While you can certainly be forgiven for believing that awarding the Nobel Peace prize to President Obama was premature at best and mischievous at worst, there is little doubt that he will have ample opportunities to prove he really deserves it – some sooner rather than later.

The news broke just as the Washington establishment was considering Afghanistan, the Times of London noting that the award in Oslo “would be all the more absurd if it follows a White House decision to send up to 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.” Actually, some estimates suggest that almost 60,000 troops may be needed. Even assuming that Gen. McChrystal is a modern Alexander or that America’s hard-pressed all-volunteer force can again be wrung out to produce an Afghan surge, there are few good options and absolutely no guarantees.

Last week, the London Times also carried a story of how soldiers from the Army’s elite 10th Mountain Division, nine months into a year-long Afghan tour, are trying to cope with the combined effects of Afghanistan and repeated combat tours. One of them said, “The soldiers’ biggest question is: what can we do to make this war stop…Soldiers want definite answers, other than to stop the Taliban….(because it’s) hard to catch someone you can’t see.”

Even harder is imposing sensible limits on strategy and commitment, a line that often stops just short of the once-familiar logic of falling dominoes. A strategic defeat in Afghanistan would have obvious effects on nuclear-armed Pakistan and India. But does avoiding catastrophe and apocalypse on the subcontinent also mean committing over-stretched American troops to a country-building mission where no country really exists? (Turf fights between clans? Different issue). Even conservative, no-nonsense analysts like Ralph Peters see greater merit in counterterrorism: forcing the enemy to dig more graves rather than winning hearts and minds by digging more wells. Recently Peters has been mortified to find himself agreeing with Vice President Biden’s reservations on Afghan strategy.

Even the reassuring thought that reasonable people can disagree about hard strategic choices vanishes whenever someone reminds you of Iran. Even before Ahmadinedjad set out to prove that the Muslim world deserves its very own Caligula, Iran hardly needed any more convincing that western resolve can be flouted at will. Harvard’s Graham Allison rightly considers Iranian nuclear ambitions to be a slow-moving Cuban Missile Crisis. As you may or may not remember, we got out of that one only by the narrowest of margins; survival ultimately depending on the judgment of a brilliant but untested young president. Fortunately, JFK was able to draw upon personal experience in the Pacific to remind sharply divided White House councils that war is a most uncertain business.

The Obama national security team – especially National Security Advisor James Jones, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus – is exceptionally well qualified to tee up the hard questions of peace and war. But setting a course often requires presidents and prime ministers to navigate between ambitious generals, cautious diplomats and self-serving aides of all descriptions. The usual quandary: balancing “how much is enough” against “a bridge too far.” In his classic study Supreme Command, Eliot Cohen argues that the essence of wartime political leadership is searching tirelessly for the nuances, the subtleties or the anomalies that suddenly re-define a truly dangerous and unprecedented situation.

There are few – if any – signs that the Obama administration understands these hard truths, much less has any inkling that national security will ultimately determine its fate. Neither does it seem to grasp that contemporary security is defined by connectedness – that even more than in economics, everything depends on everything else. Worse yet: from Afghanistan to the fabled streets of Laredo, it is networks – criminal or insurgent, terrorist or drug-related – that are finding new ways to compete on equal terms with governments and other hierarchies.

If Obama can find ways to defeat them, then he will surely have earned his Nobel Prize after all. Because on national security issues, the most important distinction is rarely between Republican and Democrat: It is usually somewhere between smart and stupid.

 

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

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