This fall, President Obama enters the final quarter of the inaugural year of his presidency. At the time of his swearing in, the US economy had officially entered a recession, American troops were fighting two wars abroad, an estimated 40 million Americans did not have any form of health insurance and the international perception of America was dismal at best. In the last nine months, President Obama has begun the promised pullout in Iraq while considering a major surge in the number of troops in Afghanistan, tackled the recession head, has seen his approval ratings dip in great part due to deep divides over how to handle health care reform and controversly won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jiffer Bourguignon recently spoke with India-born America-based geopolitical expert Parag Khanna to get his assessment of Obama’s first year in office. Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, Khanna is also the author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. He has worked at the Brookings Institution; the World Economic Forum in Geneva and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Most recently, he served as a senior geopolitical advisor to the United States Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a member of Obama’s advisory team.

JB: An obvious place to begin an assessment of Obama’s first year is Afghanistan. American casualties are steadily increasing, recent deadly attacks against the Indian embassy and a UN guesthouse in Kabul saw grave security breaches in the capital which has been considered relatively safe, opium production seems to be at a new record high every year, and the fatally flawed August 2009 presidential election followed by the cancelled run-off between incumbent Karzai and challenger Abdullah delegitimize a even further a President who is commonly referred to as “the mayor of Kabul”. Obama has inherited this war – which will likely become one of the most defining and decisive events of his presidency. What is your assessment of his position on and progress in Afghanistan? How can he „win“ this?

Parag Khanna: The Afghanistan question is a very important one – and it’s not only about Afghanistan but also about Pakistan. The question is not about how much time he is taking to make the strategy. It’s really about what is the next year going to look like in terms of the number of troops that are over there and civilians on the US and NATO side and what is their exact mandate and what and how are they going to carry it out. And those things are simply not clear yet. So unfortunately even as someone who was on Obama’s campaign working on Afghanistan strategy, I can’t say that I’ve seen a tremendous amount of progress. I see the right signals from my side there. I came up with some ideas and suggestions as to what would work better and I do think that “going local“, focusing on key population centers otherwise is a good idea with a solid footprint but I don’t see the execution of that and the broad support that is needed for that being formulated as strictly as it should be so I still think it’s a long road ahead.

JB: Former Vice-President Dick Cheney has created a stir by accusing Obama of “dithering” on Afghanistan because he has not yet decided what to do about the McCrystal report, i.e. send a surge of new troops. Do you think he is “dithering”?

Parag Khanna: The reason given for the “dithering” is, as the team came in – made up of the top, top experts on the Af/Pak situation - least of all myself - as part of his advisory group, we formulated ideas and strategies. And yet when the administration came in they thought, ‘Oh my God, we had no idea how bad it really was on both sides of the border and therefore we kind of need to start over again’. Therefore what people are calling ‘dithering’ is really Obama saying, ‘Wow, we need to reassess things because things are really that bad’. I personnally don’t really accept that because we were a team full of people who had been in and out of the country a lot over the years and we certainly had no illusions about just how bad things are in both Afghanistan and Pakistan so I reject that logic that he didn’t really know just because he wasn’t in power. All you need to do is spend five minutes over there to know how bad it is going. So, no I don’t believe it’s dithering.
I do believe what they are trying to do is come up with a strategy that just simply does not equate or recycle the logic of more troops equals more commitment equals substantial progress. So I do agree with their willingness to say, ‘let’s review and focus our goals on a few key things that may or may not require more troops but there is no guarantee at all that more troops equals better results’. And I think that they are right to question that.

JB: In that respect, if Obama is questioning sending over more American troops, should NATO members like Germany be doing the same?

Parag Khanna: The more contribution from NATO, the more legitimate this operation in terms of the views of the international community. Whether the 100,000 troops are a majority of Americans or mixed among nationalities, the question still remains what are their roles and what is their effectiveness? NATO countries should be operating seamlessly together and unfortunately there have been a number of major tragic incidents in the last few months that demonstrate that that is unfortunately not the case. So there is a lot of work to be done in terms of how the alliance works together. I appreciate Germany and other countries who are large troop contributors who are weighing sending more troops. But I also think that everyone still needs to be on the same page – and the fact that they are not is not Germany’s fault. It is a question of the bureaucracy of NATO which is quite horrendous quite frankly.

JB: Photographs have been published in major international newspapers including the Frankfurter Allgemeine and other German papers last week which showed Obama on the tarmac saluting the coffins of 18 dead soldiers on their way home. This is a very tangible symbol of the many ways this administration has broken from previous policies of the Bush administration. Could you talk about the difference between Obama and his predecessor on this issue?

Parag Khanna: The Bush administration at the end did try to increase the number of troops and do what the McCrystal strategy is becoming and what Obama has said he wants to do so it’s not strictly a Bush vs. Obama frame. I don’t think that we should look at things that way. It is an adaptation of circumstances and that adaptation has been going on prior to the political transition. I always emphasize this point because the world is not shaped by who our president is and it’s really important to realize that it is the facts on the ground in Afghanistan that are the real drivers of the situation. We are, if anything, reacting to those. So certainly the biggest difference and the most important one is the desire to really shift aid towards more civilian focuses and to have more accountability over the defending of life and to have a more civilian rather than military basis or at least more tandem.
When it comes down to the Karzai presidency, the jury is still out on whether or not it represents a genuine shift. Yes, we are harassing him and giving him a hard time but if he’s still there and if we have not made an effort to actually change the structure of the government together with Afghans, then we really have not changed much from the Bush administration.

JB: Moving on to another important benchmark of this first year: the economy. The catalyst for this crisis was put into motion long before Obama’s first term started. But his inauguration was unfortunately timed precisely with the beginning of the current recession. Globally, the world has looked to the US to see what they would do, and looked to Obama. How do you think Obama has handled the situation?

Parag Khanna: He has done what ever he could do at the time and there really weren’t any options available to him so it’s been very difficult. It is just a matter of reacting and doing what he could. It would be easy to just print money. Anyone could do that. At least his commitment to rethinking how and why the economy is stuck rather than just reprinting money and bailing out any company is a positive and necessary step. It will be a long time before we can truly judge whether this is going well or not.

JB: Obama recently hosted the latest G20 summit in Pittsburgh. It was hailed as successful as members agreed to keep emergency economic support in place until a recovery was secured. While leaders agreed to avoid premature exit strategies that might kill the fragile recovery, there were still great divides between stances held by some members, for example, how France and Germany view pay caps versus how the US would go about this topic. Is the G20 an important diplomatic tool or just a lot of hot air? 

Parag Khanna: I do think it is important for sure. The G20 actually pre-dates this crisis. It was created almost a decade ago after the Asian economic crisis. I do think it is an important policy coordinating mechanism and there is a big difference between policy coordinating and cooperation coordination. They don’t actually do a lot of cooperation coordination as in doing things together, that would be the next step. But the reason why they don’t is because the G20 is not a treaty founded legal instrument. It is a purely informal mechanism without legal basis of any kind. So I think the optics of it are sometimes more important than the reality.
There is an argument being made that peer pressure and transparency of the G20 have minimized the number of protectionist measures taken by G20 economies. That may or may not be true but I do think that it is a valid point of view to consider. It speaks to what I was saying about the optics being as valid as the substance.

JB: The outcome of the G20 was closely followed internationally. What was the reaction of the American people? What is the public perception of how the economy is being handled at home?

Parag Khanna: There is a lot of frustration that not enough financial assistance and credit has been unlocked for the middle class and the non-Wall Street economy here in the US. I think there is a lot of concern about that. For years, and this goes back to the 2004 presidential campaign, there has been talk of the need for worker retraining to adjust to globalization. None of these things have happened and there is still no concrete evidence that there are any policy suggestions for how to deal with that.  So I would say that the frustration is quite justified.

JB: Another major benchmark of Obama’s first year has been the issue of universal health care. It is estimated that 40 million American’s are currently without health insurance. Obama’s plan to give these people coverage has been praised and opposed, lauded and feared. Germans often ask me, ‘What do Americans have against health care?’ Can you explain the opposition to this plan? Is it warranted? And how is Obama handling it?

Parag Khanna: I personally have not spent much time working on this topic. My only observation is that what the plan has become in perception versus what it is in reality probably are not the same thing. And a lot of the argument is about debating the perception. So even if my personal belief is that there should be universal health care or at least some minimal health care guaranteed, I don’t think that makes a difference in the debate as such. I don’t know how it is going to play out. There is clearly a lot of industry lobbying, special interests, partisan and ideological pressure that will play a role, but my principle belief is that moving toward a humane European system would be a good thing, but I don’t know if America has the stomach for that.

JB: Speaking of perception versus reality: Obama has received a warm reception from most of the international community. He has reached out to countries who have been isolated from talks for much of the last decade. Can you talk about this policy shift.

Parag Khanna: This is where it gets really interesting, where you see a real change. In the first 100 days of his presidency, he did make those overtures to Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and just about everyone, really. And I think it will take time for that to play out, obviously the Iranian election threw a little bit of a curve back at him but I think that he handled it very well. Chavez was very positive during his visit here; there is renewed policy with North Korea; with Syria there has been a very intense amount of diplomacy that has come up. So I actually think that this will pay off in the long term for sure but it’s just too early to tell. But that is where we saw a real genuine shift literally in the first 100 days.

JB: I understand that the long term effects are difficult to predict in the present. But are there any immediate results that you can see as a result of his diplomatic overatures, as a result of Obama’s reaching out to the world. And have their been shifts in terms of the perception of the US abroad by the general public?

Parag Khanna: This is something that I have a very strong opinion about. Even if people welcome the Obama administration, no one is actually changing policies. He is very popular, that is certainly a more or less universal phenomenon although there are major countries like India where Bush was extremely popular.  But even if we assume that it is a global support and acceptance for Obama, the evidence suggests that no one is waiting for American leadership on anything. And I would challenge anyone to contest that. If you look to issues like climate change where it is very important for Americans to be at the table, it doesn’t mean that America is the leader in climate change negotiation by any stretch of the imagination.

If you look to any of the major diplomatic challenges right now such as in the Middle East, it is really driving its own dynamic. Leadership would mean that you would also see shifts in a country’s foreign policy. It isn’t clear to me that let’s say Venezuela or Iran or - China is a big example - are actually changing their foreign policy strategies or doctrines or priorities as a result of the Obama election. I have to be really tough on this one because I travel a lot internationally and I know that there is a big difference between people welcoming Obama and people waiting for Obama. I don’t really believe that anyone is waiting on him –most countries in the world really go about their own business today and don’t really wait for America unless they absolutely have to and there is a shrinking number of issues on which they really have to wait for the U.S.

JB: One cannot make an assessment of Obama’s first year without acknowledging another assessment – and resulting accolade – that being the Nobel Peace Prize. An amazing honor to bestowed upon a leader who has not yet been in office for a full year, who is considering sending a major troop surge into Afghanistan, whose ratings at home have been steadily declining. Some say the prize is a curse, others call it a blessing. Obama himself seemed to be caught off guard and has said that he feels undeserving. What is your take on the award?

Parag Khanna: I have analyzed this on the side a bit a few years ago in terms of how the prize is allocated, to whom, to what types of entities whether individuals or UN agencies or whatever over the years. It is something that has been grossly distorted from it’s original mission, at least it was meant to go to people and not organizations so whenever it goes to for example the UN peacekeepers or the High Commission for Human Rights, that’s always a misallocation. It’s also meant to reward accomplishments completed not just efforts made and so in this case it clearly violated that spirit. There are justifications but they are wishy-washy. I don’t want to implicate Obama in any of this because he was as surprised as anyone and I am sure if I were Obama I would have preferred to get it six years from now toward the end of my presidency when hopefully I would have achieved a number of great things. I wish that the prize committee had simply said, ‘This is because he’s genuinely restarted a nuclear disarmament dialogue with Russia’. And that does alone deserve a Nobel prize. But they weren’t as explicit about that as they should have been. That, to me, is something that is or could be or should be deserving of the Nobel prize. It’s just that that it hasn’t really happened yet.

JB: How can he live up to the expectations that come with the prize?

Parag Khanna: The Nobel Prize is a nice thing but it doesn’t really create additional pressures or expectations that are meaningful. When you are the president of the United States you already have a lot of constituencies to answer to. I don’t really believe it is going to change in any way his policies toward Iraq or Afghanistan or Russia. I think he has enough on his mind. So I don’t really put a lot credence into that whole thing.

JB: To wrap things up, if you had to give President Obama a letter grade (based on the American grading scale where A is the highest mark for excellence, followed by B – good, C – average, D – below average and F – fail), keeping in mind the many challenges we’ve touched upon: conflict in Afghanistan, global recession, health care, international diplomacy – how would you rate the president on his first year in office?

Parag Khanna: I would give him a ‘B’ right now. But the prospect are looking good, are moving in an upward trajectory for sure. I see things going in a positive direction.