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Afghanistan: Why Obama Must Say No to Escalation |
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The front-page story in the Washington Post Tuesday reports the intention Barack Obama to commit a stunningly irrational blunder: to escalate dramatically the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan even though he has no clear proposal from the Pentagon on what is to be accomplished with the new “surge” in troops.
The president-elect “intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan,” according to the Post. But it adds that Obama’s national security team sees the troop increase as doing nothing more than “help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy….”
Why isn’t the Obama team waiting until it has been able to “reappraise” the war effort and figure out what, if anything, would actually work before doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan? Why doesn’t Obama simply tell the Pentagon, “I’m not approving a major military escalation until you give me a plan that makes sense”?
The strange reversal of logic that has put the troop escalation in front of the war strategy horse should be a warning signal to Obama that the U.S. military is not on the right track in Afghanistan and doesn’t know how to get there.
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and the military leadership have already had months to develop a new strategy. According to the Post, however, they haven’t even have been able to agree on the nature of the war. The military is “looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates, including the relative merits of conducting conventional combat vs. targeted guerrilla war”, the Post reported.
The strategy which has been pursued by the U.S. military under Gen. David D. McKiernan since 2005, with notable lack of success, has considered attacking the Taliban to be the main military objective, according to military critics.
An alternative proposal presented to Gates by military officers who served in Afghanistan before the Taliban reemerged as de facto government in large parts of the country, would shift the objective from killing “Taliban” to protecting the people. But that would involve admitting that the existing strategy is wrong, and it has obviously encountered strong resistance from McKiernan and his staff in the field.
This is not an isolated episode of the military refusing to learning from its past mistakes. In fact it is inherent in the nature of U.S. military institutions. Col. John A. Nagl, the primary author of the U.S. Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, showed in his book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife published in 2002, that the U.S. Army refused to learn any lessons from its failure in Vietnam and instead created a comfortable narrative about how it could have won the war if only the civilians had allowed it to do so. He found that the army lacked the “organizational self-awareness” necessary to “change organizational culture”.
That’s why sending more troops to Afghanistan can only have one result: the military will end up simply doing more of what it knows how to do. And because the U.S. Army is not capable of learning, it will continue to generate more Afghan resistance to the U.S. occupation. Last October, when I asked Gen. David Barno, the commander in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004, whether the number of U.S airstrikes - and thus innocent civilians killed — wouldn’t inevitably increase with an increase in U.S. troops, he agreed. “When you’ve got that tool in your tool box,” he said, “there is a high risk that you will use it even though it puts your strategic interest at risk.”
Nagl shows how the bureaucratic resistance to change within the command structure made adaptation to reality impossible. He notes that the commander is screened from the truth by his subordinates and quotes the man responsible for “pacification” in Vietnam, Robert Komer, as calling that war a “tragedy of bureaucratic inability to adapt to unconventional situations.”
In a recent speech to the Atlantic Council, Gen. McKiernan revealed just how out of touch he is with Afghan realities. He told of meeting the governor of a district in Ghazni Province, who he asked whether things are “better than they were two years ago”. He quoted the district governor as saying, “Two years ago transiting across my district was [sic] about 1,000 Taliban. Today there’s still Taliban but it’s about 200, and people are taking their produce to the market. Children are going to school.” McKiernan concluded , ‘[I]f you have that kind of human capital to potentially work with, the glass is half-full,” and “Afghanistan will turn out much better than we found it if the will of the international community remains strong”.
But the intrepid journalist Nir Rosen, who traveled through Afghanistan with the Taliban last year, reported in Rolling Stone in October, that Ghazni:
…has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.
Gen. McKiernan was apparently clueless about what was really going on in Ghazni province, just 100 miles south of Kabul. This cluelessness is not because of McKiernan personally. It is the way the system works. It helps explain why there is no agreement on strategy accompanying the military demand for more troops in Afghanistan, and it is why the Obama administration will be engulfed in an endless, failing war in Afghanistan unless he says no to escalation now.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who specializes in U.S. national security policy. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service but has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, The Nation, The American Prospect and The Raw Story and blogged on Huffington Post. He was Co-Director of the Indochina Resource Center, an anti-war research and educational organization, in the mid-1970s, has taught at American University, City College of New York and the School of Advanced International Studies. Historian Andrew Bacevich called his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War , published by University of California Press in 2005, “without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of U.S. national security policy to appear in the past decade.”
Yes the Taliban must triumph so the reality bvased community can see its goals achieved and a progressive, diverse society established with collective justice and equality!
I think you guys really are whistling past a graveyard here. it would be nice if you just admitted you were pacifists.
http://bloggerinterrupted.com/2009/01/whats-the-alternative-to-escalat ion-in-afghanistan
Several inconsistencies and attempts at misinformation in your article that I must bring to light.
#1. The escalation is not being conducted out of some self-serving want by the Army command. You actually answer answer your own question to, “Why the Surge?” To gain a thorough appreciation of what it will take to “turn” Afghanistan, to, “reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy,” we first must gain a strategic foothold in the entire country. This is simply something we have never accomplished due to the troop needs of Iraq. Until we have a troop presence in the majority of the troubled Provinces, we will never have an understanding of what it will take to develop, “a plan that makes sense.%u201D We’ve got the cart, you want to take away the horse and then ask, why haven’t you gone anywhere?
#2. Both of the, “strategies” you write about (”killing %u201CTaliban%u201D to protecting the people”) are either (a) simplistic (and therefore opportunistic) interpretations of existing US Army doctrine. Or, (b) you really have no clear understanding of that which you write.
There are 4 clear lines of effort that we operate under as ISAF forces. Each line of effort has as a supporting effort, “protect the people.” Each line of effort has as a supporting effort, defeat the efforts of the Taliban and Al Queda. We are operating as counter-insurgents. I won’t deny that going from conventional operations to counter-insurgent operations is not difficult. It is extremely demanding on the leadership of the Army, from Company level to the national strategic level. This is the real story here.
3. You make so many invalid jumps of logic; “inherent in the nature of U.S. military institutions,” is a, “military refusing to learning from its past mistakes.” How can this logically be? You would necessarily have to have the same individuals leading and running Army operations now that you had in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict for your assertion to prove valid. You don’t have that situation, you don’t have a valid point.
Are those 40 million Pashtuns like the Kurds, troublesome to their countries’ majorities, because their traditional lands reach across national boundaries into three countries, none of which wants them as legitimate citizens? Is it not likely that political leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Turkey want the land and possessions of these minorities and therefore use invading armies (e.g. the U.S.) to rid them of these troublesome minority populations? The US is always bombing-ready. All we need is someone to point us to the targets (claiming “terrorists”) and then accept our generous bounties — so that we can clear that land for “our allies.” Bombs, pilots, and drone aircraft are too exciting NOT to use. And once again, the US war machine is fed our national treasure while American education, health, transportation and housing are left to beg and battle for crumbs not already committed to war and the banking system. This is madness.