Stratfor on Obama’s Choices in Iran and Afghanistan

I am on the record as someone who thinks the war in Afghanistan, as currently contemplated, is a waste of US blood and treasure.  I was also someone who was hopeful that Bush could have figured out some way to pull a "Nixon-goes-to-China" by opening relations with Iran.  He did not live up to that hope.  Obama has suggested the he would reach out to Iran, but it usually doesn't work that way.  Iran views Obama as a dove and thus is plowing ahead with its nuclear program figuring it will not face any real consequences.

George Friedman of Strategic Forecasting ("Stratfor") lays out Obama's choices in the article attached below.  He also thinks Afghanistan is basically unwinnable in the near term.  He also thinks that Obama is being backed in to making his choice soon.

1. He can attack Iran and increase forces in Afghanistan (still leaving us stuck in Afghanistan)
2. He can withdraw from Afghanistan and ignore Iran (leaving all our allies in the lurch)
3. He can increase forces in Afghanistan and ignore Iran (the worst outcome)
4. He can withdraw from Afghanistan and attack Iran (the most logical strategy, politics aside)

Neither of these options seems particularly attractive.



By George Friedman



During the campaign, Obama portrayed the Iraq war as a massive mistake diverting the United States from Afghanistan, the true center of the "war on terror." He accordingly promised to shift the focus away from Iraq and back to Afghanistan. Obama's views on Iran were more amorphous. He supported the doctrine that Iran should not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons, while at the same time asserted that engaging Iran was both possible and desirable. Embedded in the famous argument over whether offering talks without preconditions was appropriate (something now-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attacked him for during the Democratic primary) was the idea that the problem with Iran stemmed from Washington's refusal to engage in talks with Tehran.

We are never impressed with campaign positions, or with the failure of the victorious candidate to live up to them. That's the way American politics work. But in this case, these promises have created a dual crisis that Obama must make decisions about now.




It can be argued that the Islamic masses responded positively to Obama's opening — it has been asserted to be so and we will accept this — but the diplomatic mission did not solve the core problem. Mitchell could not get the Israelis to move on the settlement issue, and while Holbrooke appears to have made some headway on increasing Pakistan's aggressiveness toward the Taliban, no fundamental shift has occurred in the Afghan war.

Most important, no major shift has occurred in Iran's attitude toward the United States and the P-5+1 negotiating group. In spite of Obama's Persian New Year address to Iran, the Iranians did not change their attitude toward the United States. The unrest following Iran's contested June presidential election actually hardened the Iranian position. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained president with the support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while the so-called moderates seemed powerless to influence their position. Perceptions that the West supported the demonstrations have strengthened Ahmadinejad's hand further, allowing him to paint his critics as pro-Western and himself as an Iranian nationalist.



First, he can impose crippling sanctions against Iran. But that is possible only if the Russians cooperate. Moscow has the rolling stock and reserves to supply all of Iran's fuel needs if it so chooses, and Beijing can also remedy any Iranian fuel shortages. Both Russia and China have said they don't want sanctions; without them on board, sanctions are meaningless.


And third, Obama could choose to do nothing (or engage in sanctions that would be the equivalent of doing nothing). Washington could see future Iranian nuclear weapons as an acceptable risk. But the Israelis don't, meaning they would likely trigger the second scenario. It is possible that the United States could try to compel Israel not to strike — though it's not clear whether Israel would comply — something that would leave Obama publicly accepting Iran's nuclear program.






In short, Obama's commander on the ground has told him the current Afghan strategy is failing. He has said that unless that strategy changes, more troops won't help, and that a change of strategy will require substantially more troops. But when we look at the proposed strategy and the force levels, it is far from obvious that even that level of commitment will stand a chance of achieving meaningful results quickly enough before the forces of Washington's NATO allies begin to withdraw and U.S. domestic resolve erodes further.

Obama has three choices in Afghanistan. He can continue to current strategy and force level, hoping to prolong failure long enough for some undefined force to intervene. He can follow McChrystal's advice and bet on the new strategy. Or he can withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Once again, doing nothing — the first option — is doing something quite significant.

The Two Challenges Come Together


No one has a clear idea of Obama's threshold for action.







Copyright 2009 Stratfor.

One thought on “Stratfor on Obama’s Choices in Iran and Afghanistan

  1. Where Iran is concerned: there is no way we are going to act militarily there. Not even Bush was rash enough for that, and the circumstances are infinitely less propitious now than when he was considering an attack. It’s simply not going to happen. Embroiled in two ground wars and economically limping; at time when we’ve regained diplomatic leverage in the Middle East, including among enemies and frenemies of Iran (Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia) who can put the screws to Tehran more effectively than we can; at a time when Iran’s own people and important factions of its secular government and even its theocracy have displayed their dissent with its politics; and at a time when Israel, our ward where Iran is concerned, is losing clout in Washington by the day, as they rightly should given that they just put in office the childish, opportunistic Netanyahu and his preposterous, jingoistic attack dog Avigdor Leiberman, who incidentally is soon to indicted by his own government… It is simply not going to happen. We have neither the inclination, nor the support, nor the popular will — nor, most importantly, the need — to attack Iran. In Tehran there rules a retrograde, if fractured, theocracy, yes, and the country’s somewhat-elected president is a millenarian and a thoroughgoing anti-Semite. But that doesn’t mean he or the Ayatollahs are stupid. They’re not. They know very well they can’t withstand a war with Israel, which has the world’s third most powerful military and a nuclear program that dwarfs theirs. Iran is not attempting to build a military nuclear program because it thinks it can defeat Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or even France for that matter. It wants a nuclear program as a diplomatic bargaining chip. It is the issue of Israel’s vulnerability and that issue alone that would be the deciding factor in any US decision to attack Iran, and Israel is not vulnerable to Iran. Iran knows it. Washington knows it. As does Israel, but Netanyahu was elected in large part on a platform of castigating Iran so don’t expect to hear that obvious and plain fact from him anytime soon. As does, for that matter, Russia, which is why Putin and Medvedev have begun negotiating with Washington on Iran, which in turn is why we scrapped the Bush-conceived European missile plan. If Israel is our querulous ward, Iran is, for the moment, Russia’s, and Moscow knows that it has very little to gain by continuing in its myopic support of Ahmedinijad. The diplomatic landscape is changing by the day, I think for the better, despite the subterfuge of these recent and not very threatening missile tests.
    The much more important half of this question is of course Afghanistan. Important not just to the US, but to Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, and indeed to the very notion of civilized society and representative government. For while Iran might be governed, badly and only partially, by a retrograde theocracy and a Holocaust-denying martinet patiently awaiting the return of the Mahdi, it is, in fact, a democracy, indeed a very youthful and thriving one, at three decades in, which until recently boasted some of the most orderly and best-attended elections in the world. The Taliban, by contrast, is a retrograde, misogynist, theocratic and thoroughly malevolent organization uninterested in governance in anything like the post-Medieval sense of the term and hated by the majority of the Afghan population, who rely on the it for little more than the occasional caning and the selling of poppy crops at market. But if we leave Afghanistan the Taliban is, unpopular and inept as it may be, what will remain, and that is, to my mind, flatly unacceptable. What’s more, if we pull out of Afghanistan not only will the Taliban take that country, but it will take increasing swaths of Pakistan, which, unlike Iran, already has a nuclear arsenal. This prospect may pose less of a threat to Israel — or at least Israeli politicians have not yet seen fit to scare Israelis about it, yet — but a greater threat to our allies in Europe and our newest and most important ally in Asia, namely India, which, it must be added, is the only other regional power with a nuclear arsenal, and which, but for our cajoling and counsel, may have already attacked Islamabad or Karachi at this point. A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Taliban-influenced and destabilized Pakistan are, in other words, a far greater threat to our allies and interests than is an Iran with a couple of circa-1951-strength nukes.
    But we haven’t touched on the worst consequence of a US pullout from Afghanistan: a resurgent Al Qeada. If the Taliban poses a threat to Europe and much of Asia, Al Qeada poses a threat to the entire world, as they’ve amply demonstrated. There are unmistakable strains of malevolence in Iran, there is no doubt, as there are in all of the unsavory countries with whom we have to negotiate to maintain the fragile peace that is the current alternative to a third war. But Al Qeada is pure malevolence.
    It’s my hope, then, that Gates and Obama elect to give McChrystal what he needs to keep fighting in Afghanistan. It’s going to be an expensive and very long war, but it is, for the moment, not one we can in good conscience give up on.


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