President Put Politics First on Afghanistan

Published on Thursday, January 28, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

President Put Politics First on Afghanistan

by Ray McGovern

Nothing highlights President Obama's abject surrender to Gen. David Petraeus on the "way forward" in Afghanistan than two cables U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry sent to Washington on Nov. 6 and 9, 2009, the texts of which were released Tuesday by the New York Times.

No longer is it possible to suggest that Obama was totally deprived of wise counsel on Afghanistan; Eikenberry got it largely right.  Sadly, the inevitable conclusion is that, although Obama is not as dumb as his predecessor, he is no less willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for political gain.

Ambassador Eikenberry, a retired Army Lt. General who served three years in Afghanistan over the course of two separate tours of duty, was responsible during 2002-2003 for rebuilding Afghan security forces.  He then served 18 months (2005-2007) as commander of all U.S. forces stationed in Afghanistan.

Straight Talk

In the cable he sent to Washington on Nov. 6, he explains why, "I cannot support [the Defense Department's] recommendation for an immediate Presidential decision to deploy another 40,000 here."  His reasons include:

~Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not "an adequate strategic partner."  His government has "little to no political will or capacity to carry out basic tasks of governance. ... It strains credulity to expect Karzai to change fundamentally this late in his life and in our relationship."

~Karzai and many of his advisers "are only too happy to see us invest further.  They assume we covet their territory for a never ending ‘war on terror' and for military bases to use against surrounding powers."

[Comment: I wonder where Karzai ever got that idea about military bases-perhaps because we are building them?  I'll bet Karzai also assumes continuing U.S. interest in the projected oil/natural gas pipeline from the extraordinarily rich deposits in the Caspian Sea area and Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea, bypassing both Russia and the Strait of Hormuz. ]

~"The proposed troop increase will bring vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale U.S. military role."

~"We overestimate the ability of Afghan security forces to take over...by 2013. ... and underestimate how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government."

~"More troops won't end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain...and Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by a weak neighbor."

~"There is also the deeper concern about dependency. ... Rather than reducing Afghan dependence, sending more troops, therefore, is likely to deepen it, at least in the short term.  That would further delay our goal of shifting the combat burden to the Afghans."

More Straight Talk

Eikenberry is even more direct in his cable of Nov. 9, taking strong issue with "a proposed counterinsurgency strategy that relies on a large, all-or-nothing increase in U.S. troops," and warning of the risk that "we will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves..."  Condemning Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations with faint praise, Ambassador Eikenberry describes them as "logical and compelling within his [McChrystal's] narrow mandate to define the needs for a military counterinsurgency campaign within Afghanistan."

"Unaddressed variables," says Eikenberry, "include Pakistan sanctuaries, weak Afghan leadership and governance, NATO civilian-military integration, and our national will to bear the human and fiscal costs over many years."  He complains that the troop increase proposal "sets aside" these variables, even though "each has the potential to block us from achieving our strategic goals, regardless of the number of additional troops we may send."

The ambassador also notes that it is hardly a safe assumption that Karzai and his new team will ever be "committed to lead the counterinsurgency mission we are defining for them," noting that Karzai "explicitly rejected" McChrystal's counterinsurgency proposal when first briefed on it in detail.

Eikenberry does not stop there.  Rather, he bluntly warns-in vain, it turned out-against a premature decision regarding a troop increase, arguing "there is no option but to widen the scope of our analysis and to consider alternatives beyond a strictly military counterinsurgency effort within Afghanistan."  He adds:

~"We have not yet conducted a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of all our strategic options.  Nor have we brought all the real-world variables to bear in testing the proposed counterinsurgency plan."

~"This strategic re-examination could either include or lead to high-level U.S. talks with the Afghans, the Pakistanis, the Saudis and other important regional players-including possibly Iran. ..." 

Extraordinary.  Here is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan bemoaning the fact that, as the President approaches his decision on a large troop increase, there has still been no comprehensive analysis of the wider issues that remain "unaddressed" in McChrystal's proposal.

NIEs

Taking an objective look at a complex national security problem is precisely the job for which President Harry Truman created the CIA, giving its director the task of drafting what became known as National Intelligence Estimates-a process in which all agencies of the intelligence community can take part.

That no estimate has been prepared on Afghanistan/Pakistan and the "unaddressed variables" is an indictment of President Obama and his deference to the military.  The President and other misguided Democrats are hell bent on preventing the bemedaled Petraeus, a likely Republican candidate for president in 2012, from painting them soft on terrorism.  Letting Petraeus run the policy, while avoiding any critical intelligence analysis, is Obama's safe-and cowardly-way out.

During my tenure at CIA (from the administration of John Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush), I cannot think of an occasion on which a President chose to forgo a National Intelligence Estimate before making a key decision on foreign policy.  However, in early 2002, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney set a new kind of precedent when they ordered CIA Director George Tenet NOT to prepare an NIE on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, out of fear that an honest estimate would make it immensely more difficult to attack Iraq.

That did not change until September 2002, when Sen. Bob Graham, then-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned the White House that, absent an NIE, he would do all he could to prevent a vote on war with Iraq.  That's when a totally dishonest NIE was woven out of whole cloth (or, in the words of subsequent Intelligence Committee chair, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, fashioned from "created" intelligence) to hype a threat from non-existent Iraqi WMD.

After that debacle, new leadership was given to the NIE process in the person of Tom Fingar who had run the intelligence unit at the State Department.  It was Fingar who insisted on a bottom-up review of intelligence on Iran's nuclear plans, which resulted in an NIE that helped prevent Bush and Cheney from attacking Iran-or encouraging Israel to do so.

That NIE, issued in November 2007, assessed "with high confidence" that Iran had stopped working on the nuclear weapons part of its nuclear program in late 2003, directly contradicting claims of Bush and Cheney at the time.

Of equal importance, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior military had no appetite to take on Iran (or to acquiesce in Israel's doing so) and insisted that the key judgments of that NIE be made public.

This time, on Afghanistan, it's different.  Army generals Petraeus and McChrystal apparently persuaded the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, that they knew what they're doing and didn't need any intelligence analysts reaching troublesome conclusions.

What's the Rush?

From his vantage point in Kabul, Eikenberry seems impervious to Dick Cheney's charges that the President is "dithering."  The first two (of three) subheadings in Eikenberry's second cable are:  "We Have Time" and "Why We Must Take the Time."  He finishes with an appeal to "widen the scope of our analysis."

Eikenberry is all but demanding a National Intelligence Estimate, but stops short so as not to cross the President or rub salt in the wounds that the ambassador's cables have opened in Petraeus and McChrystal.

Instead of requesting an NIE, Ambassador Eikenberry suggests that the White House appoint "a panel of civilian and military experts to examine the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and the full range of options."  The list of issues he says this panel "should examine" reads very much like what the intelligence community calls "Terms of Reference" for an NIE.  (As a CIA analyst and manger I contributed to many NIEs and chaired some myself.)

When the White House gave Eikenberry short shrift, he should have resigned, rather than support the misbegotten strategy Obama chose.

Leakophobia

Part of Obama's motivation in not ordering the customary NIE was to avoid any chance that its conclusions might leak, according to a source with good access.  Assuming that intelligence community estimators have not regressed to the Bush/Cheney days of cooking estimates to order, such a leak would certainly have made it more difficult for the President to render unflinching support to Petraeus and McChrystal.

Pity Obama.  It is hard to believe he could be so naive to the ways of Washington and so dismissive of the possibility that there could still be some courageous patriots among the senior officials dismayed at his remarkable retreat from the "transparency" he promised.

The New York Times reports, "An American official provided a copy of the cables to The Times after a reporter requested them."  Well, good for that patriotic truth-teller.  And good, as well, for the New York Times for publishing the cables.  I am permitting myself to hope that still more truth-tellers will emerge from the woodwork, and even that The Times might begin to play the kind of key role it did 40 years ago, once it finally brought itself to concede that Vietnam was a fool's errand.

NODIS

It may be that one needs to have worked at senior levels on the "inside" to understand the twinge that I felt after downloading the NODIS cables made available by The Times.  NODIS cables on my desk at home!

As the cover sheet indicates, "NODIS" means no dissemination beyond the named "addressee and, if not expressly precluded, by those officials under his authority whom he considers to have a clear-cut ‘need to know.'" (Emphasis added.  It is not entirely clear, but I assume that exceptions can now be made for the current Secretary of State and other senior officials of her gender.)

In my day we had to go to the CIA Director's office, sign for, and read NODIS cables right there.  No doubt there are similar controls today.  So, in this case the whistleblower took considerable risk in taking it upon him/herself to make "transparency" real, not just Obaman rhetoric.

The irony?  If, as I have been told, the President put the kibosh on preparation of an NIE for fear it would leak, we now have an even more instructive kind of leak.  Thanks to The Times and its courageous source, we now know not only that President Obama elected to forgo an honest NIE, but that he did so in the face of very strong urging from Ambassador Eikenberry to "widen the scope" of analysis, and not simply kowtow to the Army brass.

I imagine that in years to come, Eikenberry will proudly show his cables to his grandchildren.  Or maybe he won't, out of fear that one of them might ask why he didn't have the guts to quit and let the rest of the country know what he really thought of this latest March of Folly.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/28-1

 

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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs