October 27, 2008

Simple, elegant and wrong

By: David Donadio

Sonny’s right about the applications of plausible deniability in the war on terrorism. The trouble is that “plausible” part. It’s one thing when a senior Syrian security official gets stabbed in a freak mugging in the capital. Another when a helicopter air assault comes from inside Iraq. At that point, it’s pretty useless for the U.S. military to deny knowledge of the incident.

It’s comforting to think of engagements like these as U.S. 1, Syria 0, as if there were final scores in politics. But there aren’t, and our adversaries have agency, too. How do these strikes actually serve American interests? And what’s the political context? Syria has cast in its lot with Iran, and it’s paying a price for that. We want to isolate Iran and pressure it to abandon its nuclear activities. We want Syria to make a peace deal with Israel, such that we can further isolate Iran, weaken Hezbollah, and stabilize the region. No doubt there are people in the White House who think bombing inside Syria will make Assad more inclined to see things our way and sign a peace deal that brings it back into the fold, just as conducting air strikes with impunity in Pakistan’s border region is thought to put productive pressure on the government in Islamabad.

But while both present unique problems with respect to terrorism, the situation with Syria is nothing like the situation with Pakistan. Though we’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with it, Pakistan has historically been aligned with us, and gotten much of its financial support and military hardware (F-16s and related systems) from us, which means we have influential supporters in its government, and avenues of leverage there that we lack with Syria. (Though of course China is happy to continue selling arms to Pakistan, and potentially exploit our diminished influence by compelling us to go through Beijing on issues we’d earlier have resolved bilaterally with Pakistan.) And seeing as we have nowhere near the kind of linguistic or cultural expertise we’d need to go it alone in the Northwest Frontier, we need Pakistan’s help.

If I were Assad, right now I’d probably be calling my pals Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“Microsoft Outlook AutoResponse: Mahmoud is currently out of the office…”) and Hu Jintao, and asking them what they could do for me in the interest of continuing to foil American objectives and dilute American power in the Middle East.

There are times when it’s worth it to bomb anyway. But if this strike has made a much more significant Syrian-Israeli peace deal and further Iranian isolation less likely, this wasn’t one of them.

Nor is noting that the Pakistanis have “lost control of their sovereign territory” a particularly instructive historical view. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas were so constituted by our imperial betters the British for a reason: no one’s ever been able to govern them. To this day, even the Pakistani army, whose officer corps is primarily Punjabi, and speaks Urdu, is looked on as a foreign occupier when it enters these regions, where the locals speak Pashtu. It’s very clarifying to pretend that all we need to do to fix the problem is drop a few more bombs, or make a few more nasty phone calls to the ISI. If that were true, why would it be taking so long? (Coincidentally, this is also the central conceit of liberalism: the presumption that whether the problem is affordable healthcare or terrorism, wherever there’s a will, there’s a way.)

In other words, as H.L. Mencken wrote, for every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.