitably go unmet, and inevitably create frustrations that can be–and have been–exploited by recruiters on other sides.

And just to make it harder, vhis will involve the ongoing effort to stop the financial bleeding here and abroad in the short term and the just-underway effort to really addres environmental issues that will affect all of this in the long term. Have fun, Mr. President.