Feb 16th 2007
From Economist.com
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8696412&fsrc=RSSGeorge Bush announces more troops for Afghanistan. Is America’s foreign policy becoming increasingly ad hoc?“BUSH Commits One Additional Troop To Afghanistan†read a recent headline in the Onion, an online satirical American newspaper. The satirists nearly got it right: on Thursday February 15th, George Bush confirmed that a mini surge of 3,200 extra troops will be sent. He also called on America’s NATO allies to beef up their own presence there, more than five years after the Taliban were ousted from Kabul.
There are certainly good reasons to send more soldiers to Afghanistan, though it is unclear what a few thousand extra might achieve. The Taliban are likely, especially in Helmand province, to launch a series of new offensives as the winter snows begin to melt. Afghans are growing frustrated by the lack of recovery: without the imposition of law and order it is proving difficult to promote reconstruction, to fight corruption in government or to get the economy working.
Mr Bush may be motivated by domestic grumbles too. Among the many criticisms from the Democrats and some Republicans of his policy in Iraq is the charge that, while sending more than 20,000 additional soldiers to Baghdad, Mr Bush has been neglecting Afghanistan. Rather than plough more scarce resources into a failed war of choice in Iraq, runs this argument, America should do more to stamp out the insurgency in Afghanistan, the breeding ground of al-Qaeda. Thus Mr Bush’s promise of soldiers for Afghanistan may be intended to show that America still has some fight to spare.
But consider the many crises underway. The risk of military and diplomatic overstretch is prompting a more ad hoc, less ideological, approach to foreign policy. This week declassified army plans from 2002 suggested that the American government expected, by now, to have only 5,000 soldiers in a peaceful and well-run Iraq. Instead it has 132,000 troops trapped in the middle of a sectarian civil war. Add America’s military commitments on the Korean peninsula, in the Horn of Africa (recent American air strikes helped dislodge Islamists from Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu) and in other parts of the Middle East, and one might conclude that even the world’s strongest armed forces are performing near their limit.
That might help to explain why more pragmatic diplomats were allowed to take the lead over North Korea this week. America is clearly trying to avoid a showdown there and has agreed, during six-nation talks in Beijing, to a deal that promises energy aid and warmer diplomatic ties for the dictatorship, if a nuclear facility is closed within 60 days. Compared with America’s previous hardline approach, this looks like an abrupt about-face.
Many conservatives are horrified. John Bolton, until recently America’s ambassador at the UN, said it would leave America looking through a “soda straw†at North Korea’s nuclear activities, and would encourage other would-be proliferators to seek pay-offs for merely obeying the rules. As it happens, Mr Bolton is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think-tank where Mr Bush announced the Afghanistan surge on Thursday. Other armchair warriors at the AEI have criticised any deal with North Korea that seems to reward Kim Jong Il for behaving badly.
In contrast, on Iran, the neocons who pushed for the war in Iraq seem to be in charge. Mr Bush has sent a carrier battle-group and anti-missile batteries towards Iran, and has turned up the rhetorical heat. Iran has been blamed for providing explosives used against Americans in Iraq, and Iranians have been detained there. On this front, the administration has looked so bellicose that both Democrats and some Republicans have fretted publicly about stumbling into yet another war.
There may be a grand strategy in the different ways of handling Iran and North Korea. Perhaps America worries less about the isolated and impoverished Asian country. Evidently there is more leverage over energy-poor North Korea than over oil-exporting Iran. Perhaps getting the North Koreans out of the nuclear business may help to isolate Iran. Or a more mundane motivation may be at play: America is fighting fires however it can on different fronts, no longer guided by a single clear ideology. Irving Kristol, a founding father of neoconservatism, said that a neocon was a liberal who had been “mugged by realityâ€. Now, perhaps, Mr Bush’s reactive diplomacy is showing what happens when the neocons themselves face muggers from Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea simultaneously.
