Obama risks all on flip of a COIN
By Robert Dreyfuss
Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted smartly and pledged his
loyal support for President Barack Obama's decision to start withdrawing United
States 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 (ANA) 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 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 US military, however, things are rarely
what they seem. Petraeus, the Central Command chief "demoted" in order to
replace McChrystal as US 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, neo-conservatives, and
spokesmen for the counter-insurgency (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 he clearly wasn't buying the notion that the July deadline means
much, nor did he put significant stock in the fact that 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 US heads for the exits".
The right's marching orders for the president
Petraeus' 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 US 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
US Special Forces, Petraeus literally wrote the book - namely, The US
Army/Marine Corps Counter-insurgency 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
protege 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' 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 US, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Afghan
casualties, including civilians.
That 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 Central Intelligence Agency 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 US 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 Marjah 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 US 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. Petraeus or not,
the reality is that the war will end with a political settlement involving
President Hamid Karzai's government, various Afghan warlords and powerbrokers,
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 US 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 US 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' Pakistan connection
would be useful indeed. Time, however, is running out.
Robert Dreyfuss is an independent journalist in the Washington DC area.
He is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine and a frequent contributor
to Rolling Stone and Mother Jones. His blog,
The Dreyfuss Report, appears at the Nation's website. His book,
Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,
was published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in 2005. Listen to Dreyfuss in
the latest TomCast audio interview discussing Obama's war with the military by
clicking here,
or to download to your iPod,
here.
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