A Place in Between - Russ Hoyle on Rory Stewart's stance on Obama's Afghan Surge

above: Rory Stewart - Kabul; below: Russ Hoyle - NYC

Rory Stewart is a wunderkind who has managed to find a place neither plainly right nor left without being centrist. He is a darling of the left as the New York Review of Books' in-house commentator on Iraq (where he served as colonial provincial governor for the Coalition Provisional Authority - writing Prince of the Marshes), and Afghanistan (where his legendary solo walk in 2002 yielded The Places in Between). Yet he has also appealed to the political right. He is trekking the remote Penrith and The Border constituency as the Conservative Party candidate for House of Commons. He is now Director of the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Stewart's recent opinion pieces include "Afghanistan - a war we cannot win" in the London Telegraph, July 10, 2009.

Russ Hoyle, guest writer and veteran editor, is the author of Going to War - a history of how the Bush-Cheney administration drove the country to invade Iraq on premises all now acknowledge were, to be charitable, factually incorrect.

- GWC

I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

- Barack Obama, West Point, December 1, 2009

I felt as though I had come to hear a fifteenth-century scholastic and found myself suddenly encountering Erasmus: someone not quite free of the peculiarities of the old way, and therefore haunted by its elisions, omissions, and contradictions; but already anticipating a reformation.

Obama's central—and revolutionary—claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, "we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars." Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing "whatever it takes" and "whatever it costs"—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don't have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.

- Rory Stewart, New York Review of Books, January 14, 2010

For a guy who's been contemptuous of military action in Afghanistan, utterly dismissive of counterinsurgency, and whose opening six paragraphs are at best idiosyncratic and hard to figure, I find "Afghanistan - What Could Work" - Rory Stewart's new New York Review of Books essay to be a hard right lurch from the left that lands him in moderate, pro-Obama territory.

In the larger political circus, it may also be a measure of how effectively Obama's Afghan policy has mollified the Democratic left, at least for now.

Perhaps more than anything else, Stewart is accommodating himself to the reality that Obama's Afghan policy has gotten at least tepid approval from the policy world. The essay appears to be his bid, as the director of the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, to come in from the cold and position himself as a serious analyst among the policy-making elite, using his long critical stance to bolster the persuasiveness of his newly conciliatory views.

Stewart sees Obama's view of limited U.S. means, interest, and responsibility in Afghanistan as "revolutionary" and appears to mean it. Obama, in his view, has avoided key traps, most importantly, not using the language of counterinsurgency, which allows him freedom from its strictures (such as the 1-counterinsurgent-for-every-50-population rule), and avoiding Bushesque cliches like "defeat is not an option" or "victory whatever the cost."

Though true enough, these seem to me windy abstractions that are largely meaningless except to allow Stewart to maneuver around his own objections to the U..S. escalation of armed force. He more or less winds up embracing Obama's policy as holding out the possibility of "the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty" (pg. 63, col.3), abetted by smart regional diplomacy -- which this former British diplomatic officer (and artillery officer) always has been comfortable with. Born in Hong Kong, his “smart imperialist” roots run deep.

In short, Stewart has twisted his antiwar views like a pretzel to come up with a position essentially agreeing with Obama's escalation, which IS counterinsurgency, IS nationbuilding, DOES link Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, as Stewart clearly grasps, WILL take a helluva lot longer than 18 months -- but probably without further escalation.

That, at least, is what Obama is gambling on, and, because of what he sees as Obama's careful but probably as-yet incomplete articulation of the policy, Stewart pretty much buys it hook, line, and sinker.

- Russ Hoyle

January 1, 2010