How will we know when we have achieved success in Afghanistan? According to Richard Holbrooke, our special envoy to the region, "We'll know it when we see it." That's a fuzzy definition, to be sure, one reminiscent of the murky legal definition of pornography. It's become a throwaway phrase, akin to "it is what it is" and "whaddaya gonna do?" It allows envoys and diplomats to dodge tough questions, like what are the benchmarks of success in the war in Afghanistan and will we know when it's time to hit the exits?
The previous administration fumbled this question more than once when it came to Iraq. Now it's the Obama administration's turn. It's not reassuring when the top envoy to the region cannot even specifically point to what benchmarks must be met for us to define success.
The images of voters with ink-stained fingers, while truly remarkable, given the threats voters face, obscures the Afghan conundrum of why we're fighting there. The trouble is, every time there is an election, the war's proponents can hold this up as evidence that the vast majority of Afghans want democracy and therefore we must stay because to pull out would be to turn our backs on everyone who risked their life to vote.
The election may provide evidence that Afghans want peace, stability, and good governance. It may even indicate Afghans' growing distrust of the Taliban. But it doesn't necessarily mean that Afghans want democracy, as we know it in the West. Every time there is an election in a wartorn land we've invaded, it shouldn't obscure the debate here over whether and when to pull out (I do not believe we are abandoning these Afghans if the U.S. military decides our presence is exacerbating the situation). But that requires that we first have a definable meaning of success. Sorry to say but "we'll know it when we see it" doesn't quite cut it.
Discuss
Orion Jones on August 27, 2009, 8:18 PM
Lionel, thanks for your post. I actually agree with Mr. Holbrooke in one important sense: I think it’s easier to falsify quantifiable data to “prove” one side is winning a conflict (remember the Vietnam body count?) rather than take a hard look at all the different variables and assess the situation as a whole.
Today everyone realizes that dissent was filtered out in the run-up to the latest invasion of Iraq, and that highly dubious justifications were given to the public. But there was a certain sense to Bush saying he would listen first to his commanders on the ground. This is preferable IF IF IF the cause is justified.
You say “we’ll know it when we see it” doesn’t cut it. If you think success can be defined more clearly than Holbrooke defined it, why aren’t you giving us some clues? My guess is that war is a highly variable environment where things change in unexpected ways every day. It must be very difficult to control the variables you would need to control to make accurate predictions about what constitutes success and when it will be achieved.
The difficulty of these questions, I believe, tells us something about the nature of war: violent anarchy, well, it is what it is. I wish you’d have come to a different conclusion than ragging on a guy who probably has an unimaginably difficult job.
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