Page 1 of 2 The incredible shrinking withdrawal date
By Tom Engelhardt
Going, going, gone! You can almost hear the announcer's voice throbbing with
excitement, only we're not talking about home runs here, but about the
disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan
war will officially end.
Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over is: just this side of
never. If you take the word of our Afghan war commander, the secretary of
defense, and top officials of the Barack Obama administration and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), we're not leaving any time soon. As with
any clever time traveler, every date that's set always contains a verbal escape
hatch into the future.
In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The
Incredible Shrinking Man, about a fellow who passed through a
radioactive cloud in the Pacific Ocean and soon noticed that his suits were too
big for him. Next thing you knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off
his pet cat, and fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster.
Finally, he disappeared entirely leaving behind only a sonorous voice to tell
us that he had entered a universe where "the unbelievably small and the
unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle".
In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the date for serious
drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward
the vanishing point and is now threatening to disappear "over the horizon" (a
place where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once they have
finally handed their duties over to the Afghan forces they are training).
If you remember, in December 2009 Obama spoke of July 2011 as a firm date to
"begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan", the moment assumedly
when the beginning of the end of the war would come into sight. In July of this
year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke of 2014 as the date when Afghan
security forces "will be responsible for all military and law enforcement
operations throughout our country".
Administration officials, anxious about the effect that 2011 date was having on
an American public grown weary of an unpopular war and on an enemy waiting for
us to depart, grabbed Karzai's date and ran with it (leaving many of his
caveats about the war the Americans were fighting, particularly his desire to
reduce the American presence, in the dust). Now, 2014 is hyped as the new 2011.
It has, in fact, been widely reported that Obama officials have been working in
concert to "play down" the president's 2011 date, while refocusing attention on
2014. In recent weeks, top administration officials have been little short of
voluble on the subject.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates ("We're not getting out. We're talking about
probably a years-long process."), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, attending a security
conference in Australia, all "cited 2014 ... as the key date for handing over
the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves." The New York Times
headlined its report on the suddenly prominent change in timing this way: "US
Tweaks Message on Troops in Afghanistan."
Quite a tweak. Added Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller: "The message shift is
effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011
deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops
perceived to be leaving shortly."
Inflection points and aspirational goals
Barely had 2014 risen into the headlines, however, before that date, too, began
to be chipped away. As a start, it turned out that American planners weren't
talking about just any old day in 2014, but its last one. As Lieutenant General
William Caldwell, head of the NATO training program for Afghan security forces,
put it while holding a question-and-answer with a group of bloggers, "They're
talking about December 31st, 2014. It's the end of December in 2014 ... that
[Afghan] President Karzai has said they want Afghan security forces in the
lead."
Nor, officials rushed to say, was anyone talking about 2014 as a date for all
American troops to head for the exits, just "combat troops" - and maybe not
even all of them. Possibly tens of thousands of trainers and other so-called
non-combat forces would stay on to help with the "transition process".
This follows the Iraq pattern where 50,000 American troops remain after the
departure of US "combat" forces to great media fanfare. Richard Holbrooke,
Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was typical in
calling for "the substantial combat forces [to] be phased out at the end of
2014, four years from now". (Note the usual verbal escape hatch, in this case
"substantial," lurking in his statement.)
Last Saturday, behind "closed doors" at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal,
Afghan war commander General David Petraeus presented European leaders with a
"phased four-year plan" to "wind down American and allied fighting in
Afghanistan". Not surprisingly, it had the end of 2014 in its sights and the
president quickly confirmed that "transition" date, even while opening plenty
of post-2014 wiggle room.
By then, as he described it, "our footprint" would only be "significantly
reduced". (He also claimed that, post-2014, the US would be maintaining a
"counterterrorism capability" in Afghanistan - and Iraq - for which "platforms
to ... execute ... counter-terrorism operations," assumedly bases, would be
needed.)
Meanwhile, unnamed "senior US officials" in Lisbon were clearly buttonholing
reporters to "cast doubt on whether the United States, the dominant power in
the 28-nation alliance, would end its own combat mission before 2015". As
always, the usual qualifying phrases were profusely in evidence.
Throughout these weeks, the "tweaking" - that is, the further chipping away at
2014 as a hard and fast date for anything - only continued. Mark Sedwill,
NATO's civilian counterpart to Petraeus, insisted that 2014 was nothing more
than "an inflection point" in an ever more drawn-out drawdown process. That
process, he insisted, would likely extend to "2015 and beyond", which put 2016
officially into play. And keep in mind that this is only for combat troops, not
those assigned to "train and support" or keep "a strategic over watch" on
Afghan forces.
On the eve of NATO's Lisbon meeting, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, waxing
near poetic, declared 2014 nothing more than an "aspirational goal," rather
than an actual deadline. As the conference began, NATO's secretary general
Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that the alliance would be committed in
Afghanistan "as long as it takes". And new British Chief of the Defense Staff
General Sir David Richards suggested that, given the difficulty of ever
defeating the Taliban (or al-Qaeda) militarily, NATO should be preparing plans
to maintain a role for its troops for the next 30 to 40 years.
War extender
Here, then, is a brief history of American time in Afghanistan. After all, this
isn't our first Afghan war, but our second. The first, the Central Intelligence
Agency's anti-Soviet jihad (in which the agency funded a number of the
fundamentalist extremists we're now fighting in the second), lasted a decade,
from 1980 until 1989 when the Soviets withdrew in defeat.
In October 2001, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the George W
Bush administration launched America's second Afghan war, taking Kabul that
November as the Taliban dissolved. The power of the American military to
achieve quick and total victory seemed undeniable, even after Osama bin Laden
slipped out of Tora Bora that December and escaped into Pakistan's tribal
borderlands.
However, it evidently never crossed the minds of Bush's top officials to simply
declare victory and get out. Instead, as the US would do in Iraq after the
invasion of 2003, the Pentagon started building a new infrastructure of
military bases (in this case, on the ruins of the old Soviet base
infrastructure). At the same time, the former Cold Warriors in Washington let
their dreams about pushing the former commies of the former Soviet Union out of
the former soviet socialist republics of Central Asia, places where, everyone
knew, you could just about swim in black gold and run geopolitically wild.
Then, when the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003, Afghanistan, still
a "war" (if barely) was forgotten, while the Taliban returned to the field,
built up their strength, and launched an insurgency that has only gained
momentum to this moment. In 2008, before leaving office, George W Bush bumped
his favorite general, Iraq surge commander Petraeus, upstairs to become the
head of the Central Command which oversees America's war zones in the Greater
Middle East, including Afghanistan.
Already the guru of counter-insurgency (known familiarly as COIN), Petraeus
had, in 2006, overseen the production of the military's new war-fighting bible,
a how-to manual dusted off from the Vietnam War-era's failed version of COIN
and made new and magical again. In June 2010, eight-and-a-half years into our
second Afghan war, at Obama's request, Petraeus took over as Afghan war
commander. It was clear then that time was short - with an administration
review of Afghan war strategy coming up at year's end and results needed
quickly. The American war was also in terrible shape.
In the new COIN-ish US Army, however, it is a dogma of almost biblical faith
that counter-insurgencies don't produce quick results; that, to be successful,
they must be pursued for years on end. As Petraeus put it back in 2007 when
talking about Iraq, "[T]ypically, I think historically, counterinsurgency
operations have gone at least nine or 10 years." Recently, in an interview with
Martha Raddatz of ABC News, he made a nod toward exactly the same timeframe for
Afghanistan, one accepted as bedrock knowledge in the world of the COINistas.
What this meant was that, whether as CENTCOM commander or Afghan war commander,
Petraeus was looking for two potentially contradictory results at the same
time. Somehow, he needed to wrest those nine to 10 years of war-fighting from a
president looking for a tighter schedule and, in a war going terribly sour, he
needed almost instant evidence of "progress" that would fit the president's
coming December "review" of the war and might pacify unhappy publics in the US
and Europe.
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