One of the challenges facing anyone who wishes to write on the war in Afghanistan is to squeeze this fiendishly difficult topic into an appropriate framework. It is not easy to find an approach that avoids either simplifying the issues, or bamboozling the reader into boredom, confusion, deep cynicism, or a combination of all three. That Michael J Williams manages to meet this challenge at all, let alone in 147 pages, is itself a noteworthy accomplishment.
Michael J. Williams, The Good War: NATO and the Liberal Conscience in Afghanistan, (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Amazon.com or Amazon.de
Dr. Williams is a lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London and a senior associate scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis, as well as one of the first members of atlantic-community.org
The Good War is an effort to explore the reasons
for NATO's struggles in Afghanistan, proposing that the problems this
organisation has faced are ‘more about NATO than they are about
Afghanistan'. For Williams, this rests
two key observations which form the first half of the book.
The first observation relates to the NATO as an
institution itself. Having been designed to address Cold War threats, in the
context of a bipolar system, NATO, argues Williams, is now facing Ulrick Beck's
‘risk society' in the search for its raison
d'etre in the post-Cold War World. The
organisation has become a ‘risk manager', and as a result is being asked to
operate in a climate with which it is not familiar. In the case of Afghanistan,
NATO has been forced to territorialize risk, a tendency that manifests itself
in the security narratives of policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic with
their conflation of terrorism, terrorists and Afghanistan. As he rightly points
out: ‘in the minds of Western security analysts, the word ‘Afghanistan' is
synonymous with security risk' (27).
The second observation draws on the specific
worldviews of NATO's two primary blocs: the US and Europe (it is not entirely
clear where Canada lies). For Williams,
Europe and America interpreted 9/11 and the problem of Afghanistan ‘within
their own ideational contexts' which reflect their differing historical
experiences, embedded security discourses found in policy elites, and the views
of their domestic populations. Williams uses Isaiah Berlin's essay on the
Hedgehog and The Fox to illustrate the point.
As he argues, whilst the US has traditionally sought to identify a
single narrative answer in responding to the security challenges it faces,
Europe has ceased to believe that such an answer exists. In the aftermath of 9/11 the US therefore
invoked the concept of ‘good versus evil' and ‘liberty versus tyranny'. The War on Terror became a process of
confronting evildoers, and the hatred of freedom, wherever it may prosper. This
required a muscular foreign policy programme wrapped in the universalising
rhetoric of liberty, justice, and human dignity. Achieving these aims was tied
in with the promotion of democracy, thus leaving us at the core dilemma of the
liberal conscience: that although liberalism is traditionally opposed to war,
in pursuit of avoiding future conflict, liberals admit that it is necessary to
spread liberal values, and that this in turn may require war.
Europe, on the other hand, resembles the fox in
Berlin's metaphor, drawing on a variety of experiences and deciding that the
world cannot be boiled down into a single idea.
So although Europe and America share the liberal commitment to freedom
and democracy - and face the same dilemma posed by the liberal conscience -
they differ over the extent to which this can be a universalising quest: ‘Europe
seemingly accepts that the promotion of democracy cannot be writ large upon
what is ultimately not a blank canvas.
Democracy at the point of a gun will most certainly not work' (52). The US hedgehog therefore remains more
philosophically committed to the enlightenment principle of the relentless
march of progress, or to put it into more contemporary terms: the Fukuyaman
notion of the ‘end of history'.
Meanwhile the European fox has taken a postmodern turn, expressing a
general scepticism of history's progress, and casting a critical eye on foreign
policy metanarratives. On a more practical level, in European capitals, NATO's
role in Afghanistan had a more political explanation too. As Williams highlights, all too often the
fact is overlooked ‘that NATO's involvement in Afghanistan was motivated by the
political crisis in transatlantic relations following 9/11' (60). Those European capitals that saw the Iraq
invasion as a step too far could placate their US allies by contributing to the
‘good war' in Afghanistan.
Therefore, in Afghanistan NATO is hamstrung not
only by its institutional nature as an organisation designed to deal with
maintaining the balance of power (not managing risk), but also by the specific
world views of its two dominant blocs: the US and the EU. The ‘climate for operations' which was
allowed to develop in Afghanistan should be interpreted, argues Williams, as a
reflection of these problems inherent to NATO and its member states, not as a
reflection of the problems inherent to Afghanistan.
Having dealt with the more philosophical
elements of his argument, Williams moves on to a discussion of the practical
aspects of NATO's approach to the Afghanistan campaign. Included here is the
concept of the ‘comprehensive approach' to state-building, which sought a
complementary alignment of economic, military and diplomatic power, within and
between national governments. Williams
argues that in truth this has amounted to the militarisation of development
within the NATO context, with the military dominating the spheres of governance
and development.
The institutional embodiment of the
comprehensive approach, the so-called ‘Provincial Reconstruction Teams' are
also discussed, with the argument that their blurring of the humanitarian and
military spheres has further contributed to ambiguity in strategic approach
whilst potentially undermining the impartiality of humanitarian actors. Williams uses the United Kingdom as a case
study in drawing out the challenges of civil-military coordination at the
national level. These practical
challenges conclude at a global level with the problems of achieving security
in a networked world.
The point Williams makes is that NATO doesn't
necessarily face new problems in
Afghanistan, but rather that the campaign has exposed frailties in NATO's
existing structure which demonstrate more fundamental conceptual deficiencies
in the way that security is to be conceptualised in late modernity. These
deficiencies are embedded in NATO as an organisation designed to deal with a
conceptualisation of security from which the world has now moved on.
The method by which Williams goes about making
his argument can certainly be described as eclectic. Citations sweep
from
Baudelaire to Bill Bryson. But the
approach also arguably reflects a method that Peter J. Katzenstein would
refer
to as ‘analytically eclectic'. As
Katzenstein describes it, such scholarship is marked by three features:
firstly, ‘downplaying unresolvable metaphysical divides and presumptions
of
incommensurability and encouraging a conception of inquiry marked by
practical
engagement, inclusive dialogue, and a spirit of fallibilism; secondly,
taking
on ‘problems that more closely approximate the messiness and complexity
of
concrete dilemmas facing "real world" actors'; and finally offering
‘complex
causal stories that extricate, translate, and selectively recombine
analytic
components-most notably, causal mechanisms- from explanatory theories,
models,
and narratives embedded in competing research traditions' (Sil, Rudra and Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Analytical Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms Across Research Traditions', Perspectives on Politics, 8/2, 2010, 411-31.)
Williams has
produced a work that ticks all three of these boxes, in the process helpfully
outlining and providing a framework for understanding NATO's problems in
Afghanistan. If you are hoping for a deeper understanding
of Afghanistan specifically this is not the work for you. The nature of the Afghan state and its
history is given short shrift, but this is not the point of the book. In dealing with NATO specifically, Williams
takes a necessarily open-minded view of the analytical problem. The concepts he does draw on are briefly
elaborated, allowing their rapid application to the task at hand. This means that deep theoretical reflection
is also put to one side. The Good War also serves to highlights
contestations within the Liberal peace, and suggests that these contestations
may be institutionalised within the core security structures of the West.
On more practical points, in this short text
Williams manages to pick over some of the salient points in NATO's post 9/11
operational conundrum: How to reconcile
competing conceptions of security in the transatlantic alliance; how best to
capture the challenge of failed and weak states especially in the midst of
conflict; the trend towards the militarisation of development; the challenges
of civil-military relations and the comprehensive approach. Dealing with these points he deploys a
battery of concepts raising questions that might be further explored. The
eclectic approach showcases the potential for different research traditions to
operate side by side. If nothing more,
this lends to the work a refreshingly unique perspective on a war that has
become the defining conflict of this young century.
Martin J. Bayly is a PhD student at the War Studies Department, King's College London, researching the history of diplomatic
engagements in Afghanistan, focussing on the British period of
intervention from 1842-1883 and the American period from 1989-2009. This book review was previously published at e-IR under a creative commons licence.
One of the challenges facing anyone who wishes to write on the war in Afghanistan is to squeeze this fiendishly difficult topic into an appropriate framework. It is not easy to find an approach that avoids either simplifying the issues, or bamboozling the reader into boredom, confusion, deep cynicism, or a combination of all three. That Michael J Williams manages to meet this challenge at all, let alone in 147 pages, is itself a noteworthy accomplishment.
Michael J. Williams, The Good War: NATO and the Liberal Conscience in Afghanistan, (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Amazon.com or Amazon.de
Dr. Williams is a lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London and a senior associate scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis, as well as one of the first members of atlantic-community.org
The Good War is an effort to explore the reasons
for NATO's struggles in Afghanistan, proposing that the problems this
organisation has faced are ‘more about NATO than they are about
Afghanistan'. For Williams, this rests
two key observations which form the first half of the book.
The first observation relates to the NATO as an
institution itself. Having been designed to address Cold War threats, in the
context of a bipolar system, NATO, argues Williams, is now facing Ulrick Beck's
‘risk society' in the search for its raison
d'etre in the post-Cold War World. The
organisation has become a ‘risk manager', and as a result is being asked to
operate in a climate with which it is not familiar. In the case of Afghanistan,
NATO has been forced to territorialize risk, a tendency that manifests itself
in the security narratives of policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic with
their conflation of terrorism, terrorists and Afghanistan. As he rightly points
out: ‘in the minds of Western security analysts, the word ‘Afghanistan' is
synonymous with security risk' (27).
The second observation draws on the specific
worldviews of NATO's two primary blocs: the US and Europe (it is not entirely
clear where Canada lies). For Williams,
Europe and America interpreted 9/11 and the problem of Afghanistan ‘within
their own ideational contexts' which reflect their differing historical
experiences, embedded security discourses found in policy elites, and the views
of their domestic populations. Williams uses Isaiah Berlin's essay on the
Hedgehog and The Fox to illustrate the point.
As he argues, whilst the US has traditionally sought to identify a
single narrative answer in responding to the security challenges it faces,
Europe has ceased to believe that such an answer exists. In the aftermath of 9/11 the US therefore
invoked the concept of ‘good versus evil' and ‘liberty versus tyranny'. The War on Terror became a process of
confronting evildoers, and the hatred of freedom, wherever it may prosper. This
required a muscular foreign policy programme wrapped in the universalising
rhetoric of liberty, justice, and human dignity. Achieving these aims was tied
in with the promotion of democracy, thus leaving us at the core dilemma of the
liberal conscience: that although liberalism is traditionally opposed to war,
in pursuit of avoiding future conflict, liberals admit that it is necessary to
spread liberal values, and that this in turn may require war.
Europe, on the other hand, resembles the fox in
Berlin's metaphor, drawing on a variety of experiences and deciding that the
world cannot be boiled down into a single idea.
So although Europe and America share the liberal commitment to freedom
and democracy - and face the same dilemma posed by the liberal conscience -
they differ over the extent to which this can be a universalising quest: ‘Europe
seemingly accepts that the promotion of democracy cannot be writ large upon
what is ultimately not a blank canvas.
Democracy at the point of a gun will most certainly not work' (52). The US hedgehog therefore remains more
philosophically committed to the enlightenment principle of the relentless
march of progress, or to put it into more contemporary terms: the Fukuyaman
notion of the ‘end of history'.
Meanwhile the European fox has taken a postmodern turn, expressing a
general scepticism of history's progress, and casting a critical eye on foreign
policy metanarratives. On a more practical level, in European capitals, NATO's
role in Afghanistan had a more political explanation too. As Williams highlights, all too often the
fact is overlooked ‘that NATO's involvement in Afghanistan was motivated by the
political crisis in transatlantic relations following 9/11' (60). Those European capitals that saw the Iraq
invasion as a step too far could placate their US allies by contributing to the
‘good war' in Afghanistan.
Therefore, in Afghanistan NATO is hamstrung not
only by its institutional nature as an organisation designed to deal with
maintaining the balance of power (not managing risk), but also by the specific
world views of its two dominant blocs: the US and the EU. The ‘climate for operations' which was
allowed to develop in Afghanistan should be interpreted, argues Williams, as a
reflection of these problems inherent to NATO and its member states, not as a
reflection of the problems inherent to Afghanistan.
Having dealt with the more philosophical
elements of his argument, Williams moves on to a discussion of the practical
aspects of NATO's approach to the Afghanistan campaign. Included here is the
concept of the ‘comprehensive approach' to state-building, which sought a
complementary alignment of economic, military and diplomatic power, within and
between national governments. Williams
argues that in truth this has amounted to the militarisation of development
within the NATO context, with the military dominating the spheres of governance
and development.
The institutional embodiment of the
comprehensive approach, the so-called ‘Provincial Reconstruction Teams' are
also discussed, with the argument that their blurring of the humanitarian and
military spheres has further contributed to ambiguity in strategic approach
whilst potentially undermining the impartiality of humanitarian actors. Williams uses the United Kingdom as a case
study in drawing out the challenges of civil-military coordination at the
national level. These practical
challenges conclude at a global level with the problems of achieving security
in a networked world.
The point Williams makes is that NATO doesn't
necessarily face new problems in
Afghanistan, but rather that the campaign has exposed frailties in NATO's
existing structure which demonstrate more fundamental conceptual deficiencies
in the way that security is to be conceptualised in late modernity. These
deficiencies are embedded in NATO as an organisation designed to deal with a
conceptualisation of security from which the world has now moved on.
The method by which Williams goes about making
his argument can certainly be described as eclectic. Citations sweep
from
Baudelaire to Bill Bryson. But the
approach also arguably reflects a method that Peter J. Katzenstein would
refer
to as ‘analytically eclectic'. As
Katzenstein describes it, such scholarship is marked by three features:
firstly, ‘downplaying unresolvable metaphysical divides and presumptions
of
incommensurability and encouraging a conception of inquiry marked by
practical
engagement, inclusive dialogue, and a spirit of fallibilism; secondly,
taking
on ‘problems that more closely approximate the messiness and complexity
of
concrete dilemmas facing "real world" actors'; and finally offering
‘complex
causal stories that extricate, translate, and selectively recombine
analytic
components-most notably, causal mechanisms- from explanatory theories,
models,
and narratives embedded in competing research traditions' (Sil, Rudra and Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Analytical Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms Across Research Traditions', Perspectives on Politics, 8/2, 2010, 411-31.)
Williams has
produced a work that ticks all three of these boxes, in the process helpfully
outlining and providing a framework for understanding NATO's problems in
Afghanistan. If you are hoping for a deeper understanding
of Afghanistan specifically this is not the work for you. The nature of the Afghan state and its
history is given short shrift, but this is not the point of the book. In dealing with NATO specifically, Williams
takes a necessarily open-minded view of the analytical problem. The concepts he does draw on are briefly
elaborated, allowing their rapid application to the task at hand. This means that deep theoretical reflection
is also put to one side. The Good War also serves to highlights
contestations within the Liberal peace, and suggests that these contestations
may be institutionalised within the core security structures of the West.
On more practical points, in this short text
Williams manages to pick over some of the salient points in NATO's post 9/11
operational conundrum: How to reconcile
competing conceptions of security in the transatlantic alliance; how best to
capture the challenge of failed and weak states especially in the midst of
conflict; the trend towards the militarisation of development; the challenges
of civil-military relations and the comprehensive approach. Dealing with these points he deploys a
battery of concepts raising questions that might be further explored. The
eclectic approach showcases the potential for different research traditions to
operate side by side. If nothing more,
this lends to the work a refreshingly unique perspective on a war that has
become the defining conflict of this young century.
Martin J. Bayly is a PhD student at the War Studies Department, King's College London, researching the history of diplomatic
engagements in Afghanistan, focussing on the British period of
intervention from 1842-1883 and the American period from 1989-2009. This book review was previously published at e-IR under a creative commons licence.
- 1
December 21, 2011
Mawloud Ould Daddah, none, Bronze Contributor (25)