Haven’t we learned our lesson?

On the front page of Monday’s New York Times appears this article on Afghanistan. Michael R. Gordon leads off with this falsehood in the 2nd paragraph:

Military experts agree that more troops are required to carry out an effective counterinsurgency campaign, but they also caution that the reinforcements are unlikely to lead to the sort of rapid turnaround that the so-called troop surge in Iraq produced after its start in 2007.

Military experts agree? They do? Who are these “military experts?” Because I can find a few who most certainly do not agree.

Rory Stewart, who’s award winning book on Afghanistan was a New York Times bestseller, said this a few weeks ago on the Times’ editoral page:

A sudden surge of foreign troops and cash will be unhelpful and unsustainable. It would take 20 successful years to match Pakistan’s economy, educational levels, government or judiciary — and Pakistan is still not stable. Nor, for that matter, are northeastern or northwestern India, despite that nation’s great economic and political successes.

We will not be able to eliminate the Taliban from the rural areas of Afghanistan’s south, so we will have to work with Afghans to contain the insurgency instead. All this is unpleasant for Western politicians who dream of solving the fundamental problems and getting out. They will soon be tempted to give up.

It is in our interests for Afghanistan to be more stable in part because it contributes to the stability of the region, and in particular Pakistan. Well-focused, long-term assistance in which we appear a genuine partner, not a frustrated colonial master, could help Afghans achieve this goal. We will be able to create, afford and sustain such a relationship only if we put it in a broader strategic context and limit its scope.

And there’s Anatol Lieven and Rajan Menon, respected fellows at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank, and noted journalist and respected academic respectively. All the way back in 2006 they were saying there is no military solution in Afghanistan:

More troops and more money will not solve the problem. What’s also needed is imaginative thinking. To begin with, it is facile to treat Afghanistan as a geographical and economic island. The only hope of developing the country is to spur growth in its surrounding region. One way to do this is to create new transport links through Afghanistan from Central Asia to Pakistan and India. It is shameful that we have succeeded in rebuilding only one stretch of highway since toppling the Taliban. We ought to have finished a road network and to be well into the creation of a railway linking the South Asian and former Soviet rail systems, not least because by far the greater part of the track would traverse regions secure from Taliban attack.

How about Richard Barrett, head of the UN’s al-Qaeda monitoring unit, who said British presence in Afghanistan was helping Al-Qaeda?

And that’s just who I found after a little research.

So, Mr. Gordon, who exactly are these “military experts” that say we need more troops in Afghanistan? Are they war-hawk generals? Are they off-the-record Bush administration officials? Are they anonymous right-wing think tank academics? Are they comments from members of Amehd Karzai’s corrupt government?

This kind of lockstep reporting, reporting that turns off-the-record comments into conventional wisdom, is exactly what got us into the Iraq war. The media failed to ask questions of President Bush and his intelligence while repeating the falsehoods that “military experts” say Saddam Hussien has WMDs, is talking with Al-Qaeda, is a threat to America.

As in Iraq, there is no concensus in Afghanistan. In fact, there are many who are beginning to think the military is again fighting the last war, not the current one. The surge - which “military experts” think was successful, but in reality, didn’t bring about the political reconciliation it was designed to create - looks like it will be repeated in Afghanistan, at greater cost in blood and treasure.

As Noah Feldman, fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it in the Times Magazine this weekend:

Yet despite the surface similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, the differences run deep, as Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has acknowledged. The very words policymakers use when discussing Iraq — “nation,” “tribe,” “radical,” “Islamist,” even “Al Qaeda” — mean different things in the Afghan context. In the complex world of counterinsurgency, getting these subtleties of anthropology and sociology right determines success or failure.

The accomplishment of the U.S. strategy in Iraq has been to separate Sunni sheiks from the Qaeda-affiliated radicals — many of them non-Iraqis — who came to dominate their locales during the insurgency. The sheiks knew their authority would be enhanced if they could deliver patronage from the U.S. and the Iraqi government — after all, that is how they secured their power from the era of British colonial rule right up through the reign of Saddam. You could almost say the Iraqi tribal structure was built for the very purpose to which the U.S. counterinsurgency eventually put it.

By contrast, Afghanistan’s tribes — a term that covers everything from large confederations to cousin-networks and extended families — are not natural vehicles for creating loyalty to a central government. To the contrary, for many years the tribal confederations have functioned as proxies for foreign powers. As a result, the tribes are past masters at playing international interests against one another. Even if we can revive the traditional tribal structures, the result might be more chaotic than the situation now; a tribal strategy is as likely to increase internal conflict as to effect reconciliation.

Let’s not fight the last war all over again. Let’s not repeat the mistakes we made in Iraq. We need a radical change of strategy, not an escalation. We need more diplomacy, more creativity, and more regional agreement.

We cannot afford to repeat our mistakes, and that includes the grave errors the media makes when reporting lies as fact.

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