Obama at the Precipice: Tough Guys Don't Need to Dance in Afghanistan
It's early in 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson faces a critical decision. Should he escalate in Vietnam? Should he say "yes" to the request from U.S. commanders for more troops? Or should he change strategy, downsize the American commitment, even withdraw completely, a decision that would help him focus on his top domestic priority, "The Great Society" he hopes to build?
We all know what happened. LBJ listened to the generals and foreign policy experts and escalated, with tragic consequences for the United States and calamitous results for the Vietnamese people on the receiving end of American firepower. Drawn deeper and deeper into Vietnam, LBJ would soon lose his way and eventually his will, refusing to run for reelection in 1968.
President Obama now stands at the edge of a similar precipice. Should he acquiesce to General Stanley A. McChrystal's call for 40,000 to 60,000 or more U.S. troops for Afghanistan? Or should he pursue a new strategy, downsizing our commitment, even withdrawing completely, a decision that would help him focus on national health care, among his other top domestic priorities?
The die, I fear, is cast. In his "war of necessity," Obama has evidently already ruled out even considering a "reduction" option, no less a withdrawal one, and will likely settle on an "escalate lite" program involving more troops (though not as many as McChrystal has urged), more American trainers for the Afghan army, and even a further escalation of the drone war over the Pakistani borderlands and new special operations actions.
By failing his first big test as commander-in-chief this way, Obama will likely ensure himself a one-term presidency, and someday be seen as a man like LBJ whose biggest dreams broke upon the shoals of an unwinnable war.
The Conventional Wisdom: Military Escalation
To whom, we may ask, is Obama listening as he makes his decision on Afghanistan strategy and troop levels? Not the skeptics, it's safe to assume. Not the free-thinkers, not today's equivalents of Mary McCarthy or Norman Mailer. Instead, he's doubtless listening to the generals and admirals, or the former generals and admirals who now occupy prominent "civilian" positions at the White House and inside the beltway.
By his actions, Obama has embraced the seemingly sober, conventional wisdom that senior military officers, whether on active duty or retired, have, as they say in the corridors of the Pentagon, "subject matter expertise" when it comes to strategy, war, even foreign policy.
Don't we know better than this? Don't we know, as Glenn Greenwald recently reminded us, that General McChrystal's strategic review was penned by a "war-loving foreign policy community," in which the usual suspects -- "the Kagans, a Brookings representative, Anthony Cordesman, someone from Rand" -- were rounded up to argue for more troops and more war?
Don't we know, as Tom Engelhardt recently reminded us, that Obama's "civilian" advisors include "Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who is the president's special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan (dubbed the "war czar" when he held the same position in the Bush administration), and James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, who is national security advisor, not to speak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency"? Are we surprised, then, that when we "turn crucial war decisions over to the military, [we] functionally turn foreign policy over to them as well"? And that they, in turn, always opt for more troops, more money, and more war?
One person unsurprised by this state of affairs would have been Norman Mailer, who died in 2007. War veteran, famed author of the war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning report on Vietnam-era protests, The Armies of the Night (1968), self-styled tough guy who didn't dance, Mailer witnessed (and dissected) the Vietnam analog to today's Afghan events. Back in 1965, Mailer bluntly stated that the best U.S. option was "to get out of Asia." Period.
The Unconventional Wisdom: Military Extrication
Can Obama find the courage and wisdom to extricate our troops from Afghanistan? Courtesy of Norman Mailer, here are three unconventional pointers that should be driving him in this direction:
1. Don't fight a war, and clearly don't escalate a war, in a place which means so little to Americans. In words that apply quite readily to Afghanistan today, Mailer wrote in 1965: "Vietnam [to Americans] is faceless. How many Americans have ever visited that country? Who can say which language is spoken there, or what industries might exist, or even what the country looks like? We do not care. We are not interested in the Vietnamese. If we were to fight a war with the inhabitants of the planet of Mars there would be more emotional participation by the people of America."
2. Beware of cascading dominoes and misleading metaphors, whether in Southeast Asia or anywhere else. The domino theory held that if Vietnam, then split into north and south, was united under communism, other Asian countries, including Thailand, the Philippines, perhaps even India, would inevitably fall to communism as well, just like so many dominoes toppling. Instead, it was communism that fell or, alternately, morphed into a version that we could do business with (to paraphrase former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher).
We may no longer speak metaphorically of falling dominoes in today's Af-Pak theater of operations. Nevertheless, our fears are drawn from a similarly misleading image: If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, Pakistan will surely follow, opening a nuclear Pandora's Box to anti-American terrorists in which, in our fevered imaginations, smoking guns will once again become mushroom clouds.
Despite the fevered talk of falling dominoes in his era, Mailer was unmoved. Such rhetoric suggests, he wrote in 1965, "that we are not protecting a position of connected bastions so much as we are trying to conceal the fact that the bastions are about gone -- they are not dominoes, but sand castles, and a tide of nationalism is on the way in. It is curious foreign policy to use metaphors in defense of a war; when the metaphors are imprecise, it is a swindle."
To this I'd add that, in viewing countries and peoples as so many dominoes, which by the actions -- or the inaction -- of the United States are either set up or knocked down, we vastly exaggerate our own agency and emphasize our sense of self-importance. And before we even start in on the inevitable argument about "Who lost Afghanistan?" or "Who lost Pakistan?" is it too obvious to say that never for a moment did we own these countries and peoples?
3. Carrots and sticks may work together to move a stubborn horse, but not a proud people determined to find their own path. As Mailer put it, with a different twist: "Bombing a country at the same time you are offering it aid is as morally repulsive as beating up a kid in an alley and stopping to ask for a kiss."
As our Predator and Reaper drones scan the Afghan terrain below, launching missiles to decapitate terrorists while unintentionally taking innocents with them, we console ourselves by offering aid to the Afghans to help them improve or rebuild their country. As it happens, though, when the enemy hydra loses a head, another simply grows in its place, while collateral damage only leads to a new generation of vengeance-seekers. Meanwhile, promised aid gets funneled to multi-national corporations or siphoned off by corrupt government officials, leaving little for Afghan peasants, certainly not enough to win their allegiance, let alone their "hearts and minds."
If we continue to speak with bombs while greasing palms with dollars, we'll get nothing more than a few bangs for our $228 billion (and counting).
What if LBJ Had Listened to Mailer in '65?
Not long before LBJ crossed his Rubicon and backed escalation in Vietnam, he could have decided to pull out. Said Mailer:
"The image had been prepared for our departure -- we heard of nothing but the corruption of the South Vietnam government and the professional cowardice of the South Vietnamese generals. We read how a Viet Cong army of 40,000 soldiers was whipping a government army of 400,000. We were told in our own newspapers how the Viet Cong armed themselves with American weapons brought to them by deserters or captured in battle with government troops; we knew it was an empty war for our side."
Substitute "the Hamid Karzai government" for "the South Vietnam government" and "Taliban" for "Viet Cong" and the same passage could almost have been written yesterday about Afghanistan. We know the Karzai government is corrupt, that it stole the vote in the last election, that the Afghan army is largely a figment of Washington's imagination, that its troops sell their American-made weapons to the enemy. But why do our leaders once again fail to see, as Mailer saw with Vietnam, that this, too, is a recognizably "empty war for our side"?
Mailer experienced the relentless self-regard and strategic obtuseness of Washington as a mystery, but that didn't stop him from condemning President Johnson's decision to escalate in Vietnam. For Mailer, LBJ was revealed as "a man driven by need, a gambler who fears that once he stops, once he pulls out of the game, his heart will rupture from tension." Johnson, like nearly all Americans, Mailer concluded, was a member of a minority group, defined not in racial or ethnic terms but in terms of "alienat[ion] from the self by a double sense of identity and so at the mercy of a self which demands action and more action to define the most rudimentary borders of identity."
This American drive for self-definition through constant action, through headlong acceleration, even through military escalation, the novelist described, in something of a mixed metaphor, as "the swamps of a plague" in which Americans had been caught and continued to sink. He saw relief of the desperate condition coming only via "the massacre of strange people."
To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of Mailer's analysis here, more emotionally Heart-of-Darkness than coolly rational. But that's precisely why I want someone Mailer-esque -- pugnacious, free-swinging, and prophetical, provocative and profane -- advising our president. Right now.
As Obama's military experts wield their battlefield metrics and call for more force (to be used, of course, with ever greater precision and dexterity), I think Mailer might have replied: We think the only thing they understand is force. What if the only thing we understand is force?
Mailer, I have no doubt, would have had the courage to be seen as "weak" on defense, because he would have known that Americans had no dog in this particular fight. I think he would intuitively have recognized the wisdom of the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote more than 2,000 years ago in The Art of War that "to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." Our generals, by way of contrast, seem to want to fight those 100 battles with little hope of actually subduing the enemy.
What Obama needs, in other words, is fewer generals and ex-generals and more Norman Mailers -- more outspoken free-thinkers who have no interest in staying inside the pentagonal box that holds Washington's thinking tight. What Obama needs is to silence the endless cries for more troops and more war emanating from the military and foreign policy "experts" around him, so he can hear the voices of today's Mailers, of today's tough-minded dissenters. Were he to do so, he might yet avoid repeating LBJ's biggest blunder -- and so avoid suffering his political fate as well.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu.
[Note on sources: Most of the Mailer quotations in this piece are drawn from a speech he wrote for "Vietnam Day," May 25, 1965, in Berkeley, California, as reprinted in Cannibals and Christians (New York, 1966), a fascinating collection of cutting prose and dreadful poetry.]
Copyright 2009 William J. Astore
Arianna Huffington: Why Joe Biden Should Resign
The vice president has long opposed escalating in Afghanistan. So if the president decides to escalate, Biden, for the good of the country, should escalate his willingness to act on his "deep reservations" and resign.
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i see the end of the US coming, and with people willing to be fooled by fake politicians like obama getting voted into office on a preacher speech,, its obvious to me this country is going down the tubes
thank god im retiring, and finding myself a private island somewhere to live on, so i wont have to see the demise of the american empire
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN? HAHAHAHAHA
The MSM and bloggers should make up their collective minds....i
As a teacher, I use metaphors to explain things that are very difficult to grasp on their own terms to bright university students. If the "reasons" for going to war are so subtle and complex that they require the use of metaphor to be explained, such "reasons" do not have enough urgency to justify War.
You deny the legitimacy of the report I cited, and I deny the legitimacy of continuing a global counterinsurgency campaign to seek revenge for 9/11. While I understand and agree with the need for vigilance and narrowly pursued military and intelligence intervention to quell terrorist activity and diminish its capacity to strike, I don't see how a GCC will effectuate that objective. Let's watch the Frontline documentary and resume this conversation thereafter.
Another good article in the Boston Globe by Andrew J. http://www
Ah, but Obama has been given the peace prize. Surely that means we are not at war. Perhaps next week they'll begin calling it a "Police Action," which did nothing to protect the 50 plus thousand Americans who died in Nam.
The die has already been cast, so it's futile to opine about Obama's policy to "finish the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda." A more productive line of discussion is asking what does "finishing the fight" mean, and matching up our strategy to meet those objectives.
Obama and McChrystal have so far been trying to defend the countryside, and have put our kids in some very dangerous situations, and have gotten many of them killed. Their latest idea is to have our kids mingle with the populace and cull out the taliban. Watch the upcoming Frontline documentary and see what clusterF that is turning out to be. The people are afraid of the Taliban, and distrust the troops. Our kids don't even have good translators in their companies, and can't tell Taliban from friendlies. That is just a bs situation to put our kids in.
The community organizing part of the plan won't work. A better strategy maybe would be to use US troops to monitor the borders and fortify economic power centers, and then send out the Afghan army to harass the Taliban. That way, when problems come up in the field, b/c of Taliban tactics, e.g. intimidation, then the Afghan government can do something to support their own troops
Our kids don't even have good translators in their companies, and can't tell Taliban from friendlies. That is just a bs situation to put our kids in.
Astore's piece is so on the money, it only makes one more angry that our kids are put in a situation like this, including not having translator
"Obama has evidently already ruled out even considering a 'reduction' option, no less a withdrawal one."
I fear this is correct. What this means is, given his proclivity for finding the middle, we will incrementally place ourselves into an impossible situation that we should have been smart enough to avoid in the first place. The fact is, too many politicians who understand too little about too much are working too hard to limit the president's options by making up "tests" of his "manhood" and false measures of "strength" and American interests. The President will muddle along, much like JFK, until he finds himself unable to undecide the politically induced middle of the road indecision that lead to a four alarm disaster. And the beat goes on!
Very well put. Agree completely
William,
President Obama has intelligence briefings daily, and he has access to information which many in the American public are not privy to.
The cause of all the antipathy against Afghanistan takes root in the bad experience the USA had with Iraq. We need to put things into perspective and judge the President's actions on objective reality. The reason why he was elected is to make tough decisions, even if you or many Americans disagree with him.
Hypothetically, if Al Qaeda gains ground and the cause is President Obama's withdrawal from Afghanistan simply because he was pressured by Americans at home, would you be one of the first people to blame him for not increasing troops in that country? Or would you continue to defend him for withdrawing troops?
That's why we need to trust President Obama.
"Don't we know, as Tom Engelhardt recently reminded us, that Obama's "civilian" advisors include "Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who is the president's special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan (dubbed the "war czar" when he held the same position in the Bush administration), and James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, who is national security advisor, not to speak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency"?"
Obama's advisors on the war are primarily Bush appointees Obama chose - god knows why - to retain. Did you trust Bush on Afghanistan? Because he is still in te White House in spirit with his appointees. And advisors have a great deal of power over what goes into such briefings as you remark.
Yes, Obama has relied on Bush holdovers, and this is not a good thing, not by any means...th
"The cause of all the antipathy against Afghanistan takes root in the bad experience the USA had with Iraq."
No. It's because we are witnessing our kids getting killed in Afghanistan because of poor strategy.
"President Obama has intelligence briefings daily, and he has access to information which many in the American public are not privy to."
I can guarantee you, the CIA has spent more time worrying how much lawyers may cost if prosecuted for holding power drills to people's heads in Guantanomo than in gathering actual intelligence in Aghanistan or anywhere else. They will tell Obama what he wants to hear, if for no other reason than that the one thing they can accomplish with their "daily briefings" is how to make their boss happy.
It might save them on those lawyers' bills, too.
So clearly no sane and decent person wants a war for the sake of a war. Let's be honest they are expensive, they take up a lot of your time, and of course in polite society killing people is a bad thing. But, that being said the deed is done. We have a war in Afghanistan now, and more importantly the current situation is as much, if not mostly, a result of our mishandling of the situation as anything else. So to put it if you break it, you buy it. We broke Afghanistan at lest once if not twice. So, whether we can square the conflict there with our own sensibilities it is our duty as a responsible nation to put humpty dumpty, or in this case Afghanistan, back to gether before we just pull out and let the country collapse on itself,... again.
Also I'm glad that Obama takes the opinions of generals, retired generals, and other people linked to the military when it pertains to militry operations. Because honestly generals, believe it or not are smart. They spend years studying, in colleges and war colleges, their trade. So in matters relating to the deployment of troops, tactics, strategy, and logistics so that makes them eminently qualified to advise the president on the best way to implement the goals he puts forward.
We can leave Afghanistan without mending it first - eventually we will have to, since it can't be mended by the US especially not by its military, which must always have American interests as a primary goal.
Generals may be intelligent as all get out, but they cannot decide foreign policy - and counterterrorism strategy is political, not military, in its essence.
Generals support only one thing...Wa
LBJ had another barking dog to contend with: Rethuglicans who would have accused him of being "soft on communism" if he'd withdrawn. (What a diabolically excellent epithet that is -- requires no proof of any particular action or even belief, so impossible to defend against.) I suppose the current equivalent would be "soft on terror" or some such. And the right-wing noise machine is far more pervasive and coordinated now than it was then.
According to Gen Petreaus, the U.S. is continuing a Global Counterinsurgency campaign. Iraq and now Afghanistan are just two of seemingly many bull’s-eyes on the global counterinsurgency map. Let’s call it the GCC since the military loves their acronyms. I wonder what sovereign nations are next. We are being primed for Somalia and Yemen so they may be next but then North Korea gets played in the news just enough to wet our palettes with the possibility. Then there is Iran (definite long shot since too many big players like China and Russia would be obstructionists). Well Tijuana is a lot like Kabul, maybe if the GCC gets desperate, we can fight the drug wars in Mexico, nation build and presto, no more immigration concerns. The Mexican people won’t have a reason to come here. To the contrary, it may be Americans crossing the border for a better life. A Global Counterinsurgency campaign needs either more pseudo WMD threats or just outright pre-emptive strikes to culminate an insurgency. If Obama escalates this fake war, his Nobel Prize will be the epitomy of irony.
The military is the wrong tool for counter-insurgency. It's mostly a matter for international espionage and law enforcement. What's more, the word "insurgency" means rebellion against legally constituted authority. By those terms what we're doing in Afghanistan is propping up our hand-picked despot du jour and quashing legitimate resistance to that regime. The reality around the world is that we are amateurs at Realpolitik. We side with goofballs because they aren't the guy we hate even more, and we find ourselves once again in a Vietnam replay. The common thread is that we are too dense to recognize when we lurch into situations where we have NO CONTROL over the outcome. Victory (sic.) in Afghanistan (or Iraq) is dependent on what somebody else does not what we do. How many times must we repeat the same mistake before we realize that we are inept imperialists at best. We should repair our own country and stop meddling in the affairs of others. We just aren't any good at world domination.
Imperialism? World domination? What the bleep are you talking about? The war in Afghanistan is a direct response to Al-Qaeda's unprovoked attacks on American soil targeting and murdering 2,993 innocent American men and women. Following these attacks Al-Qaeda declared war on the United States vowing to see the deaths of an additional 4 million Americans, including woman and children.
The War on Terrorism including both the Iraq and Afghanistan operations was launched directly due to the words and actions of Saddam Hussein.
During the Presidency of Saddam Hussein, the nation of Iraq used, possessed, and made efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Hussein was internationally known for his use of chemical weapons in the 1980s against Kurdish civilians during and after the Iran–Iraq War. It is also known that in the 1980s he pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program.
After the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War, the United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi WMD and related equipment and materials throughout the early 1990s, with varying degrees of Iraqi cooperation and obstructio
A fake war in Afghanistan?
On September 11 2001 Al-Qaeda launched a series of coordinated unprovoked attacks on American soil targeting innocent men, women, and children, On that morning, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania, after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C. There were no survivors from any of the flights.
In total 2,993 innocent Americans, were murdered in the attacks. Following these attacks Al-Qaeda declaired war on the United States vowing to see the deaths of an additional 4 million Americans, including woman and children.
In the days following the attacks a banner hung in the rain over the ruins of the Twin Towers, it read "We Shall Never Forget." It is so sad to see you either have, or are ignorant of the unprovoked murders that started this war.
A fake war? I don't think so.
Al-Qaeda is not the country of Afghanistan. That organization is made up of a handful of extremists from many countries - united by religion, not borders. At the time, Afghanistan was home to some of them. Do you suggest we declare war on every country that AQ members reside in? It is impossible to succeed in counter terrorism with a military strategy.
As for your comments about Hussein and WMDs, you are one of about 14 people left in the US that believes that nonsense.
And a recent Harvard report documented that 45,000 people die annually from lack of health insurance. We need to take care of our own house and narrowly deal with terrorism threats strategically. Nation building needs to start in our own country. We can assist with partner nations to aid Afghanistan but we cannot continue this absurd campaign of global counterinsurgency to exact vengeance from now until we ultimately destroy ourselves in the process. I don't think you really believe what you write.
Your recitation of the events of 9/11 is an irrelevant non sequitur, about as pertinent as using Pearl Harbor to shape our Far Eastern policy. At least you got the basic facts right. Congratulations.
Insightful, well-written article. Thank you.
Co-sign!
You do in fact edit in accord to political views despite your disclaimer. Thank you for revealing that you adhere to the practices honed to fine perfection under Stalin. The complete censorship of an opposing view. This of course carries with it the moral stain you must live with each and every day. I can speak the thing which you will never be able to bare again: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You will never live in true freedom for you will forever be haunted by the shadow, the specter of your true conscious, you will forever look into your own eyes and see the Liar, and forever on no goodness will arise from your actions, as you have corrupted the very nature of your own soul.
I am pleased that today the moderator(s) are being fair and following Huffington Post submission guidelines. Thank you for allowing my voice to be heard.
The above note was directed at one of the weekend moderators who refused to allow my point of view to be heard -- my posts followed all rules and conventions in the posting guidelines, I re-wrote these posts seven times to be certain and submitted them to no avail, no policy-oriented infractions were present -- my comments were censored solely due to political content.
We are clueless about our slide into second rate status. No great power can squander its resources as we have for the past 30 years. We got lucky when we survived the chaos of the Vietnam era, the societal dislocation and the economic damage, the economic collapse of 1973-4, ten years of stagflation, followed by the disastrous "borrow and spend" frenzy that was actually Reaganomics. Amazingly, by 2000 we had almost gotten our act together when GW Bush got selected and launched a new orgy of imperialism funded with borrowed money.
Setting aside the obvious fact that no western nation has done what we're planning to do--subdue the non-country of Afghanistan--we are neglecting domestic problems that must be addressed. In the 60's we had a sizzling, robust economy. Not now. Infrastructure is crumbling. The majority of states are upside down financially. We're deficit spending to stimulate our sagging economy and create jobs. In short, it is insane grandiosity for America to pretend to be the world's cop. We shouldn't spend another dime on Afghanisan. We shouldn't attempt any military actions not fully supported by our allies. Our military budget should shrink to that of Russia or China. We are doing what all failed empires have done, spending ourselves into oblivion with meaningless foreign adventures.
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