In this paper, we present a declarative perspective on adaptable extensible MANET protocols. Our work builds upon declarative networking, a recent innovation for building extensible network architectures using declarative languages. We make the following contributions. First, we demonstrate that traditional MANET protocols, ranging from proactive, reactive, to epidemic can be expressed in a compact fashion as declarative networks, and we validate experimentally the use of declarative techniques to implement traditional MANETs emulated on a testbed cluster. Second, we show that the declarative framework enables policy-driven adaptation, in which a generic set of declarative rule-based policies are used to make runtime decisions on the choice of MANET protocols. Third, we present some initial ideas on fine-grained protocol composition and adaptation, where a typical MANET protocol can be composed and adapted from simpler components.