by George Packer July 5, 2010
In firing General Stanley McChrystal for talking cocky mess-hall trash about his civilian superiors in the company of aides and a writer for Rolling Stone, President Obama reasserted the principle of civilian control of the military. In getting General David Petraeus, the most talented officer of his generation, to accept McChrystal’s command, the President deftly solved his crisis of generalship, which threatened to undermine the mission in Afghanistan. The three-day personnel problem ended as well as the White House could have wanted, but, because it’s a symptom of the larger problem of the war, the McChrystal uproar is going to resonate long after sniping about the old soldier—and about Vice-President “Bite Me”—has faded away.
Every aspect of the war—which is approaching its tenth year, having just superseded Vietnam as the longest in American history—is going badly. Team McChrystal’s casual insubordination reflected a war effort working against itself. McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, the American Ambassador in Kabul, disliked each other and fought over strategy through cables and leaks. (Eikenberry didn’t think that the addition of tens of thousands of troops could succeed.) Obama allowed the division to fester, giving President Hamid Karzai an opening in which to play American officials off against one another: McChrystal was Karzai’s newest friend, Eikenberry his latest enemy. Richard Holbrooke, the Administration’s special representative for the region, lost Karzai’s confidence a while ago, and it’s not clear that he still has Obama’s. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remain closely allied with each other, their subordinates, and the White House, but wars are won or lost in the field, not at headquarters.
Last year, in this magazine, Holbrooke described what often happens in government: “People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.” This is becoming a picture of U.S. policymaking in Afghanistan. Jonathan Alter’s new book, “The Promise,” recounts how, last fall, the military, with a series of leaks, tried to box in the President and force him to send more troops. In return, Obama summoned Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and, sounding like a prosecutor conducting a cross-examination, got them to sign off on a plan to start withdrawing troops in July of 2011, though their opposition to a time line was well known. Then notes from that meeting were leaked, almost certainly by the White House, to corner the military. The time line now means different things to different people, and a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the strategy’s future. The foreign-affairs analyst Leslie Gelb wrote last week that some military officers “truly don’t know where the President stands.”
After replacing McChrystal with Petraeus, Obama scolded his advisers for their bickering. But disarray among top personnel is almost always a sign of a larger incoherence. American goals in Afghanistan remain vague, the means inadequate, the timetable foreshortened. We are nation-building without admitting it, and conducting counterinsurgency on our own clock, not the Afghans’.
The Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency was co-authored by General Petraeus himself, who applied the doctrine with much success in Iraq. But counterinsurgency isn’t a static mold into which the military can pour any war and wait for it to set. When Petraeus took command of the war in Iraq, in 2007, he had already served two tours there—he knew the country as well as any American officer. Afghanistan is less familiar terrain for him; the society is less urban and more fractured than Iraq’s; and there is no sign in Afghan political dynamics of anything like the Sunni awakening that stopped the momentum of the Iraqi insurgency.
With allies like Canada and Holland heading for the exits, American troops are dying in larger numbers than at any point of the war—on bad days, ten or more. The number of Afghan civilian deaths remains high, despite the tightened constraints of McChrystal’s rules of engagement. The military key to counterinsurgency is protection of the population, but the difficulty in securing Marja and the delay of a promised campaign in Kandahar suggest that the majority of Afghan Pashtuns no longer want to be protected by foreign forces. The political goal of counterinsurgency is to strengthen the tie between civilians and their government, but the Afghan state is a shell hollowed out by corruption, and at its center is the erratic figure of President Karzai. Since last fall, when he stole reëlection, Karzai has accused Western governments and media of trying to bring him down, fired the two most competent members of his cabinet, and reportedly threatened to join the Taliban and voiced a suspicion that the Americans were behind an attack on a peace conference he recently hosted in Kabul. In the face of his wild performance, the current American approach is to tiptoe around him, as if he would start behaving better if he could just be settled down. Meanwhile, aid efforts are in a bind: working with the government nourishes corruption; circumventing it further undermines its legitimacy.
No one, however, has been able to come up with an alternative to the current strategy that doesn’t carry great risks. If there were a low-cost way to contain the interconnected groups of extremists in the Hindu Kush—with drones and Special Forces, as Vice-President Biden, among others, has urged—the President would have pursued it. If a return to power of the Taliban, which may well be the outcome of a U.S. withdrawal, did not pose a threat to international security, Obama would have already abandoned Karzai to his fate. But anyone who believes that a re-Talibanized Afghanistan would be a low priority should read the kidnapping narratives of two American journalists, Jere Van Dyk and David Rohde, who were held by the Taliban, along with the autobiography of the former Taliban official known as Mullah Zaeef. Together, these accounts show that the years since 2001 have radicalized the insurgents and imbued them with Al Qaeda’s global agenda. Tactically and ideologically, it’s more and more difficult to distinguish local insurgents from foreign jihadists.
American policy is drifting toward a review, scheduled for December, and Obama is trapped—not by his generals but by the war. It takes great political courage to face such a situation honestly, but if in a year’s time the war looks much the way it does now, or worse, Obama will have to force the public to deal with the likely reality: Americans leaving, however slowly; Afghanistan slipping into ethnic civil war, with many more Afghan deaths; Pakistan backing the Pashtun side; Al Qaeda seizing the chance to expand its safe haven. These consequences would require a dramatically different U.S. strategy, and a wise Administration would unify itself around the need to think one through before next summer.
ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL
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