Najam, Bacevich in Salon on Trump’s Afghanistan Strategy
Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and Andrew Bacevich, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Pardee School, were recently interviewed on President Donald Trump’s military strategy in the Middle East.
Najam and Bacevich were quoted in a January 29, 2017 article in Salon entitled “Alternative Facts in the Middle East: Obama Has Left Trump a Disaster in Afghanistan.”
From the text of the article:
In Trump’s off-the cuff remarks, warns Adil Najam, dean of Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, he helps makes the same case made by Islamic radicals like ISIS that “the U.S fought the war in Iraq for oil. Trump’s comments could be used for their narrative.”
“What this may signal,” Najam believes, “is a more transactional approach” to countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.“Trump in essence is saying, if you want our security what do we get for it? Under Bush, the approach was that we were giving Iraq democracy [and] not taking their oil,” whereas the current president will try to demonstrate that he can strike a better “deal” with Iraq. Doing so with Afghanistan may be more difficult.
Bacevich believes the American public has been insulated from the ongoing global war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan because the U.S. relies on a voluntary military and Washington has been hesitant to raise taxes to pay for the hundreds of billions needed for the widening war on terror.
In a recent email exchange Bacevich said he hopes Trump gets down to basic questions that have not been asked for years. “I want him to ask a very fundamental question with regard to U.S. military policy, especially in the Islamic world,” Bacevich wrote. “And the question simply is, is it working? Are we winning? When will this war, this semi-permanent war, come to an end? Because I think if you confront those questions directly, you cannot help but reach the conclusion that our military endeavors have failed. And only when we acknowledge that they have failed does it become possible then to consider alternatives to simply pressing on.”
You can read the entire article here.
Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Pardee School and is the former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. Learn more about him here.
Andrew Bacevich’s essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs,Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The New Republic. In 2004, Bacevich was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. You can read more about him here.