Monday, June 28, 2010

The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die

The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die

Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan

By Robert Dreyfuss

TomDispatch

June 27, 2010

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175266/tomgram%3A_robert_dreyfuss%2C_the_president_chooses_the_guru/#more

 

Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted

smartly and pledged his loyal support for President

Obama's decision to start withdrawing U.S. forces

from Afghanistan in July 2011. In December, when

Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add

tens of thousands of additional American forces to

the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the

military to turn the situation around and begin

handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan

National Army and police. Speaking to the nation

from West Point, Obama said that he'd ordered

American forces to start withdrawing from

Afghanistan at that time.

 

Here's the exchange, between Obama, Petraeus, and

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, as reported by Jonathan Alter in his new

book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One:

 

OBAMA: "I want you to be honest with me. You can do

this in 18 months?"

 

PETRAEUS: "Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand

over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time

frame."

 

OBAMA: "If you can't do the things you say you can

in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we

stay, right?"

 

PETRAEUS: "Yes, sir, in agreement."

 

MULLEN: "Yes, sir."

 

That seems unequivocal, doesn't it? Vice President

Joe Biden, famously dissed as Joe Bite-Me by one of

the now-disgraced aides of General Stanley

McChrystal in the Rolling Stone profile that got him

fired, seems to think so. Said Biden, again

according to Alter: "In July of 2011 you're going to

see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it."

 

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the U.S.

military, however, things are rarely what they seem.

Petraeus, the Centcom commander "demoted" in order

to replace McChrystal as U.S. war commander in

Afghanistan, seems to be having second thoughts

about what will happen next July -- and those second

thoughts are being echoed and amplified by a phalanx

of hawks, neoconservatives, and spokesmen for the

counterinsurgency (COIN) cult, including Henry

Kissinger, the Heritage Foundation, and the

editorial pages of the Washington Post. Chiming in,

too, are the lock-step members of the Republican

caucus on Capitol Hill, led by Senator John McCain.

 

In testimony before Congress just last week,

Petraeus chose his words carefully, but clearly

wasn't buying the notion that the July deadline

means much, nor did he put significant stock in the

fact that President Obama has ordered a top-to-

bottom review of Afghan policy in December.

According to the White House, that review will be a

make-or-break assessment of whether the Pentagon is

making any progress in the nine-year-long conflict

against the Taliban.

 

In his recent Senate testimony -- before he fainted,

and afterwards -- Petraeus minimized the

significance of the December review and cavalierly

declared that he "would not make too much of it."

Pressed by McCain, the general flouted Biden's view

by claiming that the deadline is a date "when a

process begins [and] not the date when the U.S.

heads for the exits."

 

The Right's Marching Orders for the President

 

Petraeus's defiant declaration that he wasn't

putting much stock in the president's intending to

hold the military command accountable for its

failure in Afghanistan next December earned him an

instant rebuke from the White House. Now, that same

Petraeus is in charge.

 

The dispute over the meaning of July 2011 is, and

will remain, at the very heart of the divisions

within the Obama administration over Afghan policy.

 

Last December, in that West Point speech, Obama

tried to split the difference, giving the generals

what they wanted -- a lot more troops -- but fixing

a date for the start of a withdrawal. It was hardly

a courageous decision. Under intense pressure from

Petraeus, McChrystal, and the GOP, Obama assented to

the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops, ignoring the

fact that McChrystal's unseemly lobbying for the

escalation amounted to a Douglas MacArthur-like

defiance of the primacy of civilian control of the

military. (Indeed, after a speech McChrystal gave in

London insouciantly rejecting Biden's scaled-down

approach to the war, Obama summoned the runaway

general to a tarmac outside Copenhagen and read him

the riot act in Air Force One.)

 

If Obama's Afghan decision was a cave-in to the

brass and a potential generals' revolt, the

president also added that kicker of a deadline to

the mix, not only placating his political base and

minimizing Democratic unhappiness in Congress, but

creating a trap of sorts for Petraeus and

McChrystal.  The message was clear enough: deliver

the goods, and fast, or we're heading out, whether

the job is finished or not.

 

Since then, Petraeus and McChrystal -- backed by

their chief enabler, Secretary of Defense Robert

Gates, a Republican holdover appointed to his

position by George W. Bush -- took every chance they

could to downplay and scoff at the deadline.

 

By appointing Petraeus last Wednesday, Obama took

the easy way out of the crisis created by

McChrystal's shocking comments in Rolling Stone. It

might not be inappropriate to quote that prescient

British expert on Afghan policy, Peter Townsend, who

said of the appointment: "Meet the new boss. Same as

the old boss."

 

On the other hand, Petraeus is not simply another

McChrystal. While McChrystal implemented COIN

doctrine, mixing in his obsession with "kinetic

operations" by U.S. Special Forces, Petraeus

literally wrote the book -- namely, The U.S

Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

 

If the COIN cult has a guru (whom all obey

unquestioningly), it's Petraeus. The aura that

surrounds him, especially among the chattering

classes of the Washington punditocracy, is palpable,

and he has a vast well of support among Republicans

and assorted right-wingers on Capitol Hill,

including the Holy Trinity: John McCain, Lindsay

Graham, and Joe Lieberman. Not surprisingly, there

have been frequent mentions of Petraeus as a

candidate for the GOP nomination for president in

2012, although Obama's deft selection of Petraeus

seems, once and for all, to have ruled out that

option, since the general will be very busy on the

other side of the globe for quite a while.

 

Even before the announcement that Petraeus had the

job, the right's mighty Wurlitzer had begun to blast

out its critique of the supposedly pernicious

effects of the July deadline. The Heritage

Foundation, in an official statement, proclaimed:

"The artificial Afghanistan withdrawal deadline has

obviously caused some of our military leaders to

question our strategy in Afghanistan... We don't

need an artificial timeline for withdrawal. We need

a strategy for victory."

 

Writing in the Washington Post on June 24, Henry

Kissinger cleared his throat and harrumphed: "The

central premise [of Obama's strategy] is that, at

some early point, the United States will be able to

turn over security responsibilities to an Afghan

government and national army whose writ is running

across the entire country. This turnover is to begin

next summer. Neither the premise nor the deadline is

realistic... Artificial deadlines should be abandoned."

 

And the Post itself, in the latest of a long-running

series of post-9/11 hawkish editorials, gave Obama

his marching orders: "He. should clarify what his

July 2011 deadline means. Is it the moment when `you

are going to see a whole lot of people moving out,'

as Vice President Biden has said, or `the point at

which a process begins. at a rate to be determined

by conditions at the time,' as General Petraeus

testified? We hope that the appointment of General

Petraeus means the president's acceptance of the

general's standard."

 

Is the COIN Cult Ascendant?

 

It's too early to say whether Obama's decision to

name Petraeus to replace his protégé McChrystal

carries any real significance when it comes to the

evolution of his Afghan war policy. The McChrystal

crisis erupted so quickly that Obama had no time to

carefully consider who might replace him and

Petraeus undoubtedly seemed like the obvious choice,

if the point was to minimize the domestic political

risks involved.

 

Still, it's worrying. Petraeus's COIN policy

logically demands a decade-long war, involving

labor-intensive (and military-centric) nation-

building, waged village by village and valley by

valley, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars

and countless U.S., NATO, and Afghan casualties,

including civilians. That idea doesn't in the least

square with the idea that significant numbers of

troops will start leaving Afghanistan next summer.

Indeed, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer with long

experience in the Middle East and South Asia, who

headed Obama's first Afghan policy review in

February 2009, told me (for an article in Rolling

Stone last month) that it's not inconceivable the

military will ask for even more troops, not agree to

fewer, next year.

 

The Post is right, however, that Obama needs to

grapple seriously with the deep divisions in his

administration. Having ousted one rebellious

general, the president now has little choice but to

confront -- or cave in to -- the entire COIN cult,

including its guru.

 

If Obama decides to take them on, he'll have the

support of many traditionalists in the U.S. armed

forces who reject the cult's preaching. Above all,

his key ally is bound to be those pesky facts on the ground.

 

Afghanistan is the place where theories of warfare

go to die, and if the COIN theory isn't dead yet,

it's utterly failed so far to prove itself. The

vaunted February offensive into the dusty hamlet of

Marja in Helmand province has unraveled. The

offensive into Kandahar, the birthplace of the

Taliban and a seething tangle of tribal and

religious factions, once touted as the potential

turning point of the entire war, has been postponed

indefinitely. After nine years, the Pentagon has

little to show for its efforts, except ever-rising

casualties and money spent.

 

Perhaps Obama is still counting on U.S. soldiers to

reverse the Taliban's momentum and win the war, even

though administration officials have repeatedly

rejected the notion that Afghanistan can be won

militarily. David Petraeus or no, the reality is

that the war will end with a political settlement

involving President Karzai's government, various

Afghan warlords and power brokers, the remnants of

the old Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and the

Taliban's sponsors in Pakistan.

 

Making all that work and winning the support of

Afghanistan's neighbors -- including India, Iran,

and Russia -- will be exceedingly hard.  If Obama's

diplomats managed to pull it off, the Afghanistan

that America left behind might be modestly stable.

On the other hand, it won't be pretty to look at it.

It will be a decentralized mess, an uneasy balance

between enlightened Afghans and benighted, Islamic

fundamentalist ones, and no doubt many future

political disagreements will be settled not in

conference rooms but in gun battles. Three things it

won't be: It won't be Switzerland. It won't be a

base for Al Qaeda. And it won't be host to tens of

thousands of U.S. and NATO troops.

 

The only silver lining in the Petraeus cloud is that

the general has close ties to the military in

Pakistan who slyly accept U.S. aid while funneling

support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. If Obama

decides to pursue a political and diplomatic

solution between now and next July, Petraeus's

Pakistan connection would be useful indeed. Time,

however, is running out.

_____________________________________________

 

No comments: