DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Meet the commanded-in-chief
By Tom Engelhardt
Let others deal with the details of President Barack Obama's Afghan speech,
with the on-ramps and off-ramps, those 30,000 United States troops going in and
just where they will be deployed, the benchmarks for what's called "good
governance" in Afghanistan, the corruption of the Hamid Karzai regime, the
viability of counter-insurgency warfare, the reliability of North Atlantic
Treaty organization (NATO) allies, and so on. Let's just skip to the most
essential point which, in a nutshell, is this: victory at last!
It's been a long time coming, but finally American war commanders have
effectively marshaled their forces, net-centrically outmaneuvering and
outflanking the enemy. They have
shocked-and-awed their opponents, won the necessary hearts-and-minds, and so,
for the first time in at least two decades, stand at the heights of success,
triumphant at last.
And no, I'm not talking about post-surge Iraq and certainly not about devolving
Afghanistan. I'm talking about what's happening in Washington.
A symbolic surrender of civilian authority
You may not think so, but on Tuesday night from the US Military Academy at West
Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama
surrendered. It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender
documents; he wasn't on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his
head. Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as
the commanded-in-chief.
And give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant.
Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up
with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos,
and in the end made off with the loot. The campaign began in late September
with a strategic leak of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's grim
review of the situation in that country, including demands for sizeable troop
escalations and a commitment to a counterinsurgency war.
It came to include rumors of potential retirements in protest if the president
didn't deliver, as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by General
McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive citizen-mobilization of
inside-the-Beltway former neo-conservative or fighting liberal think-tank
experts, and a helping hand from an admiring media. In the process, the US
military succeeded in boxing in a president who had already locked himself into
a conflict he had termed both "the right war" and a "necessary" one. After more
than two months of painfully over-reported deliberations, Obama has now ended
up essentially where General McChrystal began.
Counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine was dusted off from the moldy Vietnam
archives and made spanking new by General David Petraeus in 2006, applied in
Iraq (and Washington) in 2007, and put forward for Afghanistan in late 2008. It
has now been largely endorsed, and a major escalation of the war - a new kind
of military-led nation building (or, as they like to say, "good governance") -
is to be cranked up and set in motion. COIN is being billed as a
"population-centric", not "enemy-centric" approach in which US troops are
distinctly to be "nation-builders as well as warriors".
As for those 30,000 troops, most expected to arrive in the Afghan combat zone
within the next six months, the numbers are even more impressive when you
realize that, as late as the summer of 2008, the US only had about 28,000
troops in Afghanistan. In other words, in less than two years, US troop
strength in that country will have more than tripled to approximately 100,000
troops. So we're talking near-Vietnam-level escalation rates. If you include
the 38,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces also there (and a
possible 5,000 more to come), total allied troop strength will be significantly
above what the Soviets deployed during their devastating Afghan War of the
1980s, in which they fought some of the same insurgents now arrayed against us.
Think of this as Obama's anti-MacArthur moment. In April 1951, in the midst of
the Korean War, president Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of
the American forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure
than either McChrystal or Central Command (CENTCOM) commander General Petraeus
(and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly
disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman's plans to "limit" the war after
the Chinese intervened.
Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a "generals'
revolt" - amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the
insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election
campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who has played a far
subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what
right-wing critics termed "dithering" and supporters called "thorough
deliberations", Obama dealt with the problem quite differently to Truman. He
essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his
field commanders. (Not that his Republican critics will give him much credit
for doing so, of course.) This is called "politics" in our country and, for a
Democratic president in our era, Tuesday night's end result was remarkably
predictable.
When Obama bowed to the Japanese emperor on his recent Asian tour, there was a
media uproar in this country. Even though the speech last Tuesday night should
be thought of as bowing to the American military, there is likely to be little
complaint on that score. Similarly, despite the significance of symbolism in
Washington, there has been surprisingly little discussion about the president's
decision to address the American people not from the Oval Office but from the
US Military Academy at West Point.
It was there that, in 2002, George W Bush gave a speech before the assembled
cadets in which he laid out his aggressive strategy of preventive war, which
would become the cornerstone of "the Bush Doctrine". ("If we wait for threats
to fully materialize, we will have waited too long - our security will require
transforming the military you will lead - a military that must be ready to
strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security
will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for
preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our
lives.") But keep in mind that this was still a graduation speech and
presidents have traditionally addressed one of the military academies at
graduation time.
Obama is not a man who appears in prop military jackets with
"commander-in-chief" hand-stitched across his heart before hoo-aahing crowds of
soldiers, as our last president loved to do, and yet in his first months in
office he has increasingly appeared at military events and associated himself
with things military. This speech represents another step in that direction.
Has a president ever, in fact, given a non-graduation speech at West Point, no
less a major address to the American people?
Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military
audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory
military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic
surrender of civilian authority.
For his American audience, and undoubtedly his skittish NATO allies as well,
the president did put a significant emphasis on an exit strategy from the war.
That off-ramp strategy was, however, placed in the context of the training of
the woeful Afghan security forces to take control of the struggle themselves
and the woeful government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to turn over a new
nation-building leaf. Like the choice of West Point, this, too, seemed to
resonate with eerie echoes of the years in which George W Bush regularly
intoned the mantra: "As Iraqis stand-up, we will stand down."
In his address, Obama offered July 2011 as the date to begin a withdrawing the
first US troops from Afghanistan. ("After 18 months, our troops will begin to
come home.") However, according to the Washington-insider Nelson Report, a
White House "on background" press briefing Tuesday afternoon made it far
clearer that the president was talking about a "conditions based withdrawal".
It would, in other words, depend "on objective conditions on the ground", on
whether the Afghans had met the necessary "benchmarks". When asked about the
"scaling back" of the American war effort, General McChrystal recently
suggested a more conservative timeline - "sometime before 2013" - seconded
hazily by Said Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to Washington. Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates refers to this as a "thinning out" of US forces.
In fact, there's no reason to put faith in any of these hazy deadlines. After
all, this is the administration that came into office announcing a firm
one-year closing date for the US prison in Guantanamo (now officially missed),
a firm sunshine policy for an end-of-2009 release of millions of pages of
historical documents from the archives of the Central Intelligence Agency and
other intelligence and military services (now officially delayed, possibly for
years), and of course a firm date for the withdrawal of US combat troops,
followed by all US forces from Iraq (now possibly slipping).
Finish the job in Afghanistan? Based on the plans of the field commanders to
whom the president has bowed, on the administration's record of escalation in
the war so far, and on the quiet reassurances to the Pakistanis that we aren't
leaving Afghanistan in any imaginable future, this war looks to be all job and
no finish. Whatever the flourishes, that was the essence of Tuesday night's
surrender speech.
Monty Python in Afghanistan
Honestly, if it weren't so grim, despite all the upbeat benchmarks and
encouraging words in the president's speech, this would certainly qualify as
Monty Python in Afghanistan, lacking only the Vietnam War era comedy group's
comedic scene-changing foot from nowhere and catchphrase of "now for something
completely different" - leading to more of the same anarchic skits.
After all, three cabinet ministers and 12 former ministers are under
investigation in Afghanistan itself on corruption charges. That barely
scratches the surface of the problems in a country that one Russian expert
recently referred to as an "international drug firm", where at least one-third
of the gross national product
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