Today in Wild Overstatements

To may a long story short about a bad way to make the case for war in Afghanistan, if you take any situation (say the war in Afghanistan) then you assume that failing to apply maximum effort will lead to the worst possible consequences, then you assume the worst possible next stage consequences, and then you assume the worst possible next stage after that, then you easily generate an argument for maximum effort. But this is a serious fallacy. You could also do the same worst-case scenario mongering for other possible courses of action. Benjamin Friedman shows that we’ve got a lot of this fallacy running loose:

[Richard] Cohen calls Obama soft for letting McChrystal run amok, ignoring the fact that both the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Adviser publicly rebuked him. Cohen approvingly cites Obama’s foolish claim that Afghanistan is a war of necessity. One can’t say enough that this is senseless; even wars of pure self-defense aren’t strictly necessary, and Afghanistan, at this point, isn’t that. He then drops the dominos. Should we leave, he says, the Taliban will take over Afghanistan and then Pakistan, grabbing nukes. India then invades Pakistan, and we get 1947, but nuclear. He doesn’t say how the Taliban columns advancing on Kabul will suppress our airpower. The widespread Afghan and Pakistani hostility to the Taliban — especially among the non-Pashtuns who support and dominate both governments — doesn’t impress him. He doesn’t mention the fact that the Pakistani military keeps close hold on its nukes, no matter who is officially in power. One could go on, but suffice it to say that there is an equally plausible worst-case scenario that results from following Cohen’s advice and expanding the war.

To be fair though, Cohen is a clear-eyed realist compared to Daniel Twining, who writes for Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government blog. Twining sees the war in Afghanistan as a means to keep Russia in a box, China down, India up, world trade humming, and the current international order, whatever that is, intact. I’m not going to bother to explain how all this works, but I picture the causal diagram as somewhat psychedelic. It’s almost like a parody of Jack Synder’ work on imperial myths, like he missed the part of the story where it says these aren’t theories you copy but BS people use to sell wars.

The fact of the matter is that in the modern world everything is sort of connected to a bunch of other stuff and it all, in the end, kind of links together. So you can start anywhere on the chain and start speculating about falling dominoes. It’s really true that an India-Pakistan nuclear war might start. And the fact of the matter is that a variety of different scenarios in some sense “could” lead to that happening. On another level, such a war would always be unlikely to result under any scenario since it would be suicidal. But the only reliable way to fundamentally mitigate India-Pakistan nuclear war risk would be to work on the fundamental issue of the India/Pakistan conflict. Beyond that there’s no real reason to think that Taliban military successes in Afghanistan makes an India-Pakistan nuclear war more likely.

You can spin a scenario in which a total victory for Karzai constitutes a strategic win for India and makes Pakistan feel vulnerable, leading them to increase support for anti-India radical groups leading to a war and staggering numbers of casualties. It’s just an inherently dangerous region of the world.