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Afghanistan: The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die
Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan
Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted smartly and pledged his loyal support for President Obama's decision to start withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011. In December, when Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add tens of thousands of additional American forces to the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the military to turn the situation around and begin handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan National Army and police. Speaking to the nation from West Point, Obama said that he'd ordered American forces to start withdrawing from Afghanistan at that time.
Here's the exchange, between Obama, Petraeus, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as reported by Jonathan Alter in his new book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One:
OBAMA: "I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?"
PETRAEUS: "Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame."
OBAMA: "If you can't do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"
PETRAEUS: "Yes, sir, in agreement."
MULLEN: "Yes, sir."
That seems unequivocal, doesn't it? Vice President Joe Biden, famously dissed as Joe Bite-Me by one of the now-disgraced aides of General Stanley McChrystal in the Rolling Stone profile that got him fired, seems to think so. Said Biden, again according to Alter: "In July of 2011 you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it."
In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the U.S. military, however, things are rarely what they seem. Petraeus, the Centcom commander "demoted" in order to replace McChrystal as U.S. war commander in Afghanistan, seems to be having second thoughts about what will happen next July -- and those second thoughts are being echoed and amplified by a phalanx of hawks, neoconservatives, and spokesmen for the counterinsurgency (COIN) cult, including Henry Kissinger, the Heritage Foundation, and the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Chiming in, too, are the lock-step members of the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, led by Senator John McCain.
In testimony before Congress just last week, Petraeus chose his words carefully, but clearly wasn't buying the notion that the July deadline means much, nor did he put significant stock in the fact that President Obama has ordered a top-to-bottom review of Afghan policy in December. According to the White House, that review will be a make-or-break assessment of whether the Pentagon is making any progress in the nine-year-long conflict against the Taliban.
In his recent Senate testimony -- before he fainted, and afterwards -- Petraeus minimized the significance of the December review and cavalierly declared that he "would not make too much of it." Pressed by McCain, the general flouted Biden's view by claiming that the deadline is a date "when a process begins [and] not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits."
The Right's Marching Orders for the President
Petraeus's defiant declaration that he wasn't putting much stock in the president's intending to hold the military command accountable for its failure in Afghanistan next December earned him an instant rebuke from the White House. Now, that same Petraeus is in charge.
The dispute over the meaning of July 2011 is, and will remain, at the very heart of the divisions within the Obama administration over Afghan policy.
Last December, in that West Point speech, Obama tried to split the difference, giving the generals what they wanted -- a lot more troops -- but fixing a date for the start of a withdrawal. It was hardly a courageous decision. Under intense pressure from Petraeus, McChrystal, and the GOP, Obama assented to the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops, ignoring the fact that McChrystal's unseemly lobbying for the escalation amounted to a Douglas MacArthur-like defiance of the primacy of civilian control of the military. (Indeed, after a speech McChrystal gave in London insouciantly rejecting Biden's scaled-down approach to the war, Obama summoned the runaway general to a tarmac outside Copenhagen and read him the riot act in Air Force One.)
If Obama's Afghan decision was a cave-in to the brass and a potential generals' revolt, the president also added that kicker of a deadline to the mix, not only placating his political base and minimizing Democratic unhappiness in Congress, but creating a trap of sorts for Petraeus and McChrystal. The message was clear enough: deliver the goods, and fast, or we're heading out, whether the job is finished or not.
Since then, Petraeus and McChrystal -- backed by their chief enabler, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican holdover appointed to his position by George W. Bush -- took every chance they could to downplay and scoff at the deadline.
By appointing Petraeus last Wednesday, Obama took the easy way out of the crisis created by McChrystal's shocking comments in Rolling Stone. It might not be inappropriate to quote that prescient British expert on Afghan policy, Peter Townsend, who said of the appointment: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
On the other hand, Petraeus is not simply another McChrystal. While McChrystal implemented COIN doctrine, mixing in his obsession with "kinetic operations" by U.S. Special Forces, Petraeus literally wrote the book -- namely, The U.S Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
If the COIN cult has a guru (whom all obey unquestioningly), it's Petraeus. The aura that surrounds him, especially among the chattering classes of the Washington punditocracy, is palpable, and he has a vast well of support among Republicans and assorted right-wingers on Capitol Hill, including the Holy Trinity: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman. Not surprisingly, there have been frequent mentions of Petraeus as a candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2012, although Obama's deft selection of Petraeus seems, once and for all, to have ruled out that option, since the general will be very busy on the other side of the globe for quite a while.
Even before the announcement that Petraeus had the job, the right's mighty Wurlitzer had begun to blast out its critique of the supposedly pernicious effects of the July deadline. The Heritage Foundation, in an official statement, proclaimed: "The artificial Afghanistan withdrawal deadline has obviously caused some of our military leaders to question our strategy in Afghanistan... We don't need an artificial timeline for withdrawal. We need a strategy for victory."
Writing in the Washington Post on June 24, Henry Kissinger cleared his throat and harrumphed: "The central premise [of Obama's strategy] is that, at some early point, the United States will be able to turn over security responsibilities to an Afghan government and national army whose writ is running across the entire country. This turnover is to begin next summer. Neither the premise nor the deadline is realistic... Artificial deadlines should be abandoned."
And the Post itself, in the latest of a long-running series of post-9/11 hawkish editorials, gave Obama his marching orders: "He... should clarify what his July 2011 deadline means. Is it the moment when ‘you are going to see a whole lot of people moving out,' as Vice President Biden has said, or ‘the point at which a process begins... at a rate to be determined by conditions at the time,' as General Petraeus testified? We hope that the appointment of General Petraeus means the president's acceptance of the general's standard."
Is the COIN Cult Ascendant?
It's too early to say whether Obama's decision to name Petraeus to replace his protégé McChrystal carries any real significance when it comes to the evolution of his Afghan war policy. The McChrystal crisis erupted so quickly that Obama had no time to carefully consider who might replace him and Petraeus undoubtedly seemed like the obvious choice, if the point was to minimize the domestic political risks involved.
Still, it's worrying. Petraeus's COIN policy logically demands a decade-long war, involving labor-intensive (and military-centric) nation-building, waged village by village and valley by valley, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless U.S., NATO, and Afghan casualties, including civilians. That idea doesn't in the least square with the idea that significant numbers of troops will start leaving Afghanistan next summer. Indeed, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer with long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, who headed Obama's first Afghan policy review in February 2009, told me (for an article in Rolling Stone last month) that it's not inconceivable the military will ask for even more troops, not agree to fewer, next year.
The Post is right, however, that Obama needs to grapple seriously with the deep divisions in his administration. Having ousted one rebellious general, the president now has little choice but to confront -- or cave in to -- the entire COIN cult, including its guru.
If Obama decides to take them on, he'll have the support of many traditionalists in the U.S. armed forces who reject the cult's preaching. Above all, his key ally is bound to be those pesky facts on the ground.
Afghanistan is the place where theories of warfare go to die, and if the COIN theory isn't dead yet, it's utterly failed so far to prove itself. The vaunted February offensive into the dusty hamlet of Marja in Helmand province has unraveled. The offensive into Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and a seething tangle of tribal and religious factions, once touted as the potential turning point of the entire war, has been postponed indefinitely. After nine years, the Pentagon has little to show for its efforts, except ever-rising casualties and money spent.
Perhaps Obama is still counting on U.S. soldiers to reverse the Taliban's momentum and win the war, even though administration officials have repeatedly rejected the notion that Afghanistan can be won militarily. David Petraeus or no, the reality is that the war will end with a political settlement involving President Karzai's government, various Afghan warlords and power brokers, the remnants of the old Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and the Taliban's sponsors in Pakistan.
Making all that work and winning the support of Afghanistan's neighbors -- including India, Iran, and Russia -- will be exceedingly hard. If Obama's diplomats managed to pull it off, the Afghanistan that America left behind might be modestly stable. On the other hand, it won't be pretty to look at it. It will be a decentralized mess, an uneasy balance between enlightened Afghans and benighted, Islamic fundamentalist ones, and no doubt many future political disagreements will be settled not in conference rooms but in gun battles. Three things it won't be: It won't be Switzerland. It won't be a base for Al Qaeda. And it won't be host to tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops.
The only silver lining in the Petraeus cloud is that the general has close ties to the military in Pakistan who slyly accept U.S. aid while funneling support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. If Obama decides to pursue a political and diplomatic solution between now and next July, Petraeus's Pakistan connection would be useful indeed. Time, however, is running out.
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Show AllMr. Dreyfuss is right on one thing here when he says that if all goes well, Afghnaistan "won't be a base for Al Qaeda." What he and the entire US establishment chooses to ignore is that contemporary terrorism requires no base. The 9-11 attacks were planned in Germany and launched from the Boston and New York airports and the Times Square attempt was carried out from an apartment in Connecticut, for a cost of $250,000 and $16,000 respectively. All the killing in Afghanistan has no relationship with such attacks, except to encourage more of them.
One might more correctly state Afghaanistan wont be a base for "Al Qaeda" because it never WAS a base for "Al Qaeda".
The base for "Al Qaeda" is the USA where the fiction of it was created.
As the US Wall Street economy continues to prosper at the expense of the US Main Street economy which continues to deteriorate, Al Qaeda and other forces (some of them homegrown in the US)that are reacting to US miltary industrial media complex actions will become more active in the US and abroad.
As Einstein told us: "for every action there is a reaction".
'As Einstein told us: "for every action there is a reaction".'
Actually it was Isaac Newton, and he said "Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi.”
Or for those who slept during Latin lessons:
“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions."
It's so famous, we even named it Newton's Third Law.
Afghanistan is the stark showcase in which we view whether Obomber has a whisper of intelligence or morality.
Obama's pro-corporate actions and policies represent a morally bankrupt application of his intelligence.
You would have to be an idiot to have believed the fictional timeline Obama threw out as a sop to naive liberals. Some of the key players in congress have family members making a fortune in the defense contracting business and every new president loves the feeling of being commander in chief during his own war. The desire to kill foreigners and control the world is an important American value.
See, it all depends on what the meaning of July 2011 is. Turns out, it's whatever the Heritage Foundation, or the equally far right WaPo, says it is. Maybe it really means July 2050, or 20__ (fill in the blank). IOW, whenever the far right decides "victory" is theirs. And Obama will march to their martial music from here to eternity. Phased staying is the actual policy, and always has been. As Thalidomide says, "The desire to kill foreigners and control the world is an important American value." Obama can't afford to politically ignore one of our core values. Forcing our stupidity down the world's throat has been the essence of US foreign policy for over 50 years.
What do Obama and Betrayus care? We just lost one of the few and great anti-war senators, Robert Byrd, today and I see this as a bad omen of a war machine destined to go from bad to worse.
It's the nature of the military--job security and purpose --they don't just give up and go home, because that means "defeat" There's no other definition of "job well done" or it is simply finished... being a completely unnecessary waste of time, money, and lives...
They only come home when someone gives the orders like the Commander-in-Chief.
Surely it is clear that the enemy is not the Taliban. Surely it is clear the enemy is the Afghan who comes with a host of ghosts to do battle in the region .
So at present we see the Zombies, the pathetically retarded, and plodding US with its toys and the pretend coalition of the willing against infinite numbers of Ghosts in the form of flitting Afghans and allies.
The Zombies have no chance. Now they see them now they don't. They can only achieve victory on the Ghost's terms.
But far worse than this, they can only leave on the Ghost's terms.
US citizens need to prepare their sons for death in Afghanistan. Either that or they must prepare to pay whatever they can earn to Afghanistan and the entire region of Ghosts while China does business with them.
In it is neither one of these, it is what these possibilities rest on, which is massive US shame and disgrace.
It is as if all these war hawks, from Petraeus to Obama, to the Republicans and the Democrats, have been constantly looking at old newsreels of the U.S. fighting in Vietnam and have said to themselves that they are not going to allow the United States to once again slink away from another under developed country without this time somehow emerging victorious. Perhaps they remember former President George W. Bush proclaiming after the first Persian Gulf War that the United States had licked the Vietnam syndrome and that the United States can now somehow do the same thing in Afghanistan.
This is what Susan Brewer discusses in her most relevant book Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq when she correctly observes that:
"To rally Americans around the flag, officials have manipulated facts, exaggeration and misinformation. The primary purpose, after all, is not to inform, but to persuade. In the end the propaganda campaign seeks to disguise a paradoxical message: war is not a time for citizens to have an informed debate and make up their own minds even as they fight in the name of freedom to do just that."
While Petraeus and Obama stir the winds of war the antiwar movement still has not flooded U.S. cities, and especially Washington D.C., with hundreds of thousands of people to protest the belligerent foreign policy of the United States headed by a Democratic president who seems to be doing his best to emulate another Democratic president named Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Erroll: You're exactly right, and so long as there is no draft we won't see those huge protests and marches against these obscene wars. Even if they were to take place, the MSM would ignore them or minimize them by reporting a fraction of the numbers showing up. As they've done for decades, especially in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
The disasters we've wreaked on Iraq and Afghanistan have gone largely unnoticed by most Americans. When I bother even bringing this up to most of my liberal friends, they mainly respond with shrugs or silence. They can't understand why I'm so pissed off about it. Hey, it's not anything to do with their lives, and I have no kids over there fighting a phantom (terrorism), so why am I bothered by it all? They aren't in favor of these hideously illegal wars, but since they can't stop them, why get all lathered up? Let's just try to enjoy life! Of course, these same liberals have been patiently expectant that Obama will prove his super-liberal street cred any day now; they've been "disappointed" with him but they're sure he's not nearly as bad as I seem to think. Aren't we still better off than if McCain had won? I want to say, yes, and Glenn Beck would be even worse than McCain! And Hitler might be worse than Beck! (Probably not.)
Obama might be duplicating LBJ in his foolish determination to "win" in Afghanistan, but most Americans aren't capable of connecting these simple dots, I've concluded. They don't remember history any more than Obama seems to understand it. Thus we hurdle from one disaster to the next, easily the most irresponsible citizens (read, consumers) in world history.
Until there is a draft or a tax, the American people won't be complaining much. Too busy watching TV.
Endless US military terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen.
In other recent news, ABC and the CIA are still peddling their old lie about "the search for Osama bin Laden." Never mind that he has been dead, dead, dead for 8 and 1/2 years, buried in his grave in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Leon Panetta, the current head of the CIA, admits that Osama bin Laden is in a very deep hiding place... As in six feet under? The CIA, ABC "News," and the Associated Propaganda (AP) just cannot bring themselves to admit to the American people that they have been lying about Osama bin Laden for the last eight years. To put a twist on the title a great little novel of the Sixties by Richard Farina, Been Lyin' so Long, it looks like Truth.
OBAMA: "I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?"
PETRAEUS: "Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame."
OBAMA: "If you can't do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"
PETRAEUS: "Yes, sir, in agreement."
MULLEN: "Yes, sir."
This exchange, from OBAMA: THE MOVIE, was literally ghost written by Lyndon Johnson.
why do we believe any of these lies?
The idea of COIN was summed up for me by some video footage I saw last week of a patrol near Kandahar or Marjah. Here is one of our new soldier-ambassadors, an enormous, jackbooted goon dripping with armor and grenades and bullets, his huge, loaded machine gun at the ready, looking down at some terrified little kid through his mirrored wasp glasses, trying to hand him a stuffed toy bunny rabbit. The kid was not dumb enough to take the rabbit, since, as it happened, his uncle was up the road hoping to ambush the goons with a lucky sniper shot, but hey, the bunny was worth a try and maybe someday, after we've smoked all the Taliban out of the kid's wrecked village and his family tree, just maybe he'll remember that bunny and think Americans aren't so bad after all. I wish Vonnegut were still alive. This war is going to need a good science fiction writer to properly tell the story.
I contend that the military theories of Sun Tzu, written millenia ago, are perfectly apropos for today's Afghan conflict:
"There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."
" ... if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength."
WTF
Excellent and most relevant quotations.
The cultural differences between the U.S. and Afghanistan are insurmountable based upon military prescriptions. There we are mere gnats in the face of Islam. The foolish little boys of Washington are blind to their impotence and as their temperature's rise they become ever more dangerous while American's at home wave their flags in grotesque ignorance as we teeter on the brink of World War Three. When the American economy again collapses World War Three will begin. Jesus Christ wills it, of course!
Deus lo volt!
"Not surprisingly, there have been frequent mentions of Petraeus as a candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2012, although Obama's deft selection of Petraeus seems, once and for all, to have ruled out that option, since the general will be very busy on the other side of the globe for quite a while." I would not be nearly so quick to assume that Petraeus's being "very busy on the other side of the world" would prevent his doing his patriotic duty and assuming the presidency. Gaius Iulius Caesar was pretty busy on the "other side of the" Rubicon (in Gaul) in 44 B.C. until he and his legions crossed the Rubicon and began the events culminating in Caesar's being proclaimed dictator perpetuo.
Another very unsettling element to this mess is the fact that the Afghan National Police and Army is being trained by Canadian RCMP. The RCMP has, over the last two years since the tazering death of a Polish immigrant at the airport in Vancouver, BC, been exposed as corrupt and incompetent.
Yes. It's been a long time since Sergeant Preston mushed across the radio waves. Since then, the RCMP has been no better than the average sheriff's department in Mississippi.
Have you forgotten Dudley Doright?
The beast of the profits
It seems impossible to win the hearts and minds of the US region
The war proves their minds are bent and the hearts are filled with hatred.
The war shows they hate the way of life of those born in poverty and religion.
Power blind warriors have no understanding of a living community related.
The US heads of state are still stuffed with too much error.
Decades have gone with the same basic conquest strategy
US wars have never ever, been anything about a war on terror.
The ploy is still to impose US dependent puppetry.
The besieged country would rather have the Taliban in charge,
At least they speak the same language, and can cheaply live there.
This says a lot for the price of having the US run amok at large.
Requiring billions in cash to maintain its army beast lair.
The US struggles to win Afghanistan so very much,
and pretending to be nice is just getting doors shut
but sterner measures are being used with a dark powers touch.
against the entire world, and not just the religious nut.
The deal is with the devil for the western shoppers soul.
Is that they can have a good life while consuming all.
But to continue the bargain, the entire world becomes foul,
Until all is blackened by touch of the entropy ghoul.
Unlimited by regulation, and being only a profits hog
Factories turn ocean into toxic metal chemical stew
Engines everywhere turn carbon into an earth warming smog,
In this war the future many loose to the present few.
The war is to obliterate the entire natural world profoundly,
without future compensation, to obliterate all and sundry.
To destroy all means of livelihood, and national productivity
Entire ecosystems destroyed until we die twisted and hungry.
So the US way of life will win at the very least,
The right of corporations to profits at all cost,
The termination of all human life at the behest of the beast.
And of anything we once imagined, all memory will be lost.
War is the preferred way to concentrate wealth and power.
State corporatists have gutted the mass market and the middle class.
War industries are 2/3 of what is left to make money on.
The power elite will not voluntarily give up their power or wealth.
Empires do not voluntarily down-size to insure their longterm survival---they collapse. History is nothing but a list of those events embellished with myth and BS.
When do we start to learn the lessons that historyteaches us? What is it: 22 or so many nations have met their Waterloo in Afghanistan; Are we to be the next? If it weren't for big oil and the neocon goal of "Pax Americana", maybe we could stop wasting our dolars and sacrificing young American lives in that bottomless pit; the dollars spent and the lives sacrificed there don't have anything to do with "defending our liberty". That's the biggest con game in the world today! If you buy into that, friend, I've got a lovely bridge in Gotham I'll be willing to sell you!
We're just lucky that the opposition isn't getting the hardware we provided back when the Soviets were on the receiving end.
Like many others,
I am not impressed with
phosphorus bombs, or gernades,
Machine guns, drones, or F16s,
secret agents, generals and privates.
I am not impressed at all, are you?
I am not impressed by the cripped and maimed,
the orphans and widows
nor fathers left to cry.
I am not impressed by the technology wasted
nor the jobs that this may produce.
I am not impressed by the lies this generates
nor by the media this buys and sells.
I am not impressed by a war time economy
that hangs around year after year.
I am not impressed by the heads that
bury themselves in the sand.
War is such a handy tool in so many ways. Profitable for the very few, removing so many thousands of potentially unemployed kids from the rolls, protecting possible resources for our corporate mouths to turn into uselss crap with which they profit. A win,win situation if one's government is not responsible to the will and the needs of the people it governs.
Of course it wrecks our economy, murders countless thousands of innocents, sickens an entire generation, alienates our nation from most of the world. Such is the side effects of profit.
O.K., if we can't stop the war, then let's start paying for it with a dedicated gas tax to fund the cost.
Ante up Americans!!
The day Oblahblah was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was the day everything in the world became officially backwards. Withdraw now means reinforce, up means down, in means out, peace means violence, good means bad, more means less, no means yes and on and on and on it goes, where it stops nobody knows.