September is upon us. By the end of this month, mid-October at the latest, U.S. policy in Afghanistan will have fundamentally shifted. From what I've been hearing, everyone who works on this issue expects to not come up for air until Christmas. We are at a pivotal time. Reports from Afghanistan range from dire to mediocre. Those leading the effort -- from the president to the NATO allies to Special Ambassador Holbrooke to the Afghans themselves -- claim that we must see the effects of a fundamental policy shift away from the use of force and toward a place where we get the benefit of the doubt. Commander McChrystal's review went to the Defense Department yesterday. The administration's metrics of progress are due sometime soon and war casualties are returning the public's attention to the issue. A recent post-ABC poll found more Americans pessimistic about the war than ever. The confidence game is on.
Despite protests actions planned for October, even anti-war Americans feel conflicted about Afghanistan. Democrats and most progressives loathe getting in President Obama's face about the war. They also feel obligated to help Afghans. There's no escaping the fact that any degree of success in Afghanistan is going to take a patient and long-term social strategy. Whether it is the military carrying out this strategy, the international community, non-uniform wearing American personnel, contractors, whoever. Getting Afghanistan to a positive tipping point is going to take a big, big commitment. Many say it is impossible. Some of those protesting additional troops are not uncomfortable with a long commitment, they just don't want it to be a military one.
But this open-ended contradiction is the crux of a much larger issue -- one that is routinely ignored in the debate about Afghanistan. Which is this: Why is the military responsible for so much of our nation's security? Why have our other agencies of government -- those led by people in regular clothes -- become so incapable? Why haven't we -- nearly twenty years after the Cold War's end -- figured out a way to deploy all the talents in our government to solve the task at hand? This failure was obvious in New Orleans in 2005. It is obvious today in Afghanistan. And in order to achieve anything resembling success there, we must correct it. The shift to civilian dominance and then self-reliance in Afghanistan must become emblematic of movement away from military-reliance here at home. Any "exit strategy" for Afghanistan must be accompanied by an exit strategy for our own system's addiction to military-led solutions. Congress just allocated billions of dollars to restore the civil-sector in Pakistan. How about channeling some of that same concern inward?
America's over-dependence on the military is an open secret among policy types. Study upon study -- many by the military itself -- points out how the Defense Department accrues responsibilities that it probably shouldn't have -- with little discussion or scrutiny. As an institution, it shuns political debates (though it is a master at gaming the budget process) and so is often defenseless and reduced to stereotypes in public. On top of that, American culture has a dysfunctional pathology about the military. In my own conversations, I've heard emotions ranging from adulation to loathing to sorrow and shame about society's ignorance about those who wear a uniform. None of these feelings lead to productive and factual discussions about new ways for interacting with the world. We've ignored the conversation for so long that critical dialogue about the military is easily misconstrued as criticism of the military. This has been going on while our uniformed personnel have become the most internationalist, most skilled and most relevant players across the U.S. government. Our cultural hyper-sensitivity on top of ignorance is hurting us. Even more, it is hurting our ability to be the world's premiere open and democratic society. No matter how much we love and trust the U.S. military, the American face to the world cannot be wearing a uniform.
Military professionals also ascribe to an ethic where no challenge precedes service. They are the ultimate idealists. They salute their civilian masters and carry out orders. Which is why we create myths about them, but also why they shouldn't be in charge of policy. Besides the fact that it is not their job to set strategy, belief in the supremacy of civilian control is the cornerstone of American democracy -- cherished and carefully guarded by the military itself. The institutional failure I'm talking about -- our dependence on the Defense Department for far too much -- it isn't the military's fault. It is a failure of civilian leadership. The blame lies with Congress and the Executive Branch. In a world where we can no longer contain threats and where force is mostly counter-productive, every agency of the U.S. government, from Justice to Agriculture to Commerce to the Census Bureau should be deployable overseas. The roles of the State Department and USAID (our economic development agency) need to be updated and given much more influence. (USAID still doesn't have a leader, which is depriving our policy of a long-term developmental perspective just when we need it most). Because of this decades-long failure, we must now learn to run before we learn to walk in Afghanistan. And people in uniform are still tasked with pretty much everything. And it will stay this way until we have alternatives.
If we had a broader notion of security, the politics of Afghanistan would be entirely different. The laboratory of the 1990s could have provided the context for a new security policy -- but Congress pretty much skipped this thorny topic while under conservative reign. In 1993, we lost 18 Army Rangers in Somalia amidst a humanitarian mission that switched to warlord hunting. Security policy making should have stopped in its tracks and shifted right there. When we tried to prop up Haiti in the 90s, we quickly realized that they needed civil administrators, not the Marines. For years, our Guard and Reservists have been setting up humanitarian programs, doing city planning and helping local police throughout the Balkans. If we'd paid attention to those lessons, we would be ten years ahead of where we are now, scrambling to get civilian personnel to Afghanistan. And no matter how much people want to ignore Iraq today, we have lots to lose by not learning the lessons of that war.
Whether a person agrees or disagrees with American policy in Afghanistan, anyone involved in the debate needs to take into consideration the much larger question of how America interacts with the world. Must our best foot forward always be wearing a combat boot? If security is a broad concept and a long term ideal, words like "occupation" on the Left no longer make sense and words like "victory" on the Right seem foolish. Policy proposals would be revealed differently, too. Like Representative McGovern's (MA) very reasonable request for some kind of end-state indicators. Or Senator Feingold's (WI) desire for a timeline. These shouldn't be controversial. They should be planning tools that are part of a long-term commitment where we have phases of activity that overlap and change. That's it. These terms wouldn't be lightening rods if we shifted the conversation -- and the responsibility -- for carrying out American policy.
Last week Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented on the decline in U.S. public support for the Afghan war. But he invited a national debate over the conflict, saying it was better to take a "hard look" at the problem than to ignore it.
"Let's take a good, hard look at this fight we're in, what we're doing and why," he said. "I'd rather see us, as a nation, argue about the war -- struggling to get it right -- than ignore it."
This is great advice. And in so doing, we could finally have a long overdue conversation about US presence in the world -- how we want to be and how we're going to get there.
Follow Lorelei Kelly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/loreleikelly
Michael Brenner: America's Afghan Election
Celebrated at first by Obama on the White House lawn as a signal success marking the country's progress on the road to democracy, the Afghan election now looks like a monkey wrench thrown into the already stuttering engine of our mission there.
Afghanistan's area equals 250,000 square miles, 1.5 times California's area. Like CA there're many armed people in Afghanistan. How many million soldiers would be required to secure CA? How many millions to secure Afghanistan?
We've 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. At any given time half are sleeping (troops must sleep), then if one deducts military overhead (medics, commo, mechanics etc); how many 'shooters' remain to secure 250,000 sq miles?
Not to mention; every Army officer knows that religious mass movements cannot be put down militarily, see Christians-Romans, Islam, etc.
These factors lead one to ponder how much tragic “Can Do” lying's been mouthed by senior officers in the last eight years. All this swill coming from senior officers who are the most formally educated, but maybe the most ineffective, most politicized military leaders in our history.
If Obama does discover that the politically-bent Rightists generals he inherited are full of kolbasi faster than Lincoln did, our young soldiers are in for greater tragedy. So's our nation. A purge of our politically and religiously-bent military leadership is overdue. The team we have now handed the Mid-East Victory Cup to Iran years ago.
Our all-volunteer army, led by these politicized officers, is a powerful enabler of foolishly adventuresome military actions leading to tragedies, not victories. You've watched that in living color for the last eight years.
"Let's take a good, hard look at this fight we're in, what we're doing and why," he said. "I'd rather see us, as a nation, argue about the war -- struggling to get it right -- than ignore it."
I for one, don't want to struggle to get any war "right." My struggle is for peace.
For a Stanford graduate, Kelly possesses a suspiciously naive understanding of the effects US non-military governmental agencies have abroad. Or do I hear legions of black men in this country clamoring for the Department of "Justice" to go global? And hasn't the Department of Agriculture already done enough to destroy sustainable, indigenous farming worldwide? Do we really want to give the United States Department of Commerce license to strip more economies of their protections - to open them up to more US corporations? If USAID doesn't have a leader isn't it less effective at ensnaring countries into debt, supplying arms to warmongers, and funding drug lords? Whittled down, her inspiring left-of-center premise is that to better subjugate the people of Afghanistan we need to get creative with our DemocracyArsenal.
She repeatedly makes disparaging remarks towards war-resisters. When she states that "even anti-war Americans feel conflicted about Afghanistan," she implies that they make up a fringe minority, and that they are not committed to their beliefs. This one is not Kelly's fault, but a more general problem of branding, where those within the Iraq anti-war movement are confused with many other types of people; pacifists, anti-imperialists, libertarians, etc.
We live in a new world, where the greatest threat to national security is not who has the biggest bomb, but dirty water, famine, and people earning less than a dollar a day. As Army Lt. Col. Shannon Bebee said, "...we don't have a tank or a plane to counter that." [http://dopeace.ning.com/profiles/blogs/what-is-real-national-security].
While the world has changed, we have not.
Policy is driven by elected officials who are driven by constituents who are trying to feed and clothe their families--which means policy today is driven by money. As Lisa Schirch reminds us, Congress funds military projects (needed or not) because defense contractors provide jobs--LOTS of jobs--for constituents. "The development community simply doesn’t have the lobbying clout of the defense industry," Shirch notes [http://www.3dsecurity.org/sites/3dsecurity.org/files/Civil-Military%20Blur_Aug09.pdf].
What we are talking about is a fundamental re-thinking of who we are, what we do and how we do it. That will create a new economy based not in the violence-industrial complex, but in long-term sustainability.
Different kinds of work doesn't mean no work. We must find the courage to stop doing what's profitable and do what's right--then we'll find out that it, too, is profitable. And probably a lot more fun.
That being said, you may have heard recently that America is the only western country that lacks a national health care system (true). It also lags the OECD average in quite a few other measures of general social well-being from average life expectancy to high school science ability to median hourly earnings for manufacturing jobs. It has only two parties, just one more than communism (that's only part-joke), and a greater percentage of its population in jail than any country on earth (including police states like China and Cuba). And that's just its domestic 'nation building', before even considering the very substantial shift away from spending on foreign service (particularly on USAID) towards military spending (Pentagon) over the last 10 years.
Frankly, America has never been particularly well positioned to lead nation-building efforts, and her position has been getting worse, not better. It's not the war but the peace that she need her allies for.
Everything is impossible, until a way is found.
Another’s philosophy may appear preposterous, when set amidst and compared with your own explanation of reality. Your philosophy may also be seen as nonsensical, as it appears out of context in another’s understanding of reality. These effects aren’t just due to distortion, induced by differences in perspective. They occur because all philosophies are riddled with inconsistency. As a consequence of their origin and means of construction. Yet these inherent contradictions are not necessarily evident, when viewed and evaluated from inside the philosophy itself.
Attempting to convince and convert each other using the evidence available in any two defective understandings, is unlikely to prove successful. Appreciating the practical purpose and need for a working explanation (any effectual explanation) is, I would suggest, of potentially far more benefit.
No military "adventure" in Afghanistan has ever been anything but disaster for both the invader and invadee. What a fiasco. But I don't know how we get out of Iraq or Afghanistan gracefully - I continue to wonder how the US will ever recover from the Bush/Cheney disaster.
You ask all the right questions.
As a face in a uniform, that's been twice to Afghanistan, let me see if I can provide some further perspective--I certainly don't have answers, not on this question.
First, I'd suggest that the reason that, in Afghanistan, the Americna face is still a military one, is because the environment won't support a largely unarmed presence, not yet and not for a long while to come. When USAID can defend itself, prehaps, but then it won't be, really, the civilain face you'd prefer.
The civilian face I'd prefer as well. We build schools, roads, and hospitals, but we make these gfts from behind rifles and from under kevlar helmets--quite the mixed message, but for now, still the only realistic option, at least that I can see, short of abandoning these people, something I do NOT want to do.
The area of your article with which I disagree--you cite past lessons learned and this is a classic military blunder in the making. You have to be very circumspect in applying lessons learned form one area to another. Afghanistan is not Iraq is not Haiti is not the Balkans. There are good ideas there to consider, but they must be carefully weighed and undoubtedly adjusted before being applied.
1. I am anti-war and not the least bit conflicted concerning Afghanistan. We don't belong there. We should declare an unconditional cease-fire and withdraw.
2. We need our civilian agencies in New Orleans and elsewhere in the U.S., not in Afghanistan.
3. You state that we love and trust the military, count me out. Not after what we did to Vietnam and its people.
4. Blame lies with everyone, there is no excuse for lack of personal responsibility. From the President to the Private.
5. You mentioned Haiti, please read Randall Robinson's "An Unbroken Agony" and explain how we "proped up" that country.
6. Finally, why do we have a "Defense" budget that exceeds the sum of all defense bugets of all the countries in the world?
You want the civilians to take over. Well they won't go there if they will be killed so need protection. Let the government run the strategy well they did that in Vietnam or did we not learn. Somalia if Clinton had listen to the general on the ground and given him the armor support he requested then we would have not had the casualties we had. What the world learned from that incident is if they create enough casualties Americans will cut and run as we did and now you want us to do it again.
Sounds pretty logical.
Time to leave Afghanistan now, no excuses. If the country, like Iraq collapse so be it, another casuality of American greed and arrogance. My wife is Vietnamese, from Vietnam, I have been there and seen what we did there in the name of " Chest beating" Patriotism - complete failure.
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