Michael O’Hanlon is
a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, one of the most prestigious
think-tanks in
14 Points Editor, J.T. Rothwell:
In your January 14th article for the Washington Post, you argued that the Bush administration’s plan to increase troops deserves congressional support, even as a policy anticipating its failure must be formulated now. You cited the Bush administration’s acknowledgement that troop levels were insufficient and small scale reconstruction, like job creation programs, were inadequate. Do you think the Bush Administration has been learned from its mistakes, and are troop increases, which are no more than 21,000 in most reports, really sufficient to make a difference?
Michael O’Hanlon:
I don’t know.
Especially on the latter point; it’s not clear if 21,000 will do it. Certainly
doctrine suggests that you need more and unless the Iraqi troops in the field
become a lot more dependable we’re still going to be way short of meeting the
standard technical size for a force of this kind of operation.
As to whether President Bush has learned from
his mistakes, I think yes, but it doesn’t mean that he’s learned fast enough.
In other words, in any given situation there may come a point of no return
where just too many bad things have happened, too much violence has been
established, and you can not recover, even if you have figured out what to do
-and that’s what I acknowledged as a possibility. In fact I’ve had some debates
with friends of mine who used to be in favor of deploying the surge, but no
longer are, and there argument is precisely that: what was once feasible is no
longer feasible according to them.
JTR:
Do you think that is a prevalent position within the Democratic Party’s leadership, or do you think they were skeptical of a surge from the beginning and never would have supported it?
Michael O’Hanlon:
It’s definitely
widespread within the Democratic Party; it’s also fairly common now in the
Republican Party -not as much, but there are certainly a lot of Republicans who
think the current strategy is failing and who have run out of optimism and
bullishness and bravado, or just simple confidence in the President and the
mission, but there’s no doubt that this kind of view is widespread because
there’s clear no doubt that the overall gist of the Congress is to oppose the
surge, whereas most of the criticism of the military operation in the past was
that it did not involve enough troops or enough of a commitment from the United
States. So President Bush is doing what people have called on him to do, but
yet they’re not happy about it, which suggests that the timing -a sense of lost
opportunity is what’s preventing them from supporting a policy that they might
otherwise support. Now obviously politics can play a role as well, but I do
believe that most of the President’s critics at this point, in addition to
having their own political views in opposition to him, also sincerely believe
the mission will not work.
JTR:
Right, that seems to be what [Senators] Biden, Levin, and Hagel who [ in addition to there Senate resolution] have been arguing in recent Op/ed articles [USA Today].
Moving on, I’d like ask you about General Petraeus. What do you know about his approach to counterinsurgency and whether or not you think it marks a significant change from the strategy that was in place?
Michael O’Hanlon:
Well, I think most of
us what General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy
is by now. It’s essentially written down in the manual, which
came out in December, so there’s no need for me to elucidate it in great
detail, but I think that he is of a school in the army that has always been a
relative minority, but by the force of events and the fact that the previous
policies have failed in Iraq, his view, which was originally a minority view,
is perhaps becoming the majority view. At least it’s being given a chance now
to try itself out, and there’s no doubt that what most of Petreaus
put in that manual would push you in the direction of the surge. Now again, he
wouldn’t want to give the enemy a four year head start before you adopt this,
which is essentially what we’ve done, so I don’t know that Petraeus
is all that optimistic about whether his kind of approach will work now, and of
course, as I mentioned earlier, there’s plenty reason to doubt if 21,000 new
forces is enough in any event, but I think that nonetheless, what you’re seeing
in the current strategy that is consistent very much with Patreaus’s
view of how these sorts of operations should go.
JTR:
Can you give us a sense of where that number’s from? Is that a shear function of the limitations on the military right now?
Michael O’Hanlon:
I think that’s it. I
think the 21,000 is as much as you can comfortably do and then some. It’s
beyond the point of comfort, but it’s still at least theoretically possible.
You start trying to bring more than that over there, and then you have the
problem of never giving people a break, and you have to go to a WWII style mobilization
combat until the war is over. But even if you do that you run into the problem
of a lack of equipment for many in the division. So I think what’s driving the
21,000 number is limitations on the force structure more than any logic about
the mission.
Having said that I’ve
been critical of the 21,000 number a couple of times.
Let me quickly say that while it’s certainly on the small side, still it’s
certainly moving in the right direction and if you build up some good momentum
in certain places, you may be able to generalize the whole notion. If you
figure out a formula that works, maybe other things become possible; maybe
other countries will decide that they’ll support the effort, maybe we’ll be
prepared to contemplate radical new ideas about how we recruit people, like
recruiting foreigners. If you’ve got a strategy that you think works and the
only issue now is trying to find enough troops to do it properly nationwide,
then that would be a nice problem to have relative to the problem we’ve got now.
So I think that you start with 21,000, emphasize a few locations and see how it
works.
JTR:
While I agree with that analysis, I want to bring up a point
raised by some, for example Nicholas
Kristof, who wrote an Op/ed yesterday where he
cited polling data, which ultimately came from the University
of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. When given a choice of two characterizations
of the
Michael O’Hanlon:
Well, I think its
right to be concerned about that dynamic and I have been concerned about it. In
fact, a couple of years ago when my former boss and colleague and I, Jim
Steinberg, wrote
together, we suggested laying out a strategy for reducing the American
troop commitment to Iraq in order to counter that perception that we were
antagonizing people. But I think even while polls still say that is the
perception, there is also the general strategic assessment now that sectarian
war is at least as much of a risk as insurgency, and that the Sunnis and Shi’ites now fear each other as much as they fear us, and
so, even if poll survey results suggest that they are not very optimistic about
what we can accomplish, part of that is a venting of frustration at a mission
that is obviously not going well, and that result has to be balance against the
fact that we know there are other big problems in Iraq and people’s concern
with the foreign occupier is probably no longer the main concern. It’s still a main
concern, but you may have to balance that with the need to help Iraqis with a
politically neutral stabilization force -because they’re not very confident
about their own ability to hold their country together, and they’re very
paranoid and fearful about each other.
JTR:
To be fair, that same poll also found that roughly 66% of Iraqis said they didn’t want the US out within 6 months, or at least they implied that by choosing the other options, which were within a year [34%], or only when the violence subsides [29%], which I think is an interesting way of reading it. At least, they don’t want us out immediately.
Michael O’Hanlon:
To make one final
point on that, there have been a number of times that polls have asked Iraqis,
“Do you want Americans to leave within 6 months, or a year, or after a long
time,” and I don’t have any real confidence in the kinds of numbers you get
from that question because you’re giving people the option of choosing a Goldi-Locks-middle -ground, and of course they’re going to
lean towards that if you give them the choice because they’re going to want to
say, “well, yeah I think we need American forces in the short term, but I’d
like to have them out of my dam country in the long term, and so let’s find
some kind of middle ground, but the numbers themselves don’t mean that much
about how long they want you to stay, it’s just that they’re trying to find
some way to convey two messages simultaneously; so I’ve always felt that these
sorts of polls, which are couched in these terms are quite arbitrary about what
the time horizons really mean.
JTR:
I’d like to ask you about your [new] book Hard Power, in particular the war on terror and the essence of your long term strategy. You mention education as a large component of the long term war on terror in addition to expanding economic opportunities. Could you elaborate on the causality, because theoretically it’s a bit complicated, given that you also acknowledge [based on academic research] that there is no negative relationship between individual terrorists and education.
Michael O’Hanlon:
I’ll just take one set
of points. I don’t mean to sound like some woolly-headed liberal who believes
that only if we all went to school, we’d all learn to love and cherish each
other and this world would be okay. I mean it much more, not in the sense of
building affection for the United States directly, but more a sense of giving
opportunities to the disenfranchised in countries like Pakistan, more of a
sense of belonging, more of a sense of hope. I think the more these countries can
do to strengthen their own societies, and the opportunities offered to their
own young people, and not worry directly or excessively about how much they
like us (obviously you hope to make love us to, but if you can’t do that, you’d
like to give them something more constructive to do then worry about blowing us
up, and that’s the logic. I feel like that message was easier for me to think
through, so that’s what I spent a lot of time in that chapter writing about. I
think that free trade zones and economic development strategies are just as
important because you obviously have to create jobs for these people you’re
educating, or you’re not going to be giving them a sense of hope in strengthening
the societies in which they live. That’s another nut to crack for me. I think
free trade zones and good fiscal policies in the country in question and other
such matters are important, but I don’t feel like I’m all that well equipped to
lay out that road map so I didn’t spend a lot of time on that in the chapter.
JTR:
Could I get you to discuss US relations with countries like
Michael O’Hanlon:
I’m sympathetic to the
basic argument President Bush made after 9/11 that the old bargain didn’t really
work. I think, though, he might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater a
bit. I’m not sure he had a viable strategy to replace the old one, but I think
it is true that you need to push these countries towards reform, send them a
message that you can’t operate the same way you have been before. I’m not an
expert on these countries politics, but I think that elevating the centrality
of the reform agenda is the right thing to do. It runs into some problems
obviously. Democracy promotion is not always the right way to promote reform,
and I think with the Palestinian authority, for example, have been the wrong
way. Reform, more broadly defined, is certainly necessary. Whatever pace you decide
to accept, you’ve got to try to accelerate it because it’s just not happening
fast enough.