Obama Team Should Reappraise Afghan War Efforts Before Doubling Troop Levels
The front-page story in the Washington Post Tuesday reports the intention of 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 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.
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.
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Cheney just wanted a pipeline for Unocal and Enron, he didn't really want to "go after Bin Laden." In fact, Cheney wanted to get Saddam Hussein so that Halliburton could get the oil services and reconstruction contracts. It's all about the money - Americans forget that fact. They believe what they are told to go to war. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are examples in my lifetime. We need to stop telling fairytales to children because, when the become adults, they still believe in fairytale stories.
Many people believed that we "must find bin Laden." Now Obama admits that bin Laden isn't that important. Bush admitted that long ago. So why is that we "need" to escalate the war in Afghanistan? I guess senility has gotten the better of me, I just can't remember why Vietnam was such a good idea. Obama, Bush and Cheney never fought in any war themselves.
There is a taoist priciple that says to achieve one thing one must first do the opposite. For example, in body kinetics the antagonist muscles often contract as a prelude to the agonist muscles contracting. The principle does not seem to have made it into contemporary doctrines of war -- a pity because many of the doctrines are merely expressions of the core principle.
Moving more forces into Afghanistan as a prelude to ultimately leaving the country makes good military sense it the mission is ultimately to leave.
Building a megabase to support the forces that defend it does not make sense.
"reappraise" the war effort ..." that could take years the way they move.
Obama, News flash, we are sinking here, time to give our money back to us.. This is no time for doubling war efforts and what is the objective anyway, and dont tell me it to bring afganistan and iraq democracy.
There was NEVER an objective to bring democracy to the Iraq or Afghanistan.
This was just a convenient pitch for Cheney admin.
Iraq was a stupid war all around. But the war in A-stan was( is) fully justified and necessary.
We went to A-stan to root out and k.i.ll the enemy and install a government unwilling to support Al Qaeda.
That we have accomplished.
Now comes the hard part--supporting it and re-building the country.
Oh, one more thing- don’t count on the Europeans to help; they send fat, drunks as soldiers and are too addicted to expensive social program to defend us or even themselves. I strongly suspect Obama is going to call them out on this and show them to be the false allies they really are.
Another alternative is to demand the Taliban apologize to us for hosting Bin Laden, and turn Bin Laden over to us. If they don't then we hunt them forever with our flying, hunter-killer robots (UAV's) so they know no peace. This would require very few troops on the ground and would offer us a great way to test and upgrade these weapons. Let the Taliban have Afghanistan- who wants the crap hole anyway -we can still have our vengeance.
Well, Osama (Bin Laden) kept HIS campaign promises. He said he'd ruin America from within (2001)and you can't deny the accuracy of his statement.
He indeed has done that we are losing the battle and have made so many mistakes from top to bottom and left to right.
Monkeysuit
http://ran
Well said.
I couldn't agree more.
"Obama Team Should Reappraise Afghan War Efforts Before Doubling Troop Levels" should read
"Obama Team Should Stop Afphgan War Instead of Doubling Troop Levels"
Thank you.
I agree. I object, too, but he made it clear in the campaign that he would do this.
He's making the same mistake Johnson did, you can't have huge or serious domestic reforms and programs and spend billions fighting a war like this, which will be similar Vietnam and will go the way it did for the Russians unless we use our Air Superiority as we did in 2001..
I don't know, I suppose reports on the Taliban being within striking distance of Kabul these days kind of conveys a sense of urgency to try and stabilize the situation, so that a plan/solution can become viable later on.
Gates and the US military mind-set is definitely the Achilles tendon in Afghanistan. The US has demonstrated its competence in conventional operations, but that’s not what the US military is confronting in Afghanistan where provincial war-lords wage parochial war influenced by Taliban, Hisb-i-Islami and Haqqanis fighters. The flawed mind-set is that the military—resisting the lessons of Vietnam—is not prepared to shed conventional war and replace it with counter insurgency operations. This is something that the Australian Army has done very well in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam. Phuoc Tuy was, after all, the safest province in Vietnam and the strategy used by the Task Force was called the ‘ink-blot’: a massive patrolling program with a reaction force on stand-by, followed by a shift of the operation base and the spread of the ink-blot. Engineer units follow up behind the patrols winning ‘hearts and minds’ of the villagers by helping with rebuilding programs. To do this effectively, a minimum of 150,000 troops would be needed to secure the whole country for a finite period of time and engineering works would not be wasted on barrack blocks for foreign (US) soldiers. What’s more, we’d win! http://www
Great post, but the biggest issue with the escalation in Afghanistan is not the lack of a military objective and strategy (though that is a real issue), it is the complete lack of a viable political objective and strategy to give the military efforts direction.
We don't need large numbers of troops in Afghanistan to "get" Bin Laden. If we knew where he was, "getting" him would be a special ops project anyway.
So if "getting" Bin Laden isn't a good reason to be there, why are we still in Afghanistan? and why, why does Obama insist on keeping this specific campaign promise? (Nobody expects a politician to keep all of their campaign promises ....) Unless there are good answers that are not currently public knowledge, we should be winding down the Afghan war, not escalating it.
Same reason we can't just pull out of Iraq. We broke it, we bought it.
Besides, something does need to be done about all the poppy flowing out of there nowadays.
Totally different realities in Iraq. They have vital oil supplies and had an educated population and an infrastrucre before we broke it. Afghanasitan had no natural resources, no real economy, outside of heroin, and no infrastructure. How long are we going to stay simply to impact poppy growth?
Hey, Novak,
Your statement is as dumb as Colin Powell.
These wars are about $ and nothing else. We are going to crawl out of Afghanistan, and Iraq. As one Iraq citizen said / even if you the USA could make Iraq heaven on earth/ we do not want it from you!
The people in Iraq and Afghanistan know why we are in their countries /
Oil baby ,oil/!
Not because we are spreading "democracy " What a crock./ Soon we will be in Iran helping Israel in vain. War baby, War $$$
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