When one looks again at the inaugural address, carefully this time, one sees the three paragraphs I earlier identified as being of Presidential caliber. They are of such caliber not just because they are well written, but because of what they say. One that I have in mind starts like this: "For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies." That is a statement any temperamental conservative will agree with, and also any pragmatist, which echoes with the inaugural line about the size of government not being the issue, but its effectiveness, some ten paragraphs before. And indeed, my former State Department colleague Phil Zelikow, now teaching history at the University of Virginia, said as much in a post yesterday on the Foreign Policy magazine website. (Not as good a publication as The American Interest, but not so bad.)
The most telling line in the inaugural, however, that gives credence to my hunch, is the one in which the President urged the country to recognize that while our problems may be novel, "those values upon which our success depends--hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism--these things are old." (I wish he hadn't used the words "values" and "things", but never mind.) And then, even better, "These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress through our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths."
This is Obama as restorationist; this is not a man unmoored from the past; this is no hubris-drenched liberal. And if that were not enough, he told the American people that we all have "duties" and "responsibilities" as well as rights and entitlements. John McCain could have said that, and no doubt would have said something like it had he gotten the chance. We have "duties" to something larger than ourselves; we owe institutions for the quality of our social life-- it's about "we", not "I." If that's not temperamental conservatism as I have described it, nothing is.
As I pointed out to Phil, and as many others have noted, Obama is also shaped in part by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, and this is a very good sign. (If you do not know what this means, do not know who Rev. Niebuhr was, you should do something about that as soon as possible.) So there is a theological as well as a philosophical aspect to the foundation of Obama's pragmatism, or temperamental conservatism. You know that he mentioned Scripture in the inaugural and invoked God twice, do you not? Was this just pro forma; was he just checking off a political box? Maybe; but I don't think so.
What about Rick Warren, whose role in the inauguration ritual so pissed off the homosexual lobby (what others may want to call the "gay community", but hey, this is my blog, not theirs, so I will describe what it objectively is)? Obama has pronounced himself opposed to "gay marriage." Is this just expediency, a position that he would fold up and forget if it were to potentially cost him politically at some future point? A lot of people think yes; I am not so sure.
One more item of evidence, and then I promise I will get off this particular horse, at least for a while. When Obama went up to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to talk about the stimulus package, he apparently had a real heart-to-heart with some GOP Representatives. It was not a political drive-by, just for show, which some expected it would be. Here is what Zach Wamp, a Republican Congressman from Tennessee (and I swear that, as much as I admire The Onion, I am not making up that name) said after the encounter: "He knows that the debt and the deficit are huge long-term problems as well, and he made a compelling case. He sounded, frankly, like a Republican." (New York Times, January 28, 2009, p. A16) If you can't believe a guy named Wamp, who can you believe, eh?
A real temperamental conservative, and a real pragmatist, believes in contingency and in human agency. Believes in fact-based, not faith-based approaches to policy. Is not, in others word, lazy. This is why leaks about the new approach to Afghanistan trouble me. Obama, and General Jones, his very capable NSC Advisor, want to put more U.S. troops in Afghanistan and have them do less nation-building and more combat. This is saying, implicitly at least, that the solution to the problem there is more military, less non-kinetic than the posture adopted by the Bush Administration. Anyone out there have a taste for irony? Well, open wide, for here it comes.
This is not so good a sign of things to come. U.S. goals cannot be achieved in Afghanistan by military means short of mass murder, and seconding the nation-building tasks to the EU side of NATO just won't work. Now, it may be that nation-building in a place like Afghanistan is a fool's errand to begin with, for Afghanistan is not and never has been a state in the conventional sense. I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it is indeed a fool's errand. But I am absolutely sure that the country cannot be stabilized by an occupation force. You don't have to know anything about Alexander's travails in what was then called Bactria to reach this conclusion, but it certainty would help. You don't even have to remember what happened there to the Red Army. What you do have to know is that the problem has nothing to do with religion. The "new" Taliban is not the same as al-Qaeda or even the same as the old Taliban, the regime we attacked in October 2001. It is a form of mobilized Pashtun tribalism, and an attempt to preserve the ethos of pashtunwali. (Look that up if you don't know what it means.) I can imagine without much difficulty a situation in which the Pashtun clans have their autonomy from Kabul and from NATO, find a way to balance their interests among one another and with the country's Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara, and still not pose a threat to the United States by allowing its territory again to be used as a staging ground for mass casualty terrorism. By fighting them on their own territory, we're going to continue to kill innocent people, piss them off, and drive them into the arms of religious crazies.
The idea of being tougher on Karzai, because he's allowed a lot of corruption, is similarly questionable. Corruption is culturally relative. When there is no strong state, horsetrading and bending the law are the only ways to get what you want. If areas under government influence can't grow and prosper from growing poppies, then the trade will migrate to areas the government doesn't influence and help fund al-Qaeda. Why on earth would we want to do that? A real pragmatist certainly wouldn't. A real pragmatist would start by doing what I suggested 5 years ago when I worked for government: We ought to buy the damned opium crop ourselves, all of it.
I like some others fear that Obama's misunderstanding of Afghan history and society will lead him into his own personal Vietnam. It's not either/or: either we escalate militarily or try harder at nation-building. We can't reliably achieve either of these goals; we can't win militarily and we can't develop that country into a unitary state, let alone a modern democracy. What we can do is help to organize political elements inside the country and some around it--including Iran--to make the country off-limits to terrorist plotting and staging. That is the core interest we have there anyway. Dealing with the more serious salafi menace is bound up instead with our policy toward Pakistan, which is a problem connected to but still distinct from Afghanistan. One thing is for sure: More U.S. soldiers shedding more Pashtun blood in Afghanistan is not going to help us in Pakistan.
Talk about path dependency: We might be witnessing the beginning of a trail of tears for the Obama Administration.
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