The editors of the Washington Post note that the president’s strategy of recruiting “partners” to achieve his foreign policy goals isn’t faring too well:
In devoting 250 of the 6,800 words of his State of the Union address to the fight against “violent extremism,†President Obama offered a boilerplate description of his policy. “Instead of sending large ground forces overseas,†he said, “we’re partnering with nations from South Asia to North Africa to deny safe haven to terrorists who threaten America.†As he spoke, his strategy was crumbling in a nation he failed to mention: Yemen, home to the branch of al-Qaeda that claimed credit for the recent attacks in France and has repeatedly attempted to strike the U.S. homeland.
No Arab country other than Iraq was willing to commit ground troops to oppose DAESH there. Despite the administration’s claims, to my eye most of the gains against DAESH in Iraq have been made by the Kurdish peshmerga, those have been fairly minor, and the role that the U. S. played is unknown and probably unknowable.
Iraq appears to have broken into three parts and there’s no way to know whether that condition is permanent or not. Whatever the case that partner is no longer what it once was. Libya is in chaos. Afghanistan is unable to support a military capable of defending its borders without substantial U. S. support and IMO the prospects for that support continuing long after we’ve removed our troops from the country are slim.
Now Yemen, where our drone strikes have frayed whatever partnership we’ve managed to cultivate there, is undergoing its own dramatic change. Some partners.
It’s the Kevin Bacon “All Is Well” foreign policy approach.
A sub-header on a CNN story about Yemen:
After days of turmoil, Yemen’s President, Prime Minister and Cabinet have quit, leaving the troubled U.S. ally potentially on the brink of civil war.
I wonder what they think has been happening?
Related: Pat Lang tells a story about his experience when stationed in Yemen. Some of it might even be true.
http://fpif.org/state-empire-2015/
Iraq and Afghanistan
Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over. Six years ago, nearly 180,000 American troops served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, fewer than 15,000 remain.
Okay, but last year around this time, we had approximately zero troops in Iraq, and Obama had previously indicated that we’d be approaching zero in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Instead, Obama’s deployed around 3,000 new troops to Iraq since last summer, and last November quietly extended the combat mission for nearly 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for at least another year. We’ve also got a bonus bombing engagement in Syria. It’s true that the balance of U.S. forces overseas has been on a slow decline, but here Obama is taking credit for ending wars that he’s actually extended, or in some cases started himself.
Iraq actually broke into three parts during the mid 1990’s and humpty will not get put back together again (IMO).
The “partner” problem is one of our own making. We want to promote mostly secular, liberal democratic governments, but the regional power players aren’t interested in what we think is best for them. That makes partners hard to find. During the Cold War this wasn’t a problem because we would support anyone as long as they were anti-communist. Today we think we can have our cake and eat it too which is why we are so enamored with the so-called “moderates” in Syria in elsewhere who are largely powerless and couldn’t govern themselves out of a paper bag.
@Andy
Well put.
It’s revealing, that fourteen years into war the best our President can do to define the enemy is ” violent extremism”. We still don’t clearly understand what we are neck deep in. What does it mean to fight violent extremism? What are the objectives? How do we know when those objectives are met? How do we know when we’ve won (or lost) the war? What is the political endpoint? Is there a strategy or are we totally fixated at the tactical level?