The Exit Strategy Delusion

Gideon Rose

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1998

Summary:  Despite disagreements over troops in Bosnia, all sides want an exit strategy. That concept, however, dating back only to the ignominious U.S. withdrawal from Somalia, has nothing to do with military requirements and everything to do with post-Cold War politics. Exit strategies harm a mission's chances of success, and had they been required the United States would not have defended the armistice after the Korean War, kept the peace on the Sinai Peninsula after Camp David, or undertaken NATO. The real question is not when American troops will be out, but why they are going in.

Gideon Rose is Deputy Director of National Security Studies and Olin Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Director of the Council's Henry A. Kissinger Study Group on Exit Strategies and American Foreign Policy.

Nevertheless, withdrawing American forces from an intervention such as Bosnia will probably produce chaos on the ground unless one of three alternatives is ready to maintain order: a follow-on force, a single competent local political entity, or a clear division and stable balance of power among local factions. Paving the way for at least one of these must be a central part of an intervention's overall strategy. If for domestic political reasons an American follow-on force is not in the cards, then either a foreign force or a local solution must be arranged. If the United States does not want to stay for the long term and the three options above have little chance, then the United States should not intervene in the first place.

The transition phases of an intervention need not be simple or abrupt; often a gradual reduction of the outside presence works best, with each successive force charged with tackling a different type of problem until a local political structure is ready to stand on its own. Moreover, there is little reason for transition plans to be announced publicly or tied to a hard timetable. Publicity and rigidity could work against success by tipping one's hand to opponents, allowing them to develop countermeasures.

DEADLINE DIPLOMACY

Many people who talk about exit strategies are chiefly concerned with preventing American strength and prestige from being squandered in foreign jungles or mountains. Lake's "exit strategy doctrine," for example, was offered as a way of dealing with messy post-Cold War situations that seemed to merit our attention but did not threaten vital security interests. In these cases, he argued, a sensible, middle-of-the-road path would be for the United States to make only a good-faith effort to attack problems, rather than a commitment to solving them. Explicit time limits on American deployments would give foreigners a brief window of opportunity to reach for a better future while avoiding difficult entanglements for the United States should they fail. Deadlines would serve as boundaries for American efforts and spur local parties to take responsibility for their own societies.

The problem with this approach is that overzealous attempts to devise, publicize, and enforce limitations on American deployments can undermine an intervention's effectiveness. Deadlines for withdrawal turn American troops into lame ducks. They do not prod local thugs to settle their differences, but rather encourage them to wait until the Americans go home. A publicized limitation strategy based on costs rather than time would have the opposite effect, prompting local opponents to rise up rather than lie low, while signaling to them just what damage they need to inflict to get the Americans to close up shop. The likely consequence of embracing Lake's exit strategy doctrine, in short, would be the accumulation of several foreign commitments at a time, few of which turn out satisfactorily. The Clinton administration eventually realized this, so it decided not to face the consequences of abandoning Bosnia after a year, or even two and a half.

If Lake's answer was flawed, his question-how to avoid overextension without retreating from the world entirely-was legitimate. Two other answers look more promising. The first is to develop strict limits not on interventions' cost or duration, but rather on their objectives. This would mean keeping open the possibility of intervening widely in places such as Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq, and elsewhere, but only if the interventions were limited to pursuing goals that could be accomplished with relatively simple or tidy means, such as traditional peacekeeping, maritime blockades, or no-fly zones. The other alternative is to undertake very few interventions, yet commit to doing what it takes to see them through. This would mean choosing to accept real responsibility for bringing order to certain trouble spots while leaving others alone-doing Haiti or Bosnia, say, but not both. Either of these courses is preferable to good-faith efforts because they avoid the domestic and international humiliation of backtracking.

MEASURING SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Still others think of exit strategies as plans for what to do when an intervention does not follow its expected course. Prompted by the experience in Somalia, recent discussion has focused almost exclusively on one scenario, dramatic failure, and one response, withdrawal. This is unfortunate because responsible contingency planning involves more than simply pointing out the exit. Initial failure, for example, can theoretically be met with either withdrawal or escalation, and there can be happy surprises as well as sad ones.

If policymakers should avoid public pronouncements on an intervention's expected cost and duration, they should certainly specify their expectations on these and other matters privately, because that is the only way to establish yardsticks for assessing an intervention's progress. Without such yardsticks, it is impossible to make intelligent decisions about whether to stay the course, withdraw, or escalate. If events follow the timetable originally conceived-as in, say, the 1994 Haiti mission-the intervention will flow logically from its original operations into its transition strategy, and there will be no need to resort to contingency plans. If something unexpected happens, on the other hand, officials may need to make a fundamental change of course. It is here that contingency planning becomes necessary.

An intervention's original plans will include two kinds of assumptions. The first involves the nature of the problem and the feasibility of different solutions-what led to a crisis, for example, or which local political forces are too strong to exclude from a settlement. These assumptions undergird the intervention's basic strategy, dictating what the objectives are and how they can be achieved. The second type of assumptions are narrower, encompassing how factors like the weather, logistics, and local conditions will affect the mission's implementation. If these secondary assumptions are too pessimistic, success will come more quickly and smoothly than expected; if they are too optimistic, the intervention's progress will be slower and bumpier than hoped. Either way, the general strategy of the intervention should not be changed, and commanders and officials on the ground should be given substantial leeway to respond to the situation as they see fit.