News Journal:Fits of anger don’t cure foreign policy ills

What a mess.

Iraq. Afghanistan. Syria. Damn it, somebody’s to blame for all this. So do something! We want action. A quick fix. And the President, many people seem to feel, just isn’t doing enough.

Well, maybe. But let’s step back, take a collective deep breath and ask, first, how did we get here? Second, what’s the best course now for the long run?

One thing I’m sure of. Our troops are the best in the world, in fact the best in all of history. There are decent arguments for a volunteer army, but when you see as I did how these smart, dedicated, tough and committed people perform in combat situations, you would be glad we rely on troops who choose the military as a career. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the first Delaware Senator to serve on the Armed Forces Committee, I never ceased to marvel at just how good they were during my four trips to Iraq and three to Afghanistan.

If there were purely military solutions to the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, these people would have provided them. But of course we know that the military alone is often very limited in what it can accomplish. We are not the first “most powerful military force in the world” to face that hard truth. Read a history about what was going on in London in 1780. There was a lot of outrage in and out of Parliament that the British army, the best in the world, couldn’t seem to beat a bunch of ragtag colonials in America.

So our military bears none of the blame for how we got to where we are. You have to start with the ill-conceived decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, when most of the country and even high-ranking Congressional leaders didn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. When a chastened Bush administration finally signed a treaty with a newly elected Iraqi government in 2008, the hope was that it would work to bring together the various factions among the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish populations. Instead, we got the militant Shiite Maliki government, which systematically and corruptly disenfranchised and alienated Sunnis and Kurds.

Something all-too-similar has been happening in Afghanistan. I became convinced during my trips there that the majority of Afghans hated the Taliban. They had lived under a harsh Taliban government that denied them basic rights and ruthlessly enforced its extreme ideology. While our troops were winning battles against the Taliban, however, the corrupt-but-duly elected Karzai government was antagonizing its citizens to the point that many decided even the Taliban were preferable. When our troops successfully took back the city of Marjah in 2009, many of its citizens were unhappy. They were afraid that, when the troops left, Karzai would install the same thugs who had previously run the city.

The British tried to conquer Afghanistan at the height of the British Empire in 1878. The Russians tried it in 1979. No foreign power has ever managed to do it, and even our most militant hawks aren’t suggesting that we commit the hundreds of thousands of troops it would take to even attempt such a foolhardy war. So what do we do?

Maybe the best first step is to admit, like grownups, that sometimes there are no great options. Among all of the calls for the President to take more aggressive action, I haven’t heard one specific suggestion that is embraced by many others. Arm the Syrian rebels? Which rebels? The best intelligence we have is that militant Sunnis, including many jihadists, are the major rebel group. Do we want them to get American weapons? Look what happened when ISIS got American weapons in Iraq.

Put troops back in Iraq? A lot of people blame Obama for not leaving a small force there when most of our troops left. The fact is, that treaty signed during the Bush administration specifically outlined how that might happen. When Maliki refused to honor the treaty, we had no choice but to leave. And if we hadn’t, does anyone seriously believe that a few thousand troops – caught between warring factions – could have done much more than needlessly shed more American blood?

That leaves us with where we are right now. There is some hope that we may be seeing a reversal of the consistently bad news of the past few months. We are arming the Kurds in Iraq, and for the first time there is some cooperation between them and a new Iraqi government that may turn away from Maliki’s destructive policies. The air support we are providing seems to be making a difference. ISIS is hardly defeated, but its march of terror has been slowed or halted. No one knows what will ultimately happen to Iraq, but if I had to make a bet I think it may someday resemble the separate Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish federalized districts proposed way back in 2006 by then-Senator Biden and President Emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations Leslie Gelb.

There will soon be a new government in Afghanistan. Will the international community, led by the United States, have enough confidence in it to continue its training-and-assistance mission with the country’s military after our troops leave at the end of this year? No one really knows, but the Obama administration is using every diplomatic and economic tool it has at its disposal to reach the best outcome possible.

The futures of both Iraq and Afghanistan depend on the ability of their new leaders to change the way their people feel about their government. In Afghanistan, the new government must show that it is ending the horrendous corruption of the Karzai regime and offers a better way forward than the Taliban.

In Iraq, the majority Shiites must take some big steps to share power with moderate Sunnis.

And in the United States, we need a far more nuanced public debate about how best to use our diplomatic, economic, and military power. Stamping one’s foot and saying, “do something” contributes nothing to that dialogue.

Read all of former Sen. Ted Kaufman’s columns at tedkaufman.com.

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