<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/04/the_obama_paradox> The
Obama Paradox
A conversation with David Sanger, author of a new book on Obama's secret
wars.
INTERVIEW BY DAVID ROTHKOPF | JUNE 4, 2012
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/images/obama136447859.jpg
Barack Obama is a paradox. This has never been as clear to me as while
reading David Sanger's Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and
Surprising Use of American Power. The book is a timely, gripping read that
offers insights into some of the most surprising, most closely guarded
dimensions of the Obama presidency. Early
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cy
berattacks-against-iran.html?ref=davidesanger> excerpts from his book that
have already appeared in the New York Times have sent competitors scrambling
and governments from Washington to Tel Aviv to Tehran to Islamabad into
closed-door sessions to determine how to deal with his uncomfortable
revelations. When it comes to ongoing conflicts between America and her
perceived enemies (and friends) around the world, Sanger is a one-man
WikiLeaks and Confront and Conceal is a glimpse into a world until now
shrouded in secrecy.
A cynical observer might wonder why, at this particular moment, there have
been a spate of books and articles like Sanger's, revealing Barack Obama to
be the Great and Powerful Oz of 21st-century white-collar warfare, a
president with his hands on the joystick of American power, directing
drones, computer worms, special-operations units, and covert actors in the
kinds of shadow wars that offer a cheaper, lower-risk alternative to those
unlamented days of shock and awe and trillion-dollar wars to nowhere. You
might conclude that some in the administration were orchestrating the serial
violation of its own secrecy laws to achieve a politically desirable image
for its candidate-commander-in-chief. But whether that's really the case is
one of the few aspects of this White House onto which Sanger does not shed a
direct light. As for the rest of what is going on in the Obama national
security apparatus, Confront and Conceal is jam-packed with news, gripping
anecdotes, stories of triumph, and stories of hubris.
A measure of the book's success is that by the time I was done with it, I
was more confused than when I had begun -- about how to feel about Obama's
approach to war and about the president himself. Sanger, the New York
Times's chief Washington correspondent, sets out to dissect the Obama
doctrine and ends up instead revealing the Obama paradox. There is a bold,
thoughtful, serious man in the Oval Office. And an arrogant, cautious,
calculating one, too. There is one seeking to undo the wrongs of America's
recent past. And there is one committing a whole new set of wrongs,
sometimes on a whole new scale. And of course, as with every really good
paradoxical figure, every paradox contains paradoxes. When I was done with
the book, I concluded this might be a uniquely complex and enigmatic
president -- or perhaps one that was precisely as he appeared: an ambitious,
intelligent, well-intentioned, self-invested lawyer who has great confidence
in his own ability to manage America's (and the world's) problems, is a
learning-on-the-job manager who is in many respects more distant from his
cabinet than any president since Richard Nixon, and who is trying to do the
best he can, succeeding sometimes and failing at others. But the jury about
Obama is very much out.
The following conversation with Sanger took place a couple of days before
the June 5 publication date of Confront and Conceal. Interview by David
Rothkopf:
Foreign Policy: Why is this book different from all the other books?
David Sanger: When Barack Obama came into office, there were many liberals
and other supporters of the new president who were so ready for the end of
the Bush era that they gave little thought to what "hard power" techniques
were likely to be necessary -- and so they were surprised about the hard
edge to much of the Obama approach to foreign policy. At the same time,
there were many conservatives who thought that he was naïve in his approach
to "engagement." And they were surprised, too, about the new president's
decision to double down on some of the Bush-era initiatives.
When I set out on the reporting of Confront and Conceal, what struck me the
most was how surprising the Obama approach to foreign policy has been
compared to what we expected coming out of the 2008 campaign. So this is a
book about the surprises. And it's a book that tries to take seriously the
thought that there may be an Obama doctrine -- even if the president has
deliberately avoided that phrase. And I wanted to examine whether it works,
where it works, and where it doesn't work.
If I had to summarize the doctrine, it's got two parts. When there is a
direct threat to the United States, Obama has shown himself to be very
willing to use unilateral force, even if it violates a country's
sovereignty, and even if it angers the allies. Think of the [Osama] bin
Laden raid. Think of the drone strikes over Pakistan. Think of Olympic Games
[the code name for the cyber attacks on the Iranian nuclear program], which
is one of the largest covert programs the United States has run in recent
years and is a clear violation of the sovereignty of Iran.
When there are cases where the United States does not have direct interests
at stake, when there was just sort of a global good out there, which may
well include something like the responsibility to protect populations from
brutal dictators -- think Libya, Syria, so forth -- President Obama has been
very willing to say we're not going to take the lead here; we're going to
force others to both pay for it and to man up to it according to their own
interests. And this has left many allies pretty disturbed, because they have
wondered whether or not the traditional United States leadership role is
being abandoned. It's also created some political vulnerability for the
president. At moments, it has worked, as in Libya. At other moments, it has
not. The paralysis over Syria happened because when the United States hasn't
taken the lead, and no one else has either. So the Obama doctrine gives us
sort of a new lens on how the U.S. exercises power, and this book is an
examination of what's worked and what hasn't. Not surprisingly, it's a mixed
record.
FP: According to your book, many of the big, moving parts of the Obama
doctrine were inherited from Bush, including both drones and the cyber war
against Iran. How much credit do you think George Bush and his team deserve
for what is now being characterized as the Obama doctrine?
DS: They deserve a good deal of credit, but I think that the second half of
President Bush's term has more similarities to what President Obama has done
than the second half of the Bush term has to the first part of the Bush
term. And that was in part a reaction to the huge overreach of those first
four years for George Bush, the mistakes of Iraq, the underestimation of
what it would take to accomplish the goals in Afghanistan.
What I think President Obama deserves credit for is going back and
rethinking what our realistic objectives were, particularly in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Even in the second Bush term, there was a considerable amount
of chaos about what we could reasonably accomplish in Afghanistan, and there
were a lot of blinders on about what we could accomplish in places like
Pakistan. Because Obama did not have the burden of having declared
unreachable goals, he had the luxury to see the problems more clearly. And
in the first two years, he dramatically narrowed the goals in Afghanistan,
and I describe the change that President Obama went through to get there.
What the administration doesn't like to talk about is that narrowing those
goals meant walking away from many things that the United States had
promised the Afghans over the years: assuring that girls would go to school
and the schools would be protected from the Taliban; rebuilding justice
systems, and securing the whole country, not just downtown Kabul. No
American president wants to admit that they have so narrowed their goals
that when the United States leaves, it's very possible that you could see a
reversion to the day where the Taliban controls a good deal of the country.
But in fact that is a likelihood in the next few years, and in my interviews
some members of the Obama administration conceded we have to be prepared for
that possibility.
FP: Sometimes the contradictions within Obama's own approach are quite
striking. The president and his team concluded early we couldn't achieve our
goals in Afghanistan, then decided to double down -- and also to exit all in
one single announcement. But we are left with the question as to whether the
tortured process of arriving at the decision to leave in 2014 or
implementing that policy will produce any better outcome than if we had
simply exited to begin with.
DS: This book isn't really history -- you can't write history this close to
events. But in the end, it may be that the surge in Afghanistan did not give
us much; it may not have been better than beginning an orderly exit in 2009.
There is reason to ask: When the surge is over, and when we see what
Afghanistan looks like in 2014, will the surge have accomplished anything
lasting? It certainly allowed for some temporary gains. There are certainly
areas of the country that the Taliban is not in right now that they would be
had the surge not happened. The question is: Does that remain, or does
Afghanistan revert to the mean? Will the country in 2016 look a lot like the
country in 1999? And that's all a function of whether or not the fundamental
theory of the case -- which is that you can train the Afghan army and police
to take over the role that the United States and NATO have been playing --
whether that is possible in the short time that is available. And that's a
very open question right now.
FP: Another set of contradictions are associated with Pakistan. Part of the
Obama doctrine is to say: If we go in with this light footprint, we can go
and achieve our goals in counterterrorism and thus help reduce the threats
to the U.S. in a more effective way than we had been previously. But over
the course of the past few years, our relations with Pakistan have never
been worse. Pakistan has never been less stable. This raises the question:
Does the Obama doctrine actually work?
DS: Bruce Riedel had it right after his first review of the policy for
President Obama in 2009: The problem should be called Pak-Af, not Af-Pak. It
is an accident of history, because of 9/11, that we have more than 60,000
troops in Afghanistan, and we have none in Pakistan, yet we consider all of
the bigger threats to be in Pakistan. Pakistan is 180 million people, an
active insurgency, an expanding nuclear arsenal -- and expanding in the
worst possible way, which is to say that they are developing light,
transportable nuclear weapons that they can easily bring to the Indian
border. Those are also the nuclear weapons that are more easily stolen. So
when the Obama administration looks at the threat, they say to themselves:
What are the chances that a big threat to the United States is going to
redevelop in Afghanistan? Pretty small, because thanks to the Predator and
better intelligence we now have a chance to go in and wipe out an emerging
threat fairly quickly. What are the chances such a threat to the U.S.
homeland would develop in Pakistan? Enormous.
There is a short chapter in Confront and Conceal entitled "Bomb Scare,"
which has to do with four days in 2009 when the new Obama administration
briefly thought the Taliban might have a nuclear weapon. Fortunately, it
turned out they were wrong, but boy, those four days really focused the mind
and changed the way this administration thought about the problem. Pakistan
poses the far more complex, urgent threat.
FP: And not too long after that they started moving toward a policy of
getting out of Afghanistan that depends on cutting a deal with the Taliban.
And in fact, it's not too long after we come face to face with the worst
possible case, the Taliban ending up with a bomb, that we started talking
about "good Taliban" and began to work harder at trying to cut a deal with
some of them. So when I read that section, I thought: This certainly casts a
whole different light on the search for the good Taliban.
DS: You can spin a lot of wheels separating out the good Taliban from the
bad Taliban. The administration's strategy depended on a peel-away approach
in which they would undercut the Taliban by peeling off elements that were
really tired of trying to survive under the onslaught of the surge. But what
they've discovered is that when you announce that you're leaving by a date
certain, the incentive for the Taliban to go negotiate seriously rather than
simply wait you out is pretty limited. And there were many people inside the
administration, including Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, who were
making the case that it was a mistake to set a public deadline for the
American and NATO withdrawal.
The answer the White House gives is simple: We're not leaving entirely.
There will be an enduring presence. They don't like to talk publicly about
the size of that presence, but in the book I say they are thinking that
10,000 to 15,000 troops would be behind the high walls of bases around the
country. And while they would be based in Afghanistan to keep Kabul from
falling, in fact, the majority of their task is to keep a lid on Pakistan
and to have a way to move in quickly, including with nuclear search teams if
they think one of those hundred-plus nuclear weapons has gone loose.
FP: But with a force of that size, it's impossible to keep a lid on a large
city, much less an entire country or even an entire nuclear arsenal. Ten
thousand troops can hunt for one loose nuclear weapon or three loose nuclear
weapons, but not 200 loose nuclear weapons.
DS: That's absolutely right.
FP: The light footprint or 'surgical' component of the Obama doctrine seems
to be ideally suited for dealing with nonstate actors, except to the degree
to which it inflames state actors by violating their sovereignty. But then
in both Afghanistan and Pakistan we've got a messy hybrid situation where
you have nonstate and state actors working together.
DS: The long-term risks are not alleviated much by the 'enduring presence.'
One of President Obama's former military advisers said to me: Who wouldn't
want a light-footprint strategy? Of course, it's everyone's first choice:
It's inexpensive, you take many fewer casualties, you don't sit around and
occupy countries so you don't build up resentments among the local
population. But the problem with light-footprint strategies is there are
situations for which they are ill-suited. One of those is transforming the
nature of societies. They're great for going in and wiping out a terrorist
in a specific place. They may work well for finding a loose nuclear weapon.
They don't accomplish what a long-running, expensive counterinsurgency
approach is intended to accomplish. And of course, a few years ago the
military thought that counterinsurgency was the future, that to avoid
conflicts we would drain the swamp by providing education, providing
security, being there as an alternative to a group like the Taliban. Light
footprint doesn't help you with that.
FP: Light footprint could also spark precisely the kind of fire it can't
control. You go in, you get bin Laden, you alienate the Pakistani military,
you force a rift between the Pakistani military and the political class
within Pakistan. You could easily see something like that tipping things
into a point of instability.
DS: It very well could. A lot has been written recently about the aftermath
of the bin Laden raid.
What was fascinating about the bin Laden raid was matching up the Obama
administration's expectations about the Pakistani reaction and the reality
of the Pakistani reaction. The expectation was that the Pakistanis would be
embarrassed that bin Laden was in their midst and angry about that
embarrassment. In fact, they weren't at all embarrassed about the fact that
bin Laden had lived an hour's drive from Islamabad for five years,
ostensibly without anyone in the leadership knowing about it. They were just
humiliated by the sovereignty invasion.
And now sovereignty is a bigger problem than ever. Think about drone
strikes. The U.S. has justified the drone strikes in Pakistan on the basis
that it had the permission of the Pakistani government to execute the
strikes. In fact, when I did interviews about the legal basis for drone
strikes, administration officials said to me: We're only in countries that
let us in or don't have an operative government so you have to go in, like
Somalia. Well, what's happened? The democratically elected parliament of
Pakistan, which we prefer to have running the country instead of the
military, has voted overwhelmingly to ban all drone strikes by the United
States inside their territory. And since the passage of that declaration, we
have conducted more drone strikes inside their territory. So in order to
continue the counterterrorism mission, we have completely undercut the
authority of the democratically elected side of the Pakistani government,
and we are simply working with the old military side.
FP: In terms of ironies, the Obama administration embraced its new approach
in reaction to the Bush approach. And the Bush approach really came to be
questioned when the Bush administration wrongly predicted the nature of the
Iraqi response to the American invasion to Iraq. Now you have the pivot
point of the Obama administration strategy grossly misreading the Pakistani
response to the bin Laden attack. The one thing we have seen to be common to
both administrations is guessing wrong about how governments on the ground
are going to react.
DS: And about how people on the ground are going to react. One of the things
that the U.S. said it was ready for after the bin Laden raid was an attack
on the American embassy -- a sort of public uprising. That never happened,
but the relationship between the two governments has gotten far worse.
It's possible that Pakistan falls into that category of foreign-policy
problems for which there is no tenable solution. They want an apology for
the American attack -- the mistaken American attack that killed 25 Pakistani
soldiers. I can fully understand that. [But] in an election year, no
American president is going to apologize for what is viewed here as
defending American troops. Pakistan also wants huge payment for reopening
the supply routes into Afghanistan. The American view is Pakistan is a major
non-NATO ally, as declared by George Bush. So why are we paying a major
non-NATO ally to help fight a war that's in Pakistan's interest to keep a
stable Afghanistan? So you have two countries that have really never been
more far apart. And it's the one country where Barack Obama's charms abroad
have haven't worked.
FP: The biggest revelations of your book seem to be not just the degree of
U.S. covert operations with regard to Iran, but the degree to which those
operations were closely managed by the president of the United States
sitting in a room at the White House with his top advisors, making tactical
decisions about fighting a new kind of cyberwar.
DS: What's impressive is that the United States is approaching cyberwar with
the rules it applies to other types of military and covert action. It's got
some fairly well-defined rules about how you design these weapons, to avoid
collateral damage. But the rest of the world isn't going to care about that,
I suspect. I'm not sure the Chinese, the Russians, or a group of young
hackers who think they're acting on behalf of their country will apply the
same kind of rules to their own actions.
And so the question is: When you start using a cyberweapon, have you created
a justification for someone else to say we're not doing anything the United
States hasn't done against Iran? That's a question President Obama asked in
the Situation Room during the decisions about Olympic Games. And there was
no good answer.
FP: You point out in the book that if the cyberweapon gets into the hands of
our enemies and they can use elements of it, then you've also empowered them
in ways that they weren't before.
DS: That's what happened with Stuxnet. Stuxnet was designed to be a bullet
aimed at the Natanz nuclear plant. There were many iterations to it, and one
of them went astray. There was literally a programming error not uncommon to
anybody who has loaded an earlier version of a Microsoft program onto their
computer and then gotten a fix downloaded a few weeks later. In this case,
what happened was that the program -- which was computer controllers that
command the centrifuges -- thought that it was living just within the
confined world of Natanz. And an engineer came along, plugged his laptop in
to do some maintenance work on the Natanz plan, and unwittingly ended up
being the host for this program. He leaves the plant, he plugs into the
Internet -- I don't know if he was playing video games, shopping on Amazon,
watching his favorite American TV show, whatever he was doing -- the program
literally began to propagate around the world. And suddenly people here at
the National Security Agency, and at Israel's Unit 8200, are discovering
that this program the United States spent millions or billions of dollars to
produce is suddenly available to anybody. Any skilled computer hacker can go
decompile it and learn lessons about how to build a weapon of their own.
It's the cyber equivalent of leaving loose ordnance sitting around the
battlefield for somebody to pick up. That's not supposed to happen. Stuxnet
was proof of the law of unintended consequences.
FP: There haven't been thoughtful discussions about the consequences or the
ethics or the international legal ramifications of this approach. Let's
imagine for a moment that you're [Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
you are confronted with this. Isn't your first reaction, "How is them
blowing up Natanz with a code any different from them blowing up Natanz with
a bomb? And doesn't that justify military retaliation?"
DS: Blowing it up with computer code, rather than bombs, is different in one
big respect: It very hard for the Iranians in real time to know who the
attacker was, and thus to make a public case for retaliating. It takes a
long time to figure out where a cyber attack comes from.
That was a big reason for the U.S. and Israel to attack Natanz in this way.
But it wasn't the only reason, at least from the American perspective. One
of the main driving forces for Olympic Games was to so wrap the Israelis
into a project that could cripple Natanz in a subtle way that Israel would
see less of a motivation to go about a traditional bombing, one that could
plunge the Middle East into a another war.
Stuxnet, of course, began to open the lid on American and Israeli use of
offensive cyber weapons. And the U.S., of course, spend years trying to keep
that capability secret. But it couldn't stay secret forever. And maybe it
shouldn't. There are some in the U.S. government, in the intelligence and
military community, who thought that it would actually be a good thing if
the American cyber capability was much more broadly known because it would
have a deterrent effect. It could be a way of saying to the Iranians, we've
gotten at your centrifuges, you know about it, and we can come back and get
you anytime we want. There's another faction, to which President Obama
belongs, that said no, we want to keep this quiet as long as we can so that
it's not attributable to the United States and it's harder for them to
react.
What blew their cover? It wasn't my book. It was Stuxnet. That gave people
who were paying attention the thread to pull on. And when I pulled, the
thread led them back to the White House Situation Room.
FP: But now Iran knows the origin. Aren't the Iranians justified under
international law to retaliate?
DS: I don't know the answer to that. It would require an international
lawyer -- in the book, I quote Harold Koh, the State Department counsel,
saying as -- translating the laws of armed conflict, and in this case the
laws of covert action, into a cyber world that was never designed for that.
Broader implications aside, I think what they were trying to do was
something fairly short-term and prosaic: They were trying to buy time. Think
about the Iranian nuclear program. It has taken Iran longer to get from no
place to a nuclear weapons capability than any other nation that has
attempted it on Earth. The United States did it in the Manhattan Project in
three or four years. It took the Soviets until 1949. The Indians got there.
The Pakistanis got there. The North Koreans got there. What must you think
if you're sitting in Iran, you don't yet have a nuclear capability, and the
finest minds of Kim Jong Il High School had beaten you to the punch and now
have several nuclear weapons? So all the Obama administration was trying to
do was further delay a program that was already delayed.
FP: What you're talking about is the difference between talking about
Olympic Games or Stuxnet as a single effort and talking about it as an
element of the doctrine. When you talk about it as a doctrine, you talk
about drones, covert ops, and Special Forces as the light footprint, and
you're using it everywhere because of the idea that it's lower risk and
lower casualty. There's a slippery slope on the other side that your book
addresses. Arguably, Barack Obama has violated national sovereignty around
the world more frequently than any of his predecessors since the Second
World War. Some senior officials have suggested to me that he has more
covert actions going on in different places around the world than any of his
predecessors since the height of the Cold War. Having these tools enables
and encourages you to use them.
DS: Especially if you think the alternative is an old-style invasion and
occupation, for which the population of the United States no longer has any
tolerance.
FP: Right. So the upside of that is perhaps we're less likely to do an
old-style invasion. The downside is that at some point or another, you
inadvertently create the collateral damage or inflame the situation that
draws you in anyway, or you create the precedent for other people to embrace
these tactics.
DS: That's why the light footprint has a real political imperative and real
practical limitations. And you've discovered that now in Iran. We've
certainly seen it in Syria, as I've suggested before. You see it in almost
any society where you think you can move in and out quickly and hope that
you are going to have a better result on the ground. It's a very good
short-term insurance policy. It's not a terribly effective long-term
strategy for creating a more permissive environment for the United States.
FP: So, Pakistan is more dangerous. Afghanistan is more dangerous. Iran --
the jury is out. We don't even know whether we are effectively stopping
their nuclear program from moving forward effectively. We're in the midst of
diplomatic talks that don't seem to be going anywhere. We don't know whether
ultimately we stopped the Israelis from going in and inflaming the
situation. It didn't stop the North Koreans from doing what the North
Koreans have done. And it doesn't look like the world is dramatically safer
as a result of the light-footprint approach. Recognizing that the jury is
out on virtually everything, do you think it's made the U.S. safer?
DS: There are elements of it that have made the U.S. safer. Had we asked the
question on Jan. 20, 2009, what are the chances that central al Qaeda would
be this close to defeat three years into an Obama presidency? I don't think
either you or I would have predicted that. If we had asked the question in
2009, what are the chances that the Iranians will have either a nuclear bomb
or virtual bomb capability by the early summer of 2012? I think we both
would have said pretty high chance that they would have gotten there
already. So I think it has bought them time. I think it has bought them
space. But I don't think it's yet bought them any solutions.
FP: In terms of the approach, the tactics between Bush and Obama have been
different. But it can also be argued that both of them have made one
similar, fatal error, and that's overestimating the nature of the terrorist
threat and its centrality to the U.S. and its security interests. Bush went
after it one way; Obama is going after it another way. We're three years
into the Obama administration, and al Qaeda may be decimated, and we may be
talking about a pivot or a strategic rebalancing as you do at the end of
your book, but in terms of troops, in terms of dollars being allocated, in
terms of bandwidth in the White House, we're still spending an awful lot of
our time worrying about a handful of bad actors and less time effectively
dealing with macro, big trends that may be more fundamentally associated
with our strategic position in the world, whether it's fixing our domestic
situation, dealing with Europe, dealing with China, et cetera.
DS: It is certainly true that the squeaky terrorist gets the Predator drone.
That said, when I think about the time that I was White House correspondent
during the Bush administration, and I see how much of the bandwidth and
mental bandwidth of the U.S. government was consumed by two wars going bad
and a terrorist hunt that was not going well, and I look at today, I think
it is fair to say that there has been some improvement. We have no more
troops in Iraq. At the time that President Obama came into office, they were
well more than 100,000. They are on a pathway of reducing troops in
Afghanistan. And as we said, that may make for a very uncertain future.
What's the most interesting bandwidth decision that the president has made
in his time? There's a scene at the end of the book where the president
gathers all of the combatant commanders into the East Room. It's at
Christmastime. All the Christmas trees are up; the image of Lincoln is
staring out over them. And he basically makes the argument that the era of
unlimited expenses for the Pentagon is over. In fact, the Pentagon had just
a few months before come to him with a proposal to fund a standing force of
100,000 soldiers for stability operations. The White House said: 'No, you
guys didn't get the memo. Stability operations are over. We're not going to
keep 100,000 people around to go do a kind of operation we don't think is in
our long-term interests anymore.' And those were gone from the budget.
So, I think we are on the way to creating the mental bandwidth for thinking
about a different set of policies and these longer-term issues. But I don't
think that the administration got there anywhere near fast enough or even
will look back and say that they got very far at all in a first term. And we
don't know if there will be a second term. The pivot to Asia is a nice
rhetorical start. The trick is going to be executing it. The execution will
take years. It has to be credible not only to the Chinese but to the rest of
our Asian neighbors. And we have to do it in a way that we don't convince
the Europeans that we're abandoning them, which is the only thing they
believe when they hear the word pivot.
----[Mailing List for Eritrea Related News ]----
Received on Mon Jun 04 2012 - 20:03:01 EDT
