John Prados: Diplomats Among Warriors
[John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author, most recently, of Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1954-1975_(University Press of Kansas) and How the Cold War Ended: Debating and Doing History (Potomac Books, forthcoming).]
In Afghanistan at the moment (February 2010), U.S. Marines, allied troops, and Afghan government soldiers are embarked on an offensive at a town called Marja in Helmand province. American commander-in-chief General Stanley A. McChrystal here makes the first expression of the strategy that underlies the appeal for reinforcements that led to the Obama administration “surge” in that country. During the strategy deliberations which led to the surge decision President Obama called for advice from all quarters, and the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, contributed a set of diplomatic cables which called the U.S. strategy into question. McChrystal’s offensive may be in trouble already—air strikes have killed Afghan civilians and called into question U.S. promises for their safety—but events are also demonstrating the substance of Ambassador Eikenberry’s earlier objections. The Afghan government to which he is accredited is extremely weak, its institutions fragile, the apparatus that is supposed to take hold in Marja in many places nonexistent. The increasingly prevalent U.S. response of bypassing the national government to deal directly with local potentates promises not only to encourage competing centers of power but to further weaken the national government. This is a conundrum for American foreign policy....
As a matter of historical study... we have too long been at pains to separate the diplomatic from the military. These are conceived as different fields of inquiry, and camps of historians working each side of this street have looked askance at colleagues on the other curb. Academic programs did not require much in the way of training across these subject boundaries. As for the relevant professional organizations, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Society for Military History, for a very long time you could not find a historian who held membership in both those groups. Then there was one, then a few. The situation today is somewhat better but still far from where it needs to be. Diplomatic historians tend to regard military specialists as too narrow, military historians tend to see diplomatic experts as naïve and superficial. Not only does this bifurcation exist in an environment in which both schools of history are under challenge from other historical specialties, but in a real world in which, as argued here, both disciplines are necessary to properly analyze developments....
Read entire article at Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
In Afghanistan at the moment (February 2010), U.S. Marines, allied troops, and Afghan government soldiers are embarked on an offensive at a town called Marja in Helmand province. American commander-in-chief General Stanley A. McChrystal here makes the first expression of the strategy that underlies the appeal for reinforcements that led to the Obama administration “surge” in that country. During the strategy deliberations which led to the surge decision President Obama called for advice from all quarters, and the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, contributed a set of diplomatic cables which called the U.S. strategy into question. McChrystal’s offensive may be in trouble already—air strikes have killed Afghan civilians and called into question U.S. promises for their safety—but events are also demonstrating the substance of Ambassador Eikenberry’s earlier objections. The Afghan government to which he is accredited is extremely weak, its institutions fragile, the apparatus that is supposed to take hold in Marja in many places nonexistent. The increasingly prevalent U.S. response of bypassing the national government to deal directly with local potentates promises not only to encourage competing centers of power but to further weaken the national government. This is a conundrum for American foreign policy....
As a matter of historical study... we have too long been at pains to separate the diplomatic from the military. These are conceived as different fields of inquiry, and camps of historians working each side of this street have looked askance at colleagues on the other curb. Academic programs did not require much in the way of training across these subject boundaries. As for the relevant professional organizations, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Society for Military History, for a very long time you could not find a historian who held membership in both those groups. Then there was one, then a few. The situation today is somewhat better but still far from where it needs to be. Diplomatic historians tend to regard military specialists as too narrow, military historians tend to see diplomatic experts as naïve and superficial. Not only does this bifurcation exist in an environment in which both schools of history are under challenge from other historical specialties, but in a real world in which, as argued here, both disciplines are necessary to properly analyze developments....