Out with the old, in with the new
Last week saw two events that emphasize the fact that we are moving on from the world of George Bush to that of Barack Obama.
Per the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement June 30 marked the withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities. While the eventual outcome there is uncertain Iraq’s future is now primarily in Iraqi hands.
Two days later in Afghanistan thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys, mounting an operation, Operation Khanjar, which represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. This is a clear and hold operation, meaning not just fighting the Taliban but living and staying with local Afghans in various villages and towns.
The operation involves about 4,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was dispatched to Afghanistan this year by President Obama to combat a growing Taliban insurgency in Helmand and other southern provinces. The Marines, along with an Army brigade that is scheduled to arrive later this summer, plan to push into pockets of the country where NATO forces have not had a presence.
And with this operation President Obama irrevocably makes the war in Afghanistan his own. It is far too soon to make any predictions about the ultimate outcome of this operation but a few thoughts are in order.
U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is influenced, at least indirectly, by the legacy of the Bush administration “surge” in Iraq. There are those who argue that the surge proved that all America had to do is send more troops and employ a different counterinsurgency strategy and the problem was solved. Admittedly that is a gross oversimplification but not without a kernel of truth.
The mission, which required months of planning, is the Marines’ largest operation since the 2004 invasion of Fallujah, Iraq. That means it was in the works even before the Obama administration had formally agreed to send more troops as a result of its review of strategy in Afghanistan announced in March. So the Obama administration had decided to surge troops before its own assessment was complete. Admittedly, anyone who had listed to Obama’s speeches on the campaign trail knew this was coming. Still, what is the point of doing a strategy assessment if you have already decided on a course of action?
Furthermore, U.S. troops can’t expect to be greeted with open arms and cheers. They face numerous challenges, such as a lack of trust among the local population. That stems from concern over civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military operations as well as from a fear that the troops will not stay long enough to counter the Taliban. The British army, which had been responsible for all of Helmand since 2005 under NATO’s Afghan stabilization effort, lacked the resources to maintain a permanent presence in most parts of the province.
Another problem is that the Marines have been vexed by a lack of Afghan security forces. One of the reasons that the Iraqi “surge” did as wall as it did was due to the fact that after years of wasting time the U.S. finally got serious about training Iraqi security forces.
“Success in the near term will be removing the Taliban and their control of these areas — pushing them out,” Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail response Sunday to questions from USA TODAY. “Success in the long term, more importantly, will be when the people of Afghanistan develop trust and faith in their own government and military.”
John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert who was appointed last week to the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, said: “We do not have enough troops to hold what we have cleared in Helmand. The additional American troops are a help, but they are insufficient.
“We have more fighting in Afghanistan in front of us than we have fighting behind us, full stop. This is going to be a harder fight than Iraq. Afghanistan needs [to create its own] national army of 250,000 to enable the allies to depart.”
At present the Afghan national army has about 92,000 troops, while the police force numbers 83,000. More US troops are needed to fill the gap, but first they would have to be diverted from Iraq.
Nagl is worth listening to. While still in the military he co-wrote (with Gen. David Petraeus, who was the top general in Iraq during the “surge”, and is now head of the U.S: Central Command) the military’s new counterinsurgency field manual.
And, the Taliban still have the ability to fight on their terms. This past Saturday, when marines were deploying in Helmand province, insurgents armed with rockets, mortars and a truck bomb staged an unusual frontal attack on a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, killing two American soldiers and forcing the defenders to call in airstrikes to avoid being overrun. This pointed up the insurgents’ ability to take the fight to a location of their choosing.
But perhaps the most important consideration is that we are still not asking the right questions. Andrew Bacevich, a retired U.S. military officer and a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, wrote in the Los Angeles Times yesterday.
As President Obama shifts the main U.S. military effort from Iraq to Afghanistan, and as his commanders embrace counterinsurgency as the new American way of war, the big questions go not only unanswered but unasked. Does perpetuating the Long War make political or strategic sense? As we prepare to enter that war’s ninth year, are there no alternatives?
Pragmatists shy away from first-order questions — recall President George H. W. Bush’s aversion to what he called “the vision thing.” Obama is a pragmatist. Unlike his immediate predecessor, he inhabits a world where facts matter.
Yet pragmatism devoid of principle will perpetuate the strategic void that Obama inherited. The urgent need is for the administration to articulate a concrete set of organizing precepts — not simply cliches — to frame basic U.S. policy going forward.
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Mr. Isenberg makes some very interesting and thoughtful comments and assertions about President Obama’s military policies. And I would like to echo many critics who point out that fighting a “long war” is NOT in the strategic interests of the United States. Terrorism, in its many and varied forms, has been around a long time, decades by one definition and centuries by a less rigid interpretation. Can you ever really come anywhere close to“defeating terrorism” any more than you can end hunger, disease, piracy, or even misdemeanor crime for that matter? Like those other admittedly serious concerns, the problem must be addressed– but the way we’re all (EU, USA, etc) going about it is clearly tremendous overkill. Terrorism is really an international law enforcement problem with internationally acceptable and agreed judicial solutions (on the other hand we can occasionally use U.S., European, or other special forces or military assets in small-scale, specific operations where police forces either don’t have jurisdiction or can not carry out a military-type capture operation). So, consistent with this view, Bin Laden and other international terrorists are criminals that must be captured and put on trial for crimes against humanity or failing that killed! The collateral damage of civilians unjustly harmed or killed, the tremendous expense of war (from taxpayer dollars to the impact on American families of lost loved ones and future income foregone by these losses), and the indefinite duration (and the tremendous uncertainty that this implies) make the AfPak War an unreasonable strategic formulation for America. And, by the way, the war is morally wrong, too. As are all wars, especially now that the Cold War is over and the Millennium is upon us. There are much more important global problems facing human kind (global warming, future asteroid strikes or other cosmic threats that in fact we know very little about right now [implying correctly that we should re-task the military and scientific establishment of this and other nations to nail down those potential threats over the next half century], population growth exceeding resources, and clean energy. One of the most serious concerns is the spread of dangerous nuclear power and weapons technologies when there are no viable long-term safe, reliable storage technologies [and we’re talking VERY LONG TERM when we consider the half-lives of enriched reactor grade (and even more enriched weapons-grade) uranium [hundreds of millions of years] and plutonium [tens of thousands of years]). War is an anachronism that unfortunately our policymakers, leaders, and even most of the general population either has failed to grasp or is unwilling to accept. Nation-state sovereignty is one of the symptoms of the war problem and that too must go but the question is will human kind recognize this in time, before nuclear, biological, chemical, or cosmic apocalypses render our planet uninhabitable? Obama called for REAL CHANGE but the change so far is incremental or symptomatic of a “steady-as-she-goes” course direction. Global conditions require an about-face, a course reversal or even a completely new paradigm not focused on the mega-insignificance of four-year election cycles or meeting the ridiculously short-sighted requirements of “winning the long war.”
Comment on July 7, 2009 @ 7:31 am