Biden Doctrine and Afghanistan: Lean Counter-Terrorism and the end of Bloated Nation-Building

Biden's fire and anger came out when he talked about the issue of counter-terrorism versus counter-insurgency. That inside-the-beltway debate probably went over a lot of people's heads, and I'd like to unpack it here because I think it tells us a great deal about Biden's foreign policy in the coming three and a half years (and maybe nearly eight).

Biden said,

"Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.

"Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.

"I've argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism not counterinsurgency or nation building. That's why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice President."

There is an old saw in British Empire History that Britain acquired its empire "in a fit of absent-mindedness." It for the most part is not true, though often ambitious men on the spot out in the global South adopted a forward policy and conquered more and further than London would have initially liked. London typically did not order them to give back the newly acquired lands once the government received news of its new subjects.

In the Bush era, America acquired an empire without perhaps initially wanting one. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to use special forces more instead of the conventional land army, and to get in and out of places like Afghanistan and Iraq relatively quickly. In contrast, the State Department under Colin Powell and then Condaleeza Rice understood that you couldn't just decapitate the government of a place and walk away. That way lay global chaos. Even State, however, typically thought that they'd have to be out there in the newly conquered territories for only two or three years before standing up a new government to which they could turn the country over.

It turned out that neither Rumsfeld's coitus interruptus method of imperialism nor the State Department's theory of temporary adoption of an orphan child was practical. Once you overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan there was always the possibility that they would regroup and regain power if you just up and left. If, like Bush, you built your campaign strategy on "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here," you would look like a fool or traitor if you stopped fighting them over there and let them come back.

In Iraq the dilemma was different, since gradually the U.S. faced both a Sunni and a Shiite insurgency and dissolved the Iraqi army, setting the country up for a civil war over which US troops were forced to preside. Withdrawal could have resulted in chaos that spilled out over the region and imperiled US allies and even, gasp, oil deliveries from the area.

So we got the worst of both worlds, one in which the State Department was given limited authority to enable the provision of services by new elites, and most authority was given to a Defense Department and Pentagon that did not want to be there.

Some have suggested that the Bush administration stayed in Afghanistan to give Canada and other NATO allies who declined to go into Iraq something to do. That would be Mission Creep on a Himalayan scale.

When Bush failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, his administration needed a new rationale for the war and said they were bringing democracy to and doing state-building in the Middle East. Of course, those goals required a long-term US military occupation.

The exception to the military not wanting to be there was a group of ambitious officers, among them David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who developed a Big Think approach to the new American imperialism.

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