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Infected By Optimism

David Brooks seems to put aside all of the reasons for skepticism about grandiose plans for Afghanistan that he correctly describes at the start of this column, and apparently he allows himself to ignore his properly skeptical instincts because so many of the people he met in Afghanistan are so very optimistic. Brooks concludes: I […]

David Brooks seems to put aside all of the reasons for skepticism about grandiose plans for Afghanistan that he correctly describes at the start of this column, and apparently he allows himself to ignore his properly skeptical instincts because so many of the people he met in Afghanistan are so very optimistic. Brooks concludes:

I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:

After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.

Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.

Infected may be a far more appropriate word than Brooks imagined. As I have said before, optimism is very much like a disease of the mind, and it is contagious. It inhibits lucid thought, it shuts down core reasoning centers and seems to inflict terrible damage on memory. It is optimism that continually causes us to lose our respect for limits and to have unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve, which leads us to set ourselves up for failure and disaster by encouraging us to overreach and believe that we can find a solution to every problem. There are certain realities in Afghanistan to which there are no American or NATO solutions (the drug trade springs to mind, as does the weak central government in Kabul), because they are not really problems, or at the very least they are not our problems. Their “solution” is so far beyond what our limited national security goals are that we are not going to find the solution in any reasonable amount of time at anything like an acceptable or reasonable cost.

If it was a fantasy in Iraq “to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states,” it remains a fantasy today. It makes no difference what label one gives to it, and it is certainly not a fantasy that only neoconservatives embrace. If Americans have not learned by now that such efforts are folly, and more important that they would not be worth it even if they turned out to be successful, it may indeed say something about our national character. What I fear is that Obama, who has always been an interventionist with great confidence in this fantasy of what American power can achieve, believes that the “energetic and ambitious response” is what the American public desires and will support for years to come. I worry that he will discover midway through his term that the public that voted to bring the war in Iraq to an end really is sick of frittering away our resources to no apparent purpose and for no real national interest, and they will turn on the entire mission in Afghanistan because it has been defined at once too broadly as a grand nation-building exercise and too narrowly in its preoccupation with forces based in western Pakistan.

Because Obama is setting far too ambitious goals for Afghanistan with too few resources, while largely neglecting (or exacerbating) more significant problems inside Pakistan that are gradually making our position in Afghanistan untenable, he runs the risk of jeopardizing public support for the much more limited and achievable security goals that are in our interest and the interest of Afghanistan’s neighbors. In the end, he will have the support of the fantasists who led us into Iraq and liberal internationalists who are still invested in the idea of nation-building, and he will have to face the growing numbers of people who have grown weary of a Long War that has ceased to make any sense (if it ever made sense in the first place). These people are not “isolationist” (as they will inevitably be labeled by the fantasists), but will have no interest in subsidizing open-ended missions in service to a ‘forward’ policy that seems unsustainable and which also seems far inferior to a containment approach.

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