Check out this cool graphic of where the various pundits fit on Afghanistan. Where would I fit? Probably somewhere near the President's plan, I suppose. My ambivalence makes me hard to code.
The larger point is that we have a whole heap of dissensus on the issue. This may not be a representative list of names--perhaps an accurate survey would have more folks in one corner of the circle (yes, a circle can have corners if I say so). But the key is that we should stop saying with any sense of incredulity that the people are confused by Afghanistan when the messengers and the decision-makers (not to mention the war itself) are so very confused. Of course, publics are confused. The situation itself is fairly opaque, counter-insurgency is less easy to measure than conventional war (where there are often surprises as well), and the elites do not have any level of coherence on this.
I believe it was Feaver (need to re-read civ-mil stuff for winter semester's course) who argued that public support for war correlates highly with elite consensus, which goes a long way to explaining why the war used to be popular but is no longer. I do think he was right on this, if not on everything.
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