Here is a piece by James Traub that I found interesting:
After Cheney
We know that Obama picked Biden for vice-president mostly because of his foreign policy experience, and Traub's piece gives a glimpse of how this works in practice. Much of Biden's work has been with Iraq, but he's been a strong voice in the internal Afghanistan planning as well.
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From the outset of his tenure as vice president, Biden had come to view himself as the one who asked the unpleasant and searching question — who “upset the apple cart,” as he put it. In the debate over Afghanistan, he initially faced a near-consensus in favor of the view advanced by the generals. McChrystal offered three options, which boiled down to way more troops than he could get (80,000), enough troops (40,000), and failure (10,000 trainers but no new combat troops). Obama encouraged Biden to push the advocates to defend their arguments and justify their assumptions. Biden proceeded to do just that, especially with the brass; he proposed an alternative plan that focused less on defeating the Taliban and more on eliminating Al Qaeda. Obama reacted to this very different view by asking James Jones to present four options with different strategies, and troop levels appropriate to those strategies. When I asked Rahm Emanuel about Biden’s role in the discussions, he said: “People were thinking about certain things, but hadn’t expressed them. The vice president was expressing them.”
Biden was not willing to discuss on the record the advice he gave the president while the decision remained outstanding, but the outlines of his views may be gleaned from news reports and White House interviews. Biden and those around him do not seem to believe that McChrystal’s strategy can work — not because they question the abilities of the military, but because they think the generals are far too optimistic about the civilian elements upon which the overall plan depends. They are deeply skeptical that the government of President Hamid Karzai can somehow gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people; that the U.S. can quickly develop the enormous civilian capacity that would accompany a military surge, or can train as many as 400,000 Afghan soldiers, especially with attrition rates now running around 25 percent; that Pakistan will accept a policy designed to bolster Afghanistan’s Pashtun-led government; that NATO allies will overcome public resistance to offer major help; or that the U.S. can afford to spend something like $250 billion on Afghanistan at a time when deficits are already running very high.
Biden does not view the Taliban as synonymous with Al Qaeda and does not appear to believe that it would be a calamity if the Taliban increased its presence in the Afghan countryside (though he is not prepared to see Kabul or other major urban centers fall). If Al Qaeda can be bottled up on the border with Pakistan through counterterrorism measures involving troops as well as drone attacks, and with the help of an expanded Afghan army, then it is unnecessary to build a secure Afghanistan that can defeat the Taliban. And then you could focus instead on the greater danger — Pakistan. “I’m going to ask you a question,” Biden said. “If I said to you right now, We can send $30 billion a year to Pakistan, or $30 billion to Afghanistan, which would you pick? Every ***** person says, ‘Pakistan.’ So I say, ‘O.K., guys, we should be talking about a PakAf policy, not an AfPak policy.’ ”
This is a thoroughly plausible proposition — if, and only if, ceding much of Afghanistan to the Taliban would not be a calamity. Among those who believe that it would be are Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, most Republican senators and experts like Bruce Riedel, who has said that it is “a fairy tale” to think that Al Qaeda will not return to Afghanistan along with a resurgent Taliban. Those who favor a larger military presence in Afghanistan accept the validity of Biden’s concerns but do not view them as insurmountable. Biden is very likely to once again lose the debate on troop strength, though he may win on narrowing the objectives. The real test of his success will be whether the new policy tilts toward Pakistan.
I'm looking forward to Obama's speech from West Point, and have no idea now whether I'll buy what he sells or not. But I certainly don't see an easy way out of this. Of course this situation should never have arisen, but so what. It has.
If Traub's piece is anywhere near accurate, Biden's role in the Obama administration is, in my opinion, essential.
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As gifted as he is at retail politics, he has none of Barack Obama’s talent for the sweeping formulation or inspirational language, which perhaps explains why he has fared so poorly in presidential campaigns. Biden does not project even slightly in the realm of myth. But for this very reason, he is allergic to magical, wish-fulfillment thinking. “Guys,” he’ll say — this is how he describes addressing the Joint Chiefs of Staff — “what if it doesn’t work?” An administration full of youthful true believers, enraptured with their heroic leader, needs a skeptic and a scold. Obama may need one himself. And yet Biden is also, like Obama, an optimist. As vice presidents go, he has more in common with Hubert Humphrey, the happy warrior, than with dark Dick Cheney.
In business you definitely need people willing to rock the boat with hard questions about rosy scenarios, and I'm sure that role is vital in government too.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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