The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

M A R C H 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 41 the peaceful emergence of a viable Palestinian state in the occupied ter- ritories and Gaza looks like a much better bet than self-isolation. In the meantime, the region presents other challenges — even if none of them has the transformative potential of a peace or continued warfare in the Holy Land. Let me now turn briefly to these. Iraq and Related Challenges It is good that the end of the American misadventure in Iraq is in sight. But its termination is not likely to repair the injury it did to the standing of the United States in ei- ther the international or Muslim communities. The “surge” averted disaster; the withdrawal may yet bring it. The post- occupation order in Iraq is unlikely to emerge smoothly or without further stressing regional stability. In the land be- tween the two rivers, the United States will leave behind a battleground of grievances. The Kurdish and Sunni Arab minorities, among others, must likely undergo still more suffering before things settle down. There will be no har- vest of good will from the carnage in Iraq. The same seems likely to be true of our eight-year in- tervention in Afghanistan. We began it with simple and straightforward goals — the apprehension of al-Qaida and the chastisement of its Afghan hosts. But these goals have been buried in a barrage of competing ideological and spe- cial-interest objectives. The result is combat in a political vacuum— a war whose only apparent theme is nowWest- ern hostility to militant Islam. This has destabilized Pak- istan and nurtured a particularly virulent form of terrorism there and in the Pakistani diaspora. It has spurred a recent surge in financial contributions to the Taliban as an appar- ently heroic resistance to infidel trespasses on Islam. What then to do about Afghanistan, where everyone ad- mits the most likely outcome is now failure? If you ask a re- ligious scholar or ideologue, you will hear a sermon. From an economist, expect a development scheme. Ask a non- governmental organization, and prepare to receive a pro- gram proposal. Ask a general what must be done, and you will get a crisp salute and the best campaign plan military science can devise. People come up with the solutions they know how to put together. The Obama administration briefly showed signs that it was taking charge of policy rather than— in a strange eva- sion of civilian control of the military — delegating its formulation to the generals. It did not follow through. It ended up adopting yet another military-proposed campaign plan. This one features a pacification ef- fort extending over as much as an- other decade. But al-Qaida has relocated to Pakistan from Afghani- stan. Neither the Taliban leadership nor anyone else in Afghanistan seems to want it to come back. The proposed pacification campaign is called a “strat- egy,” but it is not. It strains to find a military way to trans- form Afghanistan, even though its authors —who are very smart soldiers—recognize there is none. We are still look- ing for a strategy backed by force. In the meantime, we continue the use of force as a very inadequate substitute for strategy. Iranian Gains This brings me, at last, to Iran. Tehran had nothing to do with the assault on America on 9/11, but no nation has benefited more from the American reaction to it than the Islamic Republic. Its revolution seemed to be flickering out when 9/11 happened. In short order, its greatest enemy, the United States, then eliminated its other ene- mies in both Kabul and Baghdad and embarked on a mili- tary rampage through the Islamic world that estranged Americans from our traditional allies there. But wait! It gets even better from the Iranian point of view. In Afghanistan, the Iranians have been able to sit on the sidelines and watch us exhaust ourselves in inconclusive warfare. In Iraq, Iran is the dominant foreign influence in the country’s newly sectarian politics. (Of course, no one can say whether Baghdad will continue its de facto alliance with Tehran after the United States withdraws.) Israel and the United States brushed aside efforts by Damascus to di- lute its longstanding dependence on Tehran, thus cement- ing rather than eroding Iran’s influence in Syria. The 2006 Israeli savaging of Lebanon drove Iran’s client movement, Hezbollah, onto the commanding heights of Lebanese politics. This reducedTehran’s need to go through Damascus to affect events in Lebanon or to reach northern Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli and American efforts to ostracize and overthrow the elected Hamas government in Palestine left it nowhere to go but into the arms of Iran. Assertively Shiite Iran has, for the first time, acquired the Sunni Arab F O C U S The best thing the United States could do for Iraq now is to engage Baghdad’s neighbors.