The power of foreign policy counterfactuals

 

Today’s musing minute: The power of foreign policy counterfactuals. 

Arguing about foreign policy consciously or unconsciously implies arguing about history, usually fairly recent history. And arguments about history imply some level of expertise and a great deal of familiarity with mountains of details, an understanding of local contexts, and a grasp of the inevitable complexity of the particular social situations. Which is why I feel exasperatingly lost in such discussions. 

Key to any argument about particular foreign policy actions or strategies, are the myriad of counterfactual assumptions one has to make to advance any claim. Thinking about the recent US departure from Afghanistan, I was struck by a particular example of this. 

Those of us who feel intuitively that foreign adventures in nation building are extremely ill-advised and immoral are often hard pressed in concrete situations to justify our position in cost-benefit terms. Consider Afghanistan. Yes, our occupation cost a bloody fortune. There was loss of life of American soldiers, inefficiency and corruption. But, for twenty years, the lives of ordinary Afghans were better than they would have been (note the italics) had the US not been there to protect the government that succeeded the deposed Taliban regime. And now, that we have left, though the future is uncertain, perhaps it was worth it. 

You see the problem? We don’t really know what would have happened (the counter factual) had we (the US) fulfilled the mission of routing Al Qaeda and found a way to withdraw, with dire warning about any further collaboration with that group, who knows how long the Taliban would have been able to hang onto power? Even now, while the picture is bleak and expectations are anxious, maintaining a stringent theocracy is a costly business and the costs mount up over time. Will Afghanistan go the way of Iran and Pakistan, or will it look more like North Vietnam. What would have been and what will be?  Choose your counterfactual and you can justify just about any policy scenario.

What that tells me is that, given the incentive and knowledge problems in any large foreign policy adventure, abstinence is the better part of valor.