When in 2009, Obama’s AfPak review stressed the need to “degrade, dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda,” train Afghan forces and inject billions of dollars to bolster the economy, there was realisation that America had not won this war on the battlefield nor could it see an end on the negotiating table. The Afghan endgame meant modest and scattered successes against the Taliban, supporting and training Afghan forces to take over security and ensuring assistance for development projects, education, and the economy: the light footprint strategy was at work.

The disengagement in American foreign policy has been slow but noticeable because, among other reasons, it has become too costly and difficult to fight insurgencies that will not disintegrate. However, with sectarianism on the rise and Islamism entering the fray in the Middle East — look at Lebanon, Syria and Iraq — there is a real threat to regional stability, especially as Arab states grapple with economic and political changes. So what does this indicate about America’s choice of containment rather than engagement at a time when there is need for greater economic and diplomatic involvement?

As senior advisor to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke,Vali Nasr’s argument in his latest book, The Dispensable Nation, centres on why America should take the lead in reorganising Asia and the Middle East, especially after the Arab Spring has created a vacuum attractive to militant organisations vying to take the lead. The reason, he argues, is because it will “once again become the region where a great rivalry is played out, with China now playing the role of the Soviet Union.” Preempting the price the Obama administration could pay for ignoring this region diplomatically, Nasr’s thesis warns against yielding strategic advantage to China in the future.

Dissecting the nature (and failure) of American foreign policies in the Middle East and Asia, Nasr looks at why its global leadership is in decline (some would disagree with this hypothesis), questioning how America exercises its power. This is not only because of a weakening economy and the frustrations Americans feel when supporting war adventures, but, most importantly, inconsistencies among Obama’s White House team (supporting the Pentagon on military strategies) and the State Department (formerly managed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Special Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Holbrooke) in determining whether they wanted to engage less militarily in this region.

Nasr is of the view that America assigns diplomacy to those who don’t necessarily support its military interventions (see Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars) and so remain ineffectual (in the foreign policy realm) when it comes to promoting long-term development projects, women and human rights in developing countries dependent on America for stability and aid. It can be argued in the case of certain USAID projects in Afghanistan, that their failure to actually leave a lasting impact was not only because of weak civilian management and little local knowledge but a failure to rebuild and protect communities and win hearts and minds away from a Taliban resurgence. But whether through military deployments or diplomacy, Nasr believes that America can still lead from the fore (on Syria he says that America must “end the bloodletting” and deny extremist groups space to dominate Syria’s future by direct intervention and support for the Free Syrian Army). America’s policy “in the end will be judged by whether the Arab Spring produces better Arab states that do right by their people.”

Nasr who has also previously written on the invasion of Iraq and how that strengthened Iran and reignited sectarian violence in the Arab world, worked at the State Department as a senior advisor on Holbrook’s AfPak team from 2009 to 2011. In 2012, he became dean of the school of international studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. In this narrative, he elaborates how the White House sidelined Holbrooke who was unable to influence American policy (and gain Obama’s confidence) when it came to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Only diplomacy with a focus on initiating talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban could end the fighting, but in 2009 “talking to the Taliban was taboo,” he writes.

In mid-2010, everyone was talking to the Taliban except the Americans. Tayeb Agha, who eventually became the Taliban’s main interlocutor in 2011, was brought to Holbrooke’s attention (February 2010) when his German counterpart met with Agha in Dubai to determine whether the channel to Mullah Omar and the Quetta Shura was real. Nasr credits Holbrooke with lobbying the White House to check if Agha was in fact important enough to talk with: “Holbrooke never participated [in these talks] and did not live to see them gain momentum, culminating in the Taliban establishing an office in Qatar … two years after the Munich meeting.” Nasr’s view is that if talks had opened sooner than later with the Taliban and while America was at its strongest — “when we had maximum troops on the ground” — then this show of force could have been used to forge a diplomatic and political solution.

The Obama administration saw the corrupt and failed Karzai government as the problem without looking at the need to rework military policies which were emboldened by the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency strategy. The latter used in Iraq was supposed to win the war but because counterinsurgency required governance and the Afghan government had little will and resources to govern, US forces who had cleared areas of the Taliban would provide governance.

Counterinsurgency did not work in Afghanistan because Obama announced a troop surge the same time he spoke of a withdrawal deadline which further emboldened the Taliban as they wait for American troops to leave before mounting deadly attacks as evident in the last four years. An Arab diplomat once said to the Americans: “If you are leaving, why would the Taliban make a deal with you? How would you make the deal stick? The Taliban will talk to you, but just to get you out faster.” Also, the troop surge did not work for a number of reasons: the infighting between the White House and the State Department in 2009 is something that has been well-documented by Woodward and Rajiv Chandrasekaren. This lack of consensus contributed to a strategic stalemate where “the generals wanted a military solution to Afghanistan, and the president’s advisors thought the political fallout of going against the military would be too great.” There were too many players and Kabul knew that none were on the same page. Obama handed most of the strategic planning to Petraeus and his allies in the war cabinet. They refused to allow Holbrooke to open talks with the Taliban as early as 2009, when they had been ready to negotiate because the Pentagon opposed that idea from the start as being a “form of capitulation to terrorism.”

It’s the chapter on Pakistan in The Dispensable Nation (‘Who Lost Pakistan?’) that nails the relationship between the two countries as something of an enigma based on mutual benefits. Key to America’s strategic interests and vital to ending the war in Afghanistan, this relationship is dissected through the period between 2009 and 2011 as running on two tracks: the CIA and Pentagon wanted to use Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda and the State Department wanted to repair the damaged relationship. Historically one partner has tried to buy cooperation through aid and the other has lent support (Pakistan as an ally during the Soviet war and the US-led ‘war on terror’) and rebuilt trust (Reagan-Zia and Bush-Mush love affairs) despite Pakistan sticking to its strategic ambition of meddling in the affairs of Afghanistan (cultivating jihadi connections). Nasr writes that America pushed for a change in Pakistan’s “strategic calculus” because ending the Afghan war meant changing Pakistan’s trajectory.

Pakistan’s double-dealing has been a reaction to its past abandonment. Approving sanctuary for the Taliban with the support of the Haqqani Network in Waziristan while at the same time sharing intelligence with the US is symptomatic of deep distrust. On a parallel track, Holbrooke’s assessment that Pakistan needed a Marshall Plan is interesting because that was meant to distract Pakistan (for a while) from a military/intelligence relationship towards more socio-economic engagement with America (Clinton meeting popular anchors/college students for open discussions). The idea was to show the average Pakistani that the relationship was not based on chasing insurgents, suicide blasts and drone attacks. The winning hearts and minds game plan, if consistently pursued, would have been a sensible road map (towards something more solidified) but bumps en-route and distrust fueled by the Raymond Davis affair, the Salala attack and the Abbottabad raid eventually led to Marc Grossman telling the press that America was looking for a “transactional relationship”. There is perhaps little consensus among Pentagon hardliners and Obama’s circle at the moment that “Pakistan is a failure of American policy” and that the relationship might have been managed better so as not to endanger internal stability and give rise to the kind of anti-American sentiment prevalent in the country.

On Iran, Obama gave up on diplomacy too soon knowing that it would be difficult to work with the Iranians who are hard bargainers, writes Nasr. He pushed for sanctions but that failed to change Iran’s behaviour; instead, in the recent past it has accelerated its nuclear ability. However, the latest development with Obama and Rouhani’s significant telephone call, the first presidential phone call between the US and Iran since 1979, despite pressure from hardliners on both sides, brings a new dynamic into play. Also, America’s Arab allies, who would rather see a US-Iran conflict than rapprochement, will now understand that Obama doesn’t seek regime change in Iran but is able to reconcile that both countries are different and can share a more open relationship.

Nasr argues that America’s military disengagement will not free it from fractious world powers but leave it politically weaker and vulnerable to criticism from liberal and neoconservative interventionists — as the case for Syria indicates where a humanitarian crisis threatens its Arab neighbours as does the need to contain sectarian violence, the emergence of Al Qaeda fighters supporting anti-Assad forces and Iran and Hezbollah fighting alongside the Syrian government. He may not advocate military intervention at all times but is clearly a proponent of American leadership as a force for good where and when action is needed in case there appears another world order — illiberal and destructive.

The reviewer is senior assistant editor at the monthly, Herald

The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

(Current Affairs)

By Vali Nasr

Random House, New York

ISBN 978-0-385-53647-9

320pp.