Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.
In January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s charge to a newly-appointed commanding general was simplicity itself: “give us victories.” President Barack Obama’s tacit charge to his generals amounts to this: give us conditions permitting a dignified withdrawal. A pithy quote in Bob Woodward’s new book captures the essence of an emerging Obama Doctrine: “hand it off and get out.”
Getting into a war is generally a piece of cake. Getting out tends to be another matter altogether -- especially when the commander-in-chief and his commanders in the field disagree on the advisability of doing so.
Happy Anniversary, America. Nine years ago today -- on October 7, 2001 -- a series of U.S. air strikes against targets across Afghanistan launched the opening campaign of what has since become the nation’s longest war. Three thousand two hundred and eighty five days later the fight to determine Afghanistan’s future continues. At least in part, “Operation Enduring Freedom” has lived up to its name: it has certainly proven to be enduring.
As the conflict formerly known as the Global War on Terror enters its tenth year, Americans are entitled to pose this question: When, where, and how will the war end? Bluntly, are we almost there yet?
Of course, with the passage of time, where “there” is has become increasingly difficult to discern. Baghdad turned out not to be Berlin and Kandahar is surely not Tokyo. Don’t look for CNN to be televising a surrender ceremony anytime soon.
This much we know: an enterprise that began in Afghanistan but soon after focused on Iraq has now shifted back -- again -- to Afghanistan. Whether the swings of this pendulum signify progress toward some final objective is anyone’s guess.
To measure progress during wartime, Americans once employed pins and maps. Plotting the conflict triggered by 9/11 will no doubt improve your knowledge of world geography, but it won’t tell you anything about where this war is headed.
Where, then, have nine years of fighting left us? Chastened, but not necessarily enlightened.
Just over a decade ago, the now-forgotten Kosovo campaign seemingly offered a template for a new American way of war. It was a decision gained without suffering a single American fatality. Kosovo turned out, however, to be a one-off event. No doubt the United States military was then (and remains today) unbeatable in traditional terms. Yet, after 9/11, Washington committed that military to an endeavor that it manifestly cannot win.
Rather than probing the implications of this fact -- relying on the force of arms to eliminate terrorism is a fool’s errand -- two administrations have doggedly prolonged the war even as they quietly ratcheted down expectations of what it might accomplish.
In officially ending the U.S. combat role in Iraq earlier this year -- a happy day if there ever was one -- President Obama refrained from proclaiming “mission accomplished.” As well he might: as U.S. troops depart Iraq, insurgents remain active and in the field. Instead of declaring victory, the president simply urged Americans to turn the page. With remarkable alacrity, most of us seem to have complied.
Perhaps more surprisingly, today’s military leaders have themselves abandoned the notion that winning battles wins wars, once the very foundation of their profession. Warriors of an earlier day insisted: “There is no substitute for victory.” Warriors in the Age of David Petraeus embrace an altogether different motto: “There is no military solution.”
Here is Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, one of the Army’s rising stars, summarizing the latest in advanced military thinking: “Simply fighting and winning a series of interconnected battles in a well developed campaign does not automatically deliver the achievement of war aims.” Winning as such is out. Persevering is in.
So an officer corps once intent above all on avoiding protracted wars now specializes in quagmires. Campaigns don’t really end. At best, they peter out.
Formerly trained to kill people and break things, American soldiers now attend to winning hearts and minds, while moonlighting in assassination. The politically correct term for this is "counterinsurgency."
Now, assigning combat soldiers the task of nation-building in, say, Mesopotamia is akin to hiring a crew of lumberjacks to build a house in suburbia. What astonishes is not that the result falls short of perfection, but that any part of the job gets done at all.
Yet by simultaneously adopting the practice of “targeted killing,” the home builders do double-duty as home wreckers. For American assassins, the weapon of choice is not the sniper rifle or the shiv, but missile-carrying pilotless aircraft controlled from bases in Nevada and elsewhere thousands of miles from the battlefield -- the ultimate expression of an American desire to wage war without getting our hands dirty.
In practice, however, killing the guilty from afar not infrequently entails killing innocents as well. So actions undertaken to deplete the ranks of jihadists as far afield as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia unwittingly ensure the recruitment of replacements, guaranteeing a never-ending supply of hardened hearts to soften.
No wonder the campaigns launched since 9/11 drag on and on. General Petraeus himself has spelled out the implications: “This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives.” Obama may want to “get out.” His generals are inclined to stay the course.
Taking longer to achieve less than we initially intended is also costing far more than anyone ever imagined. Back in 2003, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey suggested that invading Iraq might run up a tab of as much as $200 billion -- a seemingly astronomical sum. Although Lindsey soon found himself out of a job as a result, he turned out to be a piker. The bill for our post-9/11 wars already exceeds a trillion dollars, all of it piled atop our mushrooming national debt. Helped in no small measure by Obama's war policies, the meter is still running.
So are we almost there yet? Not even. The truth is we’re lost in the desert, careening down an unmarked road, odometer busted, GPS on the fritz, and fuel gauge hovering just above E. Washington can only hope that the American people, napping in the backseat, won’t notice.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. To catch Bacevich discussing how the U.S. military became specialists in quagmires in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.
Copyright 2010 Andrew J. Bacevich
I think he was on to something. If you can lie your way into a war, why not lie your way out of a war? Just say we won a big victory... "yeah, we sure kicked their asses".... "sure did, showed them who's boss". Etcetera. And then just leave.
A clever joke? Maybe, but if you can lie your way into a war, why not just lie your way out of a war? When anybody challenges the claim that we won a great victory, then just say that this is slander against our fine fighting men and women. "Of course they won a great victory!" "You just say that because you hate America!" "You don't support the troops!"
Moreover, if, as Andrew Bacevich says, there is no real concept of winning, i.e. we don't even know what "winning" means in this context, really, why not just announce loudly "we won" and then leave? Besides, whether a claim is true or not should hardly seems to matter in contemporary American politics.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-rushing/afghanistan-9th-anniversa_b_756550.html
Let's start organizing NOW to ensure that Obama's promised start of withdrawal is REAL and SIGNIFICANT, and sets us on a path, not to endless war, but to a speedy conclusion to this disaster.
I think we should insist that a full brigade of combat troops be removed by the end of August 2011, and that ALL "surge" troops (and all contractors added as part of the "surge") be removed by the end of 2011. Obviously total withdrawal is and should be our goal, but we need to set some doable incremental steps to get us there.
Frankly it's going to take everything we have to get the 30,000 "surge" troops out by the end of 2011, so let's get cracking!
The real terrorist threat has not been addressed since 911. But, the end is nearing. America
is BANKRUPT, and the pursuit of EMPIRE can no longer be funded. Did you know that the FED is the second largest holder of US govt debt?? WOW, the federal govt spends money it does not have, and the
FED creates funny money out of this air to buy the govt debt!! What do YOU think that will do to the
value of a dollar???
The second shift is to recognize the inappropriateness of the concept of a "War on Terror". I'll repeat my earlier analogy: Invading Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda makes as much sense as invading Italy to defeat the Mafia. Terrorists should be treated as criminals, and the criminal justice apparatus - not he military - should be employed to deal with them. Just as we can never expect to wipe out crime, so can we never expect to wipe out terrorism.
The third shift is to recognize that counterinsurgency operations are what Chuck Spinney calls fourth generation warfare. Our entire tactical concept in fighting such a war is wrong. If we are going to fight such wars, our troops need to be trained differently and equipped differently. Our very methods of showing presence, whether by drone strikes or riding around in MRAPs, are inherently alienating to the people we are ostensibly trying to win over.
I would encoruage Mr Bacevich and HPsters to examine the development plans for India by American companies, American national security strategists, and DOD officials.
According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor, in his work The Grand Chessboard, America needs to control and dominate Central Asia in order to sustain America's "global hegemony" and "global primacy"- his words.
According to numerous sources, including Asia Times, America corporations have been seeking to utilize the resources and mineral so Central Asia (including Afghanistan) for the development of India into a regional superpower. The TAPI pipeline (Turkmen, Afghan, Pak, Indian) would transport gas to India. In 2000, ENRON had proposed that pipeline to fuel its gas plant in India. Other companies have proposed similar lines.
This all coencides with major military partnership America has entered into with India since the lat 1990s the Clinton admin signed major military and trade pacts with India. Bush expanded it to include nuclear partnership. India has since made a major partnership with Israel as well.
Meanwhile, China has sent several divisions to its Xinjiang province and has a major naval base at Gwadar port, its state of the art deep sea port it finished for Pakistan to serve China's interests.
U.S. influence our government to change course, and at least begin to pull back from the brink of
catastrophe. The inertia of this debacle is so deeply rooted, that I have no faith there will be a change toward a foreign policy that will stop the madness of "power projection" and preventative war. Can we as citizens make a difference, or should we prepare ourselves for an endless madness in our foreign policy? I believe the American people are so misinformed they can never make sound voting decisions. I also believe my fellow citizens are too busy to be able to see the truth of our current dilemma. I am also a Vietnam Vet. I also served in-country from the
summer of 1970 to the summer of 1971. The war, by then, had turned into a fiasco. We were
very discouraged that the South Vietnamese could prosecute the war successfully. It was a
very bleak time for the American military. The young people fighting this war in Afghanistan and
Iraq are also quite discouraged. We both know that the tragedy of 9/11 should have brought out an
all out police investigation, with the subsequent arrest of the key figures of Al Queda. Instead we
have lived through GWB's, and now Obama's wars. Please continue to write. We need more
people like you Andrew. Thank you.
GVB
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XydXJ1J_ZY0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvtC_qzHVM4