How We’ll Know When the Job is Done

“After eight years…it is my intention to finish the job.”

At last Barack Obama is giving us a glimpse of how he’s approaching the decision he will be announcing next week.  But what can he mean by “finishing the job?” In particular, what does he think “the job” is, and in what sense could it be “finished” anytime soon?

It seems likely that the president is trying to define the mission as narrowly as possible.  “The job” sounds like a counterterrorism mission, although the administration may be willing to employ some elements of counterinsurgency or stability operations in Afghanistan to enable the counterterrorism campaign inside Pakistan to go forward.  And it even seems like a narrow counterterrorism mission that focuses principally on al Qaeda rather than the broader syndicate of associated Islamist groups in the region.

But it’s the desire to “finish” the job that is most revealing.  Thus the administration’s oft-repeated talking points on an “exit strategy.”  Thus White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ description of the final Afghanistan strategy session: “I think I characterized a decent part of it as not just how we get people there but what’s the strategy for getting them out.”  Not a strategy for winning, but for ending the war.

No matter how narrowly defined the job becomes, it’s hard to see how it can be finished, even within the scope of two Obama presidential terms.  If Osama bin Laden were to be killed tomorrow, both al Qaeda proper and the violent Islamist movements in South Asia and globally would reconstitute, recover and persist.

But there is a larger underlying problem: how we choose to define the job and what the job really is are not necessarily the same.  The true task, which is large, complex but undeniably necessary, is to build a political order in South Asia that does not pose a mortal threat to the rest of the world.  This, in turn, is a critical element in integrating the greater Middle East into the international system.  In this regard, our job in Afghanistan is the first but hardly the last step.

Finally, the term “exit strategy” should be banished.  There is no relief — least of all for an American president — from the practice of statecraft and shaping global politics.  The United States has yet to “get out” of anything: the Western Hemisphere, Europe, East Asia, the Persian Gulf, or any of the world’s oceans. The job is “finished,” as it mostly is in Europe, when it’s safe for free people — when they can “stay in,” not get out.

Tom Donnelly is director of the Center for Defense Studies.