The Use and Abuse of American Power

To truly achieve victory as Clauswitz defined it – to attain a political objective – the U.S. military’s ability to kick down the door must be matched by our ability to clean up the mess and even rebuild the house afterward. - Sec. Robert Gates

As the Obama administration prepares to send more troops into Afghanistan, Stephen Walt questions the underlying rationale behind the vogue in counter-insurgency warfare:

In short, the current obsession with counterinsurgency is the direct result of two fateful errors. We didn't get Bin Laden when we should have, and we invaded Iraq when we shouldn't. Had the United States not made those two blunders, we wouldn't have been fighting costly counterinsurgencies and we wouldn't be contemplating a far-reaching revision of U.S. defense priorities and military doctrine.

I wouldn't phrase it quite like this, particularly the first part. However, the decision to stick around in Afghanistan and try to create some semblance of a modern, centralized state was a strategic choice that has led rather directly to our current woes. As Secretary Gates said above, the purpose of war is to obtain a political objective. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has established political objectives which are considerably difficult to achieve, especially with the amount of manpower and resources we have devoted to the task.

And that's important, because counterinsurgency warfare is being pushed in a strategic context - and that is one in which the U.S. is going to be an interventionist power using the military to shape political outcomes. In that same speech in 2008, Secretary Gates also said:

Think of where our forces have been sent and have been engaged over the last 40-plus years: Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and more.

What’s interesting in Gates' formulation was what was not said – whether most of these military conflicts were worthwhile endeavors in the first place. This is not the place to debate the particular merits of each of these conflicts, but looking at the list what's striking is how irrelevant most of them are to American security. I'm hard pressed to imagine a world in which the U.S. is vastly less secure because it did not intervene in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti or Iraq the second time around.

And this is a problem. We are spending too much time arguing about the application of American power and not nearly enough about its purpose.

(AP Photos)