Blackwill's paper was the Ernest May lecture this year at Aspen. Fittingly, he quotes May quite a bit. Some of the quotes:
- With regard to government decisions - "Will it work? Will it stick? Will it help more than it hurts? If not, what?"
- With regard to meddling in foreign cultures - "Who are they? How do they see things? Not, how do we presume that they see things. Not, how do we insist that they see things? Not, how do we hope they see things?"
- With regard to history - "at least three other strands of history ought, in our view, to be drawn in before objectives are finally selected, opinions sorted, and actions decided. The first is the historical underpinnings of key presumptions…this is the history which induces belief that if X occurs, Y will follow." (So what are the key presumptions that underpin our Afghanistan strategy? If we artfully implement COIN in southeast Afghanistan, the Pashtun will come over to our side? How much are these presumptions based on analysis and evidence, and how much on simple faith?) "The second is the history in the heads of other people—the differing ideas about the past and its lessons that with differences in age or experience or culture..." (What lessons from their history do Pashtun draw?) "Third is the history of organizations." (What was to be the Pentagon’s likely answer if asked in the early fall of 2009, how many troops does it need in Afghanistan? Was there any chance it would say fewer?)
I will identify eight such possible lessons from Afghanistan:
1. Ensure that the U.S. commitment in blood and treasure is clearly commensurate with U.S. vital national interests and does not push aside more important American strategic challenges.
2. Keep U.S. policy objectives feasible. No dreams allowed.
3. Take into account that local realities dominate global constructs.
4. Stay out of long ground wars in general, and especially stay out of long ground wars in Asia.
5. Reject the notion that America has the capability to socially engineer far-off societies fundamentally different from our own.
6. Be cautious about making counterinsurgency the U.S. Army’s core competence. Interacting with exotic foreign cultures on the ground, not to say dramatically changing them, is not exactly America’s comparative advantage.
7. Accept that diplomacy is almost always a better instrument of U.S. national purpose than the use of military force.
8. Remember that often purported worst case consequences of U.S. external behavior don’t ever happen, not least because we remain the most powerful and resilient country on earth.
As I end my presentation, Ernie’s penetrating questions keep coming to mind regarding Afghanistan. Does current U.S. policy in the Afghanistan conflict make strategic sense? Will historians understand why the United States deployed 100,000 troops into Afghanistan nearly ten years after 9/11? Will current U.S. policymakers remember twenty years from now why it was so important to defend Helmand province and the village of Marja and to sometimes speak as if the fate of the civilized world depended on our success? In two decades, will these people among the best and the brightest of the American national security community in this era serving at the top of the Obama administration, will they still find the grand strategic importance of Kandahar self-evident? Or as May and Neustadt underscore, might they later ask as other American policymakers have asked before them, "How in God’s name did we come to do that?"
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