With little fanfare, the Defense Department has announced a revolution in military strategy--a transformation in global outlook and combat tactics whose only true precedent is the equally momentous turnaround engineered by Defense SecretaryRobert McNamara during the Kennedy administration. Then, as now, an incoming administration inherited a strategy heavily weighted toward high-intensity warfare among well-equipped adversaries, mostly in Europe and Asia; now, as then, the response has been to redirect the Pentagon's attention toward low-intensity combat on the fringes of the developing world. The result back then was Vietnam; today it is Afghanistan and an unknown number of "future Afghanistans."
When Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1961, the Defense Department was governed by a military "posture" that emphasized nuclear war and massive tank battles on the plains of Europe. Sensing that the main theater of competition between the superpowers had shifted to proxy warfare in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Kennedy ordered McNamara to undertake a massive enhancement of US capabilities for what were then called "brush-fire wars" in the Third World. The president also authorized a vast expansion of the Special Forces--then a small and obscure Army unit intended for partisan operations behind Soviet lines in Eastern Europe--and gave them responsibility for promoting the newly fashionable concept of counterinsurgency.
"Subversive insurgency is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression," Kennedy said at West Point in 1962. "It requires in those situations where we must counter it...a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of training."
Kennedy's fierce patronage of counterinsurgency doctrine led to expanded US involvement in Southeast Asia and ultimately to the unmitigated disaster of Vietnam. In the wake of the war there, the US military largely abandoned its interest in counterinsurgency, fearing the specter of Che Guevara's 1967 call for "two, three, many Vietnams." Instead, it chose to focus on a renewed cold war in Europe and later, under the first President Bush, conventional combat against "rogue" states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea--basically recycling tactics developed for combat against Soviet forces. Although promising to modernize this posture after 9/11, the second President Bush merely grafted his "global war on terror" onto the rogue-state approach, choosing to invade Iraq rather than invent a new strategy aimed at radical Islamist insurgencies.
Now we have President Obama and his domineering Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, both of whom have criticized the Pentagon's emphasis on conventional combat at the expense of low-intensity warfare. Iraq, Obama has said, was the "wrong" war, a distraction from the more urgent task of defeating Al Qaeda and its network of allies, including the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. To rectify this strategic bungling, as he sees it, Obama has been redeploying combat resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. But this is just the beginning of his grand vision: Obama seeks to fashion a new military posture that shifts the emphasis from conventional combat to brush-fire wars and counterinsurgency.
"The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan," Obama declared at West Point on December 1. "Unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies." To prevail in these contests, "we'll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where Al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold--whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere--they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships."
Clearly, this is a long-term strategy with far-reaching implications. Even if Obama brings some forces back from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011, as he has pledged, US troops are likely to be engaged there (some perhaps in a covert mode) and in a number of other hot spots--"two, three, many Afghanistans," to put Che's dictum into contemporary parlance.
This strategy, first enunciated in a series of speeches by Obama and Gates, has been given formal character in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon's Congressionally mandated overhaul of strategy. Released on February 1, the QDR is expected to guide military planning over the next four years and to govern the Pentagon's budget priorities.
Like earlier Pentagon reviews, the 2010 QDR begins by reaffirming America's stature as a global power with global responsibilities--a burden no other country can shoulder. "The strength and influence of the United States are deeply intertwined with the fate of the broader international system," the document asserts. "The U.S. military must therefore be prepared to support broad national goals of promoting stability in key regions, providing assistance to nations in need, and promoting the common good."
But while this globalist mission has remained unchanged for many decades, the nature of the threats confronted by American forces has changed dramatically. "The United States faces a complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of change continues to accelerate," the QDR indicates. "The rise of new powers, the growing influence of non-state actors, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and other destructive enabling technologies...pose profound challenges to international order."
The United States also faces a danger not unlike that envisioned by Kennedy in 1961: the emergence of radical insurgencies in the corrupt and decaying nations of the developing world. "The changing international system will continue to put pressure on the modern state system, likely increasing the frequency and severity of the challenges associated with chronically fragile states," the QDR notes. "These states are often catalysts for the growth of radicalism and extremism."
In this environment, America's traditional advantages in conventional conflict--what the QDR calls "large-scale force-on-force warfare"--can no longer guarantee success. Instead, the US military must be prepared to prevail in any number of conceivable combat scenarios and employ the same sort of novel warfighting tactics as those used by America's rivals and adversaries. Our principal objective, the QDR affirms, is "ensuring that US forces are flexible and adaptable so that they can confront the full range of challenges that could emerge from a complex and dynamic security environment."
Within this mandate, no priority is given greater weight than the task of preparing for an unending series of counterinsurgency campaigns in remote corners of the developing world. "The wars we are fighting today and assessments of the future security environment together demand that the United States retain and enhance a whole-of-government capability to succeed in large-scale counterinsurgency (COIN), stability, and counterterrorism (CT) operations in environments ranging from densely populated urban areas and mega-cities, to remote mountains, deserts, jungles, and littoral regions," the QDR explains.
The language used here is instructive--both in the degree to which it reveals current Pentagon thinking and the ways it echoes Kennedy's outlook. "Stability operations, large-scale counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism operations are not niche challenges or the responsibility of a single Military Department, but rather require a portfolio of capabilities as well as sufficient capacity from across America's Armed Forces," the QDR states. "Nor are these type of operations a transitory or anomalous phenomenon in the security landscape. On the contrary, we must expect that for the indefinite future, violent extremist groups, with or without state sponsorship, will continue to foment instability and challenge U.S. and allied interests." As a result, "U.S. forces will need to maintain a high level of competency in this mission area for decades to come." (Emphasis added.)
As the QDR makes plain, this will require substantial retooling of military capabilities. In place of "large-scale force-on-force warfare," the Pentagon must be configured to fight many small-scale conflicts in dissimilar locations on several continents at once. This requires that forces be equipped for counterinsurgency-type operations: helicopters, small arms, body armor, night-vision devices, mine-resistant vehicles, aerial gunships, surveillance drones and the like. Some of this material has already been provided to forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the entire military will have to be re-equipped.
Also required will be increased military aid and training (provided by growing cadres of Special Forces) for the military and police forces of embattled governments in fraying Third World states.
"Terrorist groups seek to evade security forces by exploiting ungoverned and under-governed areas as safe havens from which to recruit, indoctrinate, and train fighters," the QDR notes. "Where appropriate, U.S. forces will work with the military forces of partner nations to strengthen their capacity for internal security.... For reasons of political legitimacy as well as sheer economic necessity, there is no substitute for professional, motivated local security forces protecting populations threatened by insurgents and terrorists in their midst."
Except for a slight modernization of terminology, these are exactly the words used by Kennedy to justify the deployment of thousands of counterinsurgency "advisers" in Vietnam, plus hundreds more in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The danger is that America's "partner nations" are not capable of deploying "professional, motivated" forces, so US soldiers will be compelled to shoulder an ever-increasing share of the burden. As proved true in Vietnam--and as is being repeated today in Afghanistan--this will likely be the case when the local army and police are viewed by the majority of the population as tools of a corrupt and unresponsive government.
What should be cause for alarm is that despite the worrisome picture in Afghanistan, the Pentagon is determined to export this model to other areas, many for the first time, including Africa. "The need to assist fragile, post-conflict states, such as Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, and failed states such as Somalia, and transnational problems, including extremism, piracy, illegal fishing, and narcotics trafficking, pose significant challenges," the document notes. "America's efforts will hinge on partnering with African states, other international allies and partners, and regional and sub-regional security organizations to conduct capacity-building and peacekeeping operations, prevent terrorism, and address humanitarian crises."
The United States is already assisting the Ugandan government in its seemingly futile efforts to eradicate the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal guerrilla group with no discernible ideology, as well as the Somali government in its (equally futile) campaign to rid Mogadishu of Al Shabab, a militant Islamic group linked to Al Qaeda. It is likely that advisory teams from the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, based at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, are engaged in similar operations in North Africa and the Sahel. (The CJTF-HOA is the combat arm of the US Africa Command, a multiservice headquarters organization established by Bush in 2008 and given expanded responsibilities since then by Obama.)
The Pentagon is also supporting counterinsurgency operations in Colombia, the Philippines and Yemen, among other countries. Typically, these operations entail deploying training and advisory teams, providing arms and intelligence information, and employing (often covert) specialized combat units. According to the QDR, "U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Colombia, and elsewhere to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks while providing security to populations that have been intimidated by violent elements in their midst." Again, one must ask, Just how deeply is the United States involved? Where is this leading? What happens when the "host-country counterparts" prove unequal to the task?
The worry that this will lead to an endless series of Vietnam- or Afghanistan-like counterinsurgencies is further heightened by the QDR's call for increased reliance on social scientists to better comprehend the perplexing social and cultural realities of these faraway places. Under its Minerva Initiative, the Defense Department is seeking "the intellectual capital necessary to meet the challenges of operating in a changing and complex environment." For those whose memory stretches back far enough, this will recall the infamous Project Camelot, a Vietnam-era Army effort to secure academic assistance in assessing public attitudes in Third World countries for counterinsurgency purposes.
The greatest risk in all this, of course, is that the military will become bogged down in a constellation of grueling, low-level wars. This is the prospect of "imperial over-stretch" spoken of by Yale historian Paul Kennedy in his 1987 classic, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. It is also, says Fareed Zakaria in The Post-American World, the scenario we must avoid if the United States is to escape the fate of the British Empire and other failed imperiums. "Britain's strategic blunder was to spend decades--time and money, energy and attention--on vain attempts to stabilize peripheral places on the map," Zakaria wrote in 2008. "The United States could easily fall into a similar imperial trap."
The Pentagon's renewed commitment to counterinsurgency and low-intensity warfare will also require a substantial investment in new hardware at a time when the country faces a record deficit, further eroding its long-term vitality. To obtain the added funds he deems necessary, Gates has asked for an $18 billion increase in the Pentagon's base budget for the 2011 fiscal year, raising total spending to $549 billion (which does not include combat costs in Iraq and Afghanistan). To gain additional financing for these projects, he has been willing to sacrifice some big-ticket items intended for major conventional wars, such as the F-22 jet fighter (discontinued in 2009).
Gates calls this shift in emphasis "rebalancing," and it is said to be the guiding principle of the new Pentagon budget. "Rebalancing our forces in support of these strategic priorities means that US forces must be flexible and adaptable to confront the full range of plausible challenges," Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy, one of the QDR's principal authors, told a Pentagon press briefing on February 1. "To underwrite this flexibility...we need more and better enabling capabilities...like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, rotary-wing aircraft, language skills and so forth."
The danger here is that Congress--prodded by powerful interests in the military-industrial complex--will approve the specialized counterinsurgency equipment sought by Gates and Flournoy, as well as an array of costly, super-sophisticated weapons designed to fight a full-scale war with some future, Soviet-like "peer" competitor. Under these circumstances, the Pentagon budget will continue to grow.
The Obama-Gates strategy thus entails a double peril. On the one hand, it risks involvement in an endless series of wars, wearing down the military and turning more and more non-Westerners against the United States--exactly the outcome envisioned by Che in his famous 1967 dictum. On the other hand, the "rebalancing" sought by Gates could lead to higher spending on low-intensity hardware while failing to curb investment in high-end weaponry, thereby producing ever-increasing military budgets, a growing national deficit and persistent economic paralysis. In the worst case, both outcomes will occur, dooming the United States to retreat, humiliation and penury.
There is no reason to doubt that Obama and Gates believe they are acting in the nation's--and the world's--best interest by advocating a strategy of global counterinsurgency. Such a strategy could conceivably prevent Al Qaeda from gaining a temporary foothold in some "ungovernable area" on the fringe of the Islamic world. But it will not eliminate the conditions that give rise to Islamist extremism, nor will it ensure lasting peace. The Pentagon's new strategy can only lead, in the end, to a world of increased anti-Americanism and violence.
About Michael T. Klare
Michael T. Klare, Nation defense correspondent, is professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. His latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy
JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq — Early this year a “fob in a box” — military slang for 80 shipping containers with all the tents, showers and construction material needed to set up a remote forward operating base — was put on trucks here for the trip from one war to another.
Left over and never used in Iraq, the fob rumbled north to Turkey, east through Georgia and Azerbaijan, by ship across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, then south on the old Soviet rail lines of Uzbekistan into northern Afghanistan. There — the end of a seven-nation, 2,300-mile, two-and-a-half-month odyssey — it was assembled just weeks ago as home for several hundred of the thousands of American forces entering the country.
In trying to speed 30,000 reinforcements into Afghanistan while reducing American forces in Iraq by 50,000, American commanders are orchestrating one of the largest movements of troops and matériel since World War II. Military officials say that transporting so many people and billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, weapons, housing, fuel and food in and out of both countries between now and an August deadline is as critical and difficult as what is occurring on the battlefield.
Military officials, who called the start of the five-month logistics operation “March Madness,” say it is like trying to squeeze a basketball through a narrow pipe, particularly the supply route through the Khyber Pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan.
So many convoys loaded with American supplies came under insurgent attack in Pakistan last year that the United States military now tags each truck with a GPS device and keeps 24-hour watch by video feed at a military base in the United States. Last year the Taliban blew up a bridge near the pass, temporarily suspending the convoys.
“Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now,” said Lt. Gen. William G. Webster, the commander of the United States Third Army, using one of the extravagant historical parallels that commanders have deployed for the occasion. He spoke at a military base in the Kuwaiti desert before a vast sandscape upon which were armored trucks that had been driven out of Iraq and were waiting to be junked, sent home or taken on to Kabul, Afghanistan.
The general is not moving elephants, but the scale and intricacy of the operation are staggering. The military says there are 3.1 million pieces of equipment in Iraq, from tanks to coffee makers, two-thirds of which are to leave the country. Of that, about half will go on to Afghanistan, where there are already severe strains on the system.
Overcrowding at Bagram Air Base, the military’s main flight hub in Afghanistan, is so severe that beds are at a premium and troops are jammed into tents alongside runways. Cargo planes, bombers, jet fighters, helicopters and drones are stacked up in the skies, waiting to land.
All lethal supplies — weapons, armored trucks, eight-wheeled Stryker troop carriers — come in by air to avoid attacks, but everything else goes by sea and land. The standard route from Iraq to Afghanistan is south from Baghdad and down through Kuwait, by ship through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to Karachi, Pakistan, then overland once again. The “fob in a box” went on an experimental and potentially less expensive journey through Turkey to link up with a new northern route through Central Asia, which was opened last year for supplies going to Afghanistan from Europe and the United States as an alternative to the risky trip through Pakistan.
Both routes circle Iran, by far the most direct way to get from Baghdad to Kabul, but off limits because of the country’s hostile relationship with the United States. “These are the cards that we’re dealt,” said Gen. Duncan J. McNabb, who oversees all military logistics as the leader of the United States Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.
Nonlethal supplies flowing into Afghanistan include cement, lumber, blast barriers, septic tanks and rubberized matting, all to expand space at airfields and double, to 40, the number of forward operating bases in a country that has an infrastructure closer to the 14th century than the 21st.
Gen. David H. Petraeus of the United States Central Command, in another grand historical parallel, recently called the construction under way “the largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar,” a reference to the conqueror of Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C.
Food shipments alone are enough to feed an army. The Defense Logistics Agency, which provides meals for 415,000 troops, contractors and American civilians each day in both wars, shipped 1.1 million frozen hamburger patties to Afghanistan in March alone, compared with 663,000 burgers in March 2009. The agency also supplied 27 million gallons of fuel to forces in Afghanistan this month, compared with 15 million gallons a year ago.
Commanders say that their chief worry is that the equipment and supplies will not arrive in sync with the troops. Their biggest enemy, they say, is the short time between now and August, the deadline set in separate plans for each war.
Early last year, President Obama and military commanders agreed on a withdrawal plan to reduce United States forces in Iraq to 50,000 by Aug. 31 ( 97,000 United States troops are there now), with all American forces out by 2011. Late last year, he pushed commanders to speed up the infusion of new troops into Afghanistan — military planners had originally said it would take 18 months — so that 30,000 new troops would get there by August. So far, about 6,000 of those reinforcements have arrived. Once they all get there, there will be close to 100,000 United States troops in Afghanistan.
“There is a great sense of urgency in getting in and getting effective,” said Vice Adm. Alan S. Thompson, the director of the Defense Logistics Agency. “The administration is concerned about being able to show results quickly.” There are obvious strains, he said, but “I think it’s doable.”
In the meantime, General McNabb, in yet another reference to Alexander the Great, said that when he took over the transportation command in 2008, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reminded him of the well-known words attributed to the famous conqueror: “My logisticians are a humorless lot; they know if my campaign fails they are the first ones I will slay.”
Mr. Gates had his own words of advice. “He just said, ‘Hey, it’s a tough job, better figure it out,’ ” General McNabb said.
How our new favorite weapon in the war on terror could soon be turned against us.
By P. W. Singer | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Mar 8, 2010
The unmanned spy plane that Lebanon's Hizbullah sent buzzing over Israeli towns in 2005 was loud and weaponless, and carried only a rudimentary camera. But the surprise flight by a regional terror group still worried U.S. analysts, who saw it as a sign that the unmanned vehicles were falling into the wrong hands.
Today that concern appears to have been well founded. At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America's Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.
You wouldn't know it to hear U.S. officials talk. Jim Tuttle, the Department of Homeland Security official responsible for safeguarding America against nonnuclear weapons, downplays the idea that drones could be used against us. "What terrorist is going to have a Predator?" he scoffed at a conference last winter. More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported, the U.S. ignored a dangerous flaw in its UAV technology that allowed Iraqi insurgents to tap into the planes' video feeds using $30 software purchased over the Internet.
Such arrogance is setting us up for a fall. Just as we once failed to imagine terrorists using our own commercial aircraft against us, we are now underestimating the threat posed by this new wave of technology. We must prepare for a world in which foreign robotics rivals our own, and terrorists can deliver deadly explosives not just by suicide bomber but also by unmanned machine.
The ease and affordability of such technology, much of which is already available for purchase commercially, means that drones will inevitably pass into the wrong hands, allowing small groups and even individuals to wield power once limited to the world's great militaries. There is, after all, no such thing as a permanent, first-mover advantage—not in technology, and certainly not in war. The British may have invented the tank during World War I, but the Germans wielded it better in the blitzkrieg more than two decades later.
For now, however, America remains at the forefront of the robotics revolution—superiority that has come at considerable effort and expense. We've channeled billions into UAVs, initiating what has been called the largest shift in military tactics, strategy, and doctrine since the invention of gunpowder. This year the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, and train more UAV pilots than traditional bomber and fighter pilots combined. As Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, put it in January, "We can't get enough drones."
But neither can our adversaries—who don't need their own network of satellites and supercomputers to deploy an unmanned plane. Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson built a version of the military's hand-tossed Raven surveillance drone for $1,000, while an Arizona-based anti-immigrant group instituted its own pilotless surveillance system to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border for just $25,000. Hitler's war machine may have lacked the ability to strike the American mainland during World War II. But half a century later, a 77-year-old blind man from Canada designed an unmanned system that in 2003 hopped the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland.
Today, the lag time between the development of military technology and its widespread dissemination is measured in months, not years. Industrial farmers around the world already use aerial drones to dust their crops with pesticides. And a recent U.S. Air Force study concluded that similar systems are "an ideal platform" for dirty bombs containing radioactive, chemical, or biological weapons—the type of WMDs that terrorists are most likely to obtain. Such technologies have the potential to strengthen the hand not only of Al Qaeda 2.0, but also of homegrown terror cells and disaffected loners like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As one robotics expert told me, for less than $50,000 "a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan."
The United States has not truly had to think about its air defenses—at home or abroad—since the Cold War. But it's time it did, because our current crop of weapons isn't well suited to dealing with these new systems. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.
To succeed in this revolution, we need something many competitor countries already have: a national robotics strategy. That means graduate scholarships, lab funding, and a Silicon Valley–style corridor for corporate development. Otherwise we are destined to depend on the expertise of others. Already a growing number of American defense and technology firms rely on hardware from China and software from India, a clear security concern.
Equally important, we need a military and homeland-security strategy that considers not only how we use these unmanned systems but how others will use them against us. That means widening the threat scenarios our agencies plan and train for. It also means new legal regimes to determine who should have access to such dangerous technologies—lest our greatest new weapon come back to bite us.
By Blaine Harden Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 24, 2010; 2:14 PM
TOKYO -- In a small town election that may have a big impact on U.S. ties with Japan, voters in Nago on Okinawa island chose a new mayor Sunday who opposes the relocation of a noisy U.S. military air base to his town.
Susumu Inamine, who said during his campaign that he did not want the air station constructed in Nago, defeated incumbent Mayor Yoshikazu Shimabukuro, who has long supported hosting the base as a way of increasing jobs and investment.
The United States and Japan agreed four years ago to move the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, now located in a dense urban area in the center of Okinawa, to Nago, a town of 60,000 in the thinly populated northern part of the tropical island. It was to have been built on landfill along a pristine coast on the edge of the town.
But to the exasperation of the Obama administration, that deal was put on hold last fall after the election of a new government led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who says Japan has been too passive in its dealings with the United States. Hatoyama has suggested that the base should be moved off Okinawa or out of Japan altogether -- and has also said that the outcome of the mayoral vote in Nago would be a factor in his government's final decision, which he has promised to make by May.
Inamine's anti-base campaign attracted support from environmentalists and from local members of Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan and its coalition partners, as well as from the Japanese Communist Party.
Nago's mayor avoided mention of the airbase in his campaign, saying its relocation was not a matter that could or should be decided by him or residents of his city.
That view is shared by U.S. Marine Corps commanders, who view the Futenma air station as a linchpin in the continuous training and on-call mobility of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force, which is based on Okinawa and is the only such U.S. force in the Far East.
"National security policy cannot be made in towns and villages," Lt. Gen. Keith J. Stalder, commander of Marine forces in the Pacific, said in an interview last week.
Relocating the Marine air station to Nago is a key part of a $26 billion deal between Japan and the United States to transfer 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam and turn over valuable tracts of land to people on the island. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last fall that the deal would probably collapse if the air station does not move to Nago.
Several U.S. officials said last week that they believe that senior leaders in the Hatoyama government have begun to realize that there is no workable alternative to relocating the air station as previously agreed . They also said that such an important decision should be made in Tokyo and not in a local election.
Construction of the air station in Nago would require a massive landfill in a picturesque stretch of waters now used by fishermen and snorkelers. It is opposed by environmentalists who have filed a law suit saying it would destroy habitat of the rare dugong, a manatee-like sea mammal. A Japanese government environmental assessment has said that dugongs have not been seen in the proposed construction area for many years.
For many Okinawans, the Futenma air station has become a symbol of the noise, pollution and risk of accidents that they associate with the large U.S. military presence on the island.
Surrounded by 92,000 people in Ginowan city, Futenma torments its neighbors with the comings and going of combat helicopters and transport aircraft.
In 2004, a helicopter based at the airfield crashed into the administration building of a nearby college. There were no deaths, but the incident angered local residents and led to the 2006 agreement to move the air base to Nago.
The vote in Nago does not necessarily kill the relocation of the air station. The final decision is up to the governor of Okinawa, who has shown qualified support for the base relocation plan, and the central government in Tokyo.
By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 20, 2010; A01
Experienced fighters returning to Yemen from the Iraq war and radicalized U.S. citizens who have taken up residence in that country have broadened assessments of the threat posed by the al-Qaeda affiliate there, according to administration and congressional officials.
In addition to flooding Yemen with intelligence resources, the United States has stepped up military strikes from the air against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and pressed the Yemeni government, which has offered to negotiate with the group, to toughen its approach.
As Yemen's foreign minister arrived in Washington this week for consultations, the State Department announced Tuesday that it had designated the al-Qaeda branch there, known as AQAP, as a foreign terrorist organization, a move that allows U.S. prosecution of those who are associated with or provide assistance to the group, which was formed only last January. A United Nations sanctions committee also announced Tuesday that it had added AQAP and its senior leaders to a U.N. blacklist that allows assets to be frozen internationally and imposes travel restrictions.
An investigative report scheduled for release Wednesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cites U.S. concern over as many as three dozen American citizens who converted to Islam in prison and moved to Yemen after their release in the past year. Some of them have "dropped off the radar" of U.S. and Yemeni law enforcement and may be receiving al-Qaeda training there, the report says.
The report cautions that U.S. officials said they had no specific evidence of such training, but a committee staffer said that "everything related to Yemen is now being ratcheted up." As U.S. citizens, these people do not come under the purview of the CIA but are "being watched," the staffer said, by the FBI and State Department security officials attached to the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital.
"U.S. officials said they are on heightened alert because of the potential threat from extremists carrying American passports and the related challenges involved in detecting and stopping homegrown operatives," the report says.
An additional concern, it says, "is a group of nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists, and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country." One U.S. official, it reports, described them as "blond-haired, blue-eyed types" who "fit a profile of Americans whom al-Qaeda has sought to recruit over the past several years."
Intelligence lapses leading to the attempted bombing of a U.S. jetliner on Christmas Day and the growing threat from Yemen will be the subject of a series of congressional hearings over the next several weeks, beginning with testimony Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. On Thursday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has scheduled a closed-door hearing.
Administration and military officials insisted that the intensified focus on Yemen predated the embarrassing failure to prevent the attempted airplane bombing last month. They noted that White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan made two visits there last year and that Yemen was the subject of 15 meetings of the National Security Council "deputies committee" as well as numerous meetings of top national security officers. U.S. military counterterrorism trainers and CIA intelligence collectors on the ground there were increased last year along with the budget for such operations. Twice in December, U.S. precision-guided missiles struck al-Qaeda targets in Yemen; an additional strike took place last week.
The biggest surprise of the Christmas incident, a senior administration official said, was that planning for the attack and training of the alleged bomber, Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, took place in Yemen despite the fact that "we had that place sort of blanketed, that we were working it very closely."
"What Mr. Abdulmutallab demonstrates is that we need to heighten our vigilance about those who may have been in Yemen, or that the Yemeni AQAP are working with abroad," including U.S. passport-holders, the official said. This source and military and counterterrorism officials agreed to discuss the still-volatile policy and intelligence situation in Yemen only on the condition of anonymity.
"Individuals who are working this issue need to be in place in Yemen," the official said of the growing U.S. presence there. "We do not have [military] boots on the ground and we have no intention . . . of having boots on the ground. But we want to make sure that we have the expertise and capabilities that can work with the Yemenis to provide them with the wherewithal and the capacity that they need."
The official expressed frustration at a recent offer by Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to negotiate with AQAP leaders who agree to lay down their arms. "Al-Qaeda is an organization to be destroyed, not to be negotiated with in any manner," he said. The administration would "continue to press the Yemenis to defeat al-Qaeda, not to talk with them." Officials are "mindful" to avoid inflaming the domestic situation with a heavy U.S. footprint, he said, "but there are certain near-term and immediate imperatives that we need to pursue."
Brennan's conversations with Saleh and other Yemeni officials, he said, have been "pretty intense . . . and rather direct in terms of what we expected the Yemenis to do vis-a-vis al-Qaeda and what we were prepared to do in the event it was not addressed . . . not just collect information about them but take aggressive action to denigrate their capabilities." The December air attacks, in conjunction with Yemeni air, ground and intelligence forces, were seen as proof that the government was starting to get the message.
Saleh's offer to negotiate, U.S. officials said, is based on a failure to understand that AQAP is a different breed than an earlier organization, al-Qaeda in Yemen, that was largely decimated early this decade by coordinated U.S. and Yemeni operations. The new group, whose leadership was formed by terrorists who escaped from a Yemeni prison in 2006 and Yemenis released from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under the Bush administration, combines al-Qaeda affiliates in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen and is bolstered by insurgents returning from Iraq with what one counterterrorism official called "battlefield expertise" and tactical knowledge.
"As the Iraq conflict came down, you found that a number of those al-Qaeda types who went to Iraq to fight came back with hardened skills and new techniques," the senior administration official said.
"These individuals who wanted to go and fight are now being plugged into the existing organization in Yemen," said Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert at Princeton University. "For a long time, there was no real organizational infrastructure for them to fit into. Now, there is something."
By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 7, 2010; A10
UNITED NATIONS -- The top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan on Wednesday delivered a gloomy assessment of the U.S.-led effort to restore stability in the country and warned "we will fail" if the strategy there relies too heavily on military force.
In a presentation to the U.N. Security Council, envoy Kai Eide called on the United States and its Western allies to invest heavily in Afghanistan's economy and its civilian institutions. He said the Obama administration's "military surge must not be allowed to undermine" those goals.
"What we need is a strategy that is politically and not militarily driven," Eide said in his final briefing to the council before he steps down in March. "If we do not take these civilian components of the transition strategy as seriously as the military component, then we will fail."
Eide's assessment comes just three weeks before the United States and its military allies meet in London for a conference on security in Afghanistan. His remarks, which stressed greater investment in education, agriculture and infrastructure, marked one of his final efforts to leave an imprint on Afghanistan policy.
He also advocated for better salaries for Afghan government administrators, and a peace and reconciliation process that would allow the integration of Taliban insurgents who renounce violence.
After Eide's remarks, Rosemary A. DiCarlo, the U.S. representative for special political affairs, sought to underscore the Obama administration's avowed commitment to beefing up civilian participation in the Afghanistan transition. She said the United States, which is preparing to send 30,000 additional troops there, will soon triple its civilian presence in Afghanistan, from 320 last year to nearly 1,000.
"U.S. experts are also working with their Afghan partners to help rehabilitate Afghanistan's key economic sectors so that Afghans themselves can defeat the insurgents, who promise only more violence," she said. "To help reverse the Taliban's momentum, we are focusing our reconstruction effort in areas where we can quickly create jobs, especially agricultural ones."
The United States also has supported Afghan calls for integrating reformed Taliban insurgents into society if they lay down their weapons. Afghanistan's U.N. ambassador, Zahir Tanin, asked the council to lift sanctions on Taliban members "willing to renounce violence and join the peace process."
The United States and European countries have sought to drop sanctions against former Taliban members who have cooperated with the government, but Russia has resisted such a move.
Eide said that he is "deeply worried" about waning public support in the West for the mission in Afghanistan, the failure of Western forces to counter the Taliban insurgency and the growing frustration among Afghans over what they see as the failure of the international community to improve their lives.
"If these negative trends are not soon reversed, then there is a risk that they will become unmanageable," he told the 15-nation council.
Eide said the Western alliance operates "in a way that Afghans perceive as disrespectful and sometimes arrogant." Such behavior, he said, "fuels suspicions of unacceptable foreign interference and breeds a sense of humiliation."
The United Nations is concerned that billions of dollars in foreign assistance for Afghanistan have not been used to strengthen the nation's institutions. Less than 10 percent of foreign aid has gone directly to the Afghan government, and most of that is earmarked for projects supported by donors.
U.N. officials said they think Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has settled on a replacement for Eide, Staffan di Mistura, a dual Italian and Swedish national who headed the world body's mission in Iraq. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, a French national who headed the U.N. peacekeeping department, and Ian Martin, a former U.N. representative in Nepal and East Timor, also have been under consideration for the job.
WASHINGTON — One of them, an Army Ranger who served three tours in Afghanistan, led a team into a treacherous mountain ravine to recover the remains of 16 American commandos shot down in a helicopter crash. He still remembers how only their boots had been taken off their bodies by the Taliban.
Another, a captain in the Oregon National Guard, held a town in the southern Afghan province of Helmand with a ragtag Afghan Army unit for three chaotic weeks in 2006, only to see the Taliban sweep back in after he got orders to move on.
A third, a supply sergeant with the 10th Mountain Division, spent more time than she ever expected saluting coffins as they left Bagram Air Base near the Afghan capital, Kabul, for the last trip home.
Such are the experiences of some of the soldiers who have lived through the American policy permutations of an Afghan war now entering its ninth year, from the deployment of the 2,000-strong force that helped oust the Taliban from power in 2001 to President Obama’s decision to escalate a stagnating conflict to 100,000 American troops in 2010.
As the first of Mr. Obama’s 30,000 reinforcements arrive in Afghanistan, four men and women, whose lives have been shaped by the war — grass-roots experts as opposed to big-picture policy makers — expressed mixed feelings in recent interviews about the president’s new strategy. They said that they supported sending additional troops, that time had been wasted and the buildup was overdue. But some were skeptical, particularly about the value of training the Afghan security forces.
Even the most optimistic said there was no guarantee that Mr. Obama’s plan would work.
Maj. Kevin Remus, 33, arrived in Helmand in the summer of 2006 when the southern Afghan province was, in his words, “no man’s land” — a Taliban stronghold where British and Canadian troops were stretched thin. A 1998 West Point graduate, Major Remus had left active duty and joined the Army Reserve in 2004. He was called back two years later to lead an 11-man Oregon National Guard training team responsible for fighting alongside a 35-man unit of the Afghan Army.
There were 20,000 American troops in Afghanistan at the time and almost none in Helmand. “We didn’t know what we were up against,” said Major Remus, then a captain in the Guard.
He spent part of that July and August with his unit, holding as best it could the town of Garmsir, on the Helmand River. The Taliban had captured it when the local Afghan police fled. The Canadians had just retaken it, and Major Remus was left with confusing orders from the top. “Somebody in our chain of command said, ‘You guys stay and work with the Afghan police,’ but they had just run away,” Major Remus said. “That’s the reason the Taliban had the town to begin with.”
Major Remus and his small band of Americans and Afghans made a circle of Humvees in a walled area near the town’s government center, which consisted of a few partly burned buildings. They stayed there for three weeks, aware that the Taliban had retreated only about 500 feet to the other side of a nearby canal. Once Major Remus was ordered to leave, fighting over the area resumed. It was not until United States Marines swept through in May 2008 that Garmsir was out of Taliban hands. Today, a fragile calm has taken hold.
Major Remus, now a student at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that he did not consider his effort in Garmsir futile — “we did a good job on a tough mission” — and that the bigger frustration of his yearlong deployment was getting members of his Afghan unit to show up and fight. Mr. Obama’s focus on building up the Afghan Army and police is misguided, he said.
“When they talk about the Afghan security forces, they make it sound so easy,” Major Remus said. “I don’t think people understand the difficulty. You don’t trust them like you would another American soldier.”
Feeling Forgotten
First Lt. Kristen L. Rouse, 36, of Brooklyn, was at Bagram Air Base in the spring of 2006 keeping track of equipment and supplying body armor to troops when Iraq was grabbing all the headlines.
“To tell you the truth, we felt really forgotten,” said Lieutenant Rouse, who was a supply sergeant in the 10th Mountain Division at the time.
That June, a soldier in her unit was killed in a convoy, “which really stopped all of us in our tracks,” she said. It turned out to be the worst month in 2006 for American casualties in Afghanistan: 18 Americans killed, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths. Lieutenant Rouse knew firsthand because as the coffins arrived at Bagram en route to the United States, announcements would come over the loudspeakers for anyone available to line the main drive and salute.
“It was a regular feature of our lives,” she said. “It didn’t happen every day, thank God, but I can’t tell you how many fallen comrade ceremonies I stood there and saluted at. And all of that is going on, and you see nothing of the reality we lived reflected in the news.” At the time, she said, “the U.S. really had a very cheap commitment to Afghanistan.”
Now, she said, “for people to wake up and say, ‘Hey, we haven’t accomplished anything in Afghanistan, let’s pull out,’ my gut response is, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
Lieutenant Rouse is now training with a unit of the Vermont National Guard at Camp Atterbury in Indiana and will be heading back to Afghanistan sometime in the coming months to provide support for an infantry battalion. She said she believed the president’s plan was “very doable,” but “had we done it right the first time, we wouldn’t have had to do it a second time.”
‘No Guarantees’
Maj. Pat Work, 36, a member of the elite Army Rangers, helped build a remote base on the Afghan border with Pakistan in early 2002, moved on foot in the bitter cold of the northeastern mountains trying to gather intelligence about insurgents in late 2004 and was part of the recovery team for a failed mission to capture or kill a Taliban leader in the summer of 2005.
Three of four members of the Navy Seals died in that mission, a story told in a best-selling book by the lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell. Eight more members of the Seals and eight other Special Operations personnel who were trying to rescue the original four were killed when their helicopter was shot down. When Major Work and his team found the bodies of the 16 after searching a heavily forested mountainside, he had a grim insight into the resourcefulness of the Taliban.
“What I learned that day was that the Taliban took nothing off of our deceased other than their boots,” he said. “Boots was something very practical they could use at 10,000 feet in August.”
Throughout his three tours, he came to see the Taliban as “a violent extremist movement that provides jobs.” He also learned how hard it was to get villagers to divulge information about insurgents to American troops. “There’s very little incentive for a local who knows you’re going to leave to talk,” he said.
Major Work, who also served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, is now working full time on a graduate thesis at Georgetown. He wants to go back to Afghanistan, and said that the president’s new plan finally linked the kind of small-unit commando operations in which he took part to a larger strategy of intelligence-gathering and protecting the Afghan population. But will it succeed? “There are no guarantees,” Major Work said.
A Soldier’s Journal
Sgt. First Class Jeff Courter, 52, spent much of 2007 on a remote base in Paktika Province, hard on the edge of Pakistan, where he was the chief officer of a small Illinois National Guard unit charged with training the Afghan border police, or A.B.P. At the time, he called the conflict the “Kmart War” because he felt the United States was fighting it at a discount.
He taught the border police how to use weapons, went on joint patrols, held meetings with Afghan elders and gave away hundreds of pounds of food to villagers. But as he wrote in a journal he self-published on his return, “We didn’t get rid of the Taliban; we didn’t elevate the A.B.P. to a much higher level than they were before we arrived; we didn’t get schools or clinics built.”
Sergeant Courter concluded that his progress had been in “baby steps,” and did some soul-searching as he left for home. “I am still trying to figure out what we are trying to do here, what we have accomplished, what is or should be our goal and whether or not we can succeed,” he wrote in his journal on Jan. 17, 2008.
Sergeant Courter, now a National Guard recruiter in Kankakee, Ill., said that Mr. Obama had finally given American commanders in Afghanistan the tools to do their jobs, although he predicted no quick victory.
“I believe that progress is inevitable and the Taliban are doomed because they’re on the wrong side of history,” he said. “The question is, how long will that take?”
Cool poker-players, we are tempted to believe, only raise or fold: they only increase their bet or leave the game. Calling, making the minimum bet to stay, suggests that you can't calculate the odds or face losing the pot, and that the other players are intimidating you. Calling is for children. Real men and women don't want to call in Afghanistan: they want to dramatically increase troops and expenditure, defeat the Taliban, and leave. Or they just want to leave. Both sides—the disciples of the surge and the apostles of withdrawal—therefore found some satisfaction in one passage in President Obama's speech at West Point on December 1:
I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.
But the rest left them uneasy. This was not, as they might have imagined, because he was lurching between two contradictory doctrines of increase and withdrawal, but because the rest of his speech argued for a radically different strategy—a call strategy—which is about neither surge nor exit but about a much-reduced and longer-term presence in the country. The President did not make this explicit. But this will almost certainly be the long-term strategy of the US and its allies. And he has with remarkable courage and scrupulousness articulated the premises that lead to this conclusion. First, however, it is necessary to summarize the history of our involvement and the conventional policies that have long favored surge and exit.
A legion of arguments almost drove Obama away from this new moderate position over the last ten weeks of discussion. There was our general fear in Afghanistan and Pakistan of the modern demons, which policy experts dub "insurgency, terrorism, civil war, human rights–abusing warlords, narcotics, weapons of mass destruction, and global jihad" and the spawn of "safe havens, rogue, fragile, and failed states." There was our developing sense, over the last eight years, that the status quo was unacceptable.
From 2001, sections of the international community attempted to assist the Afghan government in the construction of a state. The British Department for International Development put 80 percent of its funds into direct budgetary support for the Afghan government and NGOs implemented health, education, and rural development projects as contractors for the Afghan government. Such efforts were described by NATO as a "comprehensive approach to security, governance and economic development" in which the UN, an apparently benevolent Karzai government, NATO, and the NGOs would all play their part—largely in concert because there was no perceived conflict between their aims and values.
Challenges from warlords, druglords, lack of funds, and lack of government authority were to be met through cen- tralization, disarmament of opposition groups, crop eradication, coordination, and closer partnership. It was assumed that it would be possible within a reasonable time (some documents claimed within seven years) to build a stable centralized state, largely independent of foreign support, arranged around the rule of law and a technocratic administration, with a vibrant economy based on lawful commerce and trade. Few expected the Taliban to reemerge. Comparisons were drawn with the development of Korea or Singapore.
Eight years later this seems a tragic fantasy. Frustrated by lack of progress, the US and its allies have oscillated giddily between contradictory policies. The British government that once championed more generous budgetary support for the Kabul government now portrays it as corrupt, semi-criminal, ineffective, and illegitimate. "Warlords" such as Gul Agha Shirzai, who we once demonized, are now tolerated or even praised, and are almost certain to be given good positions in the new Karzai government. We armed militias in 2001, disarmed them through a demobilization program in 2003, and rearmed them again in 2006 as community defense forces. We allowed local autonomy in 2001, pushed for a strong central government in 2003, and returned to decentralization in 2006. First we tolerated opium crops; then we proposed to eradicate them through aerial spraying; now we expect to live with opium production for decades.
Meanwhile, the Karzai government and the nations involved in Afghanistan have fallen into a cruel and dysfunctional arranged marriage that seems too often to lack common values, common projects, trust, and even patience. Each undermines the other's legitimacy. NATO is blamed for being associated with a corrupt and illegitimate administration; the Karzai government is blamed by Afghans for bombarding civilians and for accepting the support of foreign infidels. And each has sought to shift blame to the other side.
Many of these tensions were illustrated in the first week of November: five British soldiers were killed by the Afghan policeman they were training; nine Afghan policemen, trying to come to the rescue of lost American servicemen, were killed by a coalition bomb; five UN election observers were killed by the Taliban in their Kabul guesthouse, causing the UN to begin to withdraw its staff. A PBS journalist interviewed President Karzai:
Margaret Warner: "The UN did reluctantly withdraw about two thirds of its foreign staff.... What impact is that likely to have?"
Margaret Warner: So you don't care if they return?
Hamid Karzai: They may or may not return. Afghanistan won't notice it. We wish them well wherever they are.
Even an optimist would now describe Afghanistan as a poor, dangerous country, struggling to survive in the face of jihadist ideology, insecurity, and poor governance. It is now hoped that good development in Afghanistan might allow it over decades to draw level with Pakistan. The Taliban have a growing presence even outside their traditional heartland in the south and east of Afghanistan and they mount attacks on previously safe areas and communities. Civil war is now seen as very likely. Comparisons are drawn with Somalia.
Through all these bewildering years, a subtle and refined edifice of justification for troop increases has emerged, in which arguments are categorized by type and family and reinforced with analogies and precedents, in a structure in which each claim supports another. The tone, history, and arguments in this liturgy are not only the product of soldiers, spies, explorers, journalists, administrators, writers, aid workers, professors, think-tank directors, and politicians. They have been developed by the great alliances of NATO and the UN and have drawn on World Bank economists, veterans of Iraq and the frontier, linguists with decades of experience in rural Afghanistan, and even, occasionally, Afghans. The creed, hammered out in the great international councils of Washington, Bonn, and Paris, runs as follows:
Afghanistan is an existential threat. It is the epicenter of international terrorism and the epitome of a failed state. We must fight in Afghanistan for six reasons: (1) to protect the United States and the rest of NATO from terrorist attack; (2) to protect Pakistan and the region; (3) to protect the credibility of the United States and NATO; (4) to protect the Afghan people; (5) to defeat the Taliban; and (6)to create an effective, legitimate, stable state.
Our enemies include corruption, drugs, poverty, and insecurity and we will address them through governance and capacity- building, alternative livelihoods, a regional solution, a comprehensive approach, and an exit strategy. The surge worked in Iraq. We have a moral obligation to the Afghan people. By abandoning them in 1989, we created the conditions that led to September 11. We must, therefore, implement counter-insurgency operations across the spectrum.
Just as Buddha's fourth noble truth can be divided into an eightfold path, so each justification, need, ethical claim, doctrine, precedent, and analogy of this modern metaphysics can be further subdivided. Thus the article of faith that our operations in Afghanistan are crucial to the stability of Pakistan can conventionally be defended by reference to the need for a two-sided pincer movement against the Taliban on the border; worries about safe havens, failed states, and global jihad; the support for drone attacks in Pakistan conveyed in one opinion poll on the frontier and by one Pakistani general; the appearance of the Taliban "only sixty miles from Islamabad." And the possibility that mad mullahs will seize the nukes.
Each argument echoes much deeper assumptions about the world: a belief in the moral imperative of humanitarian intervention, backed by our failures in Rwanda and our success in the Balkans; a maximal vision in which no one good ("security," for example) can be achieved without the achievement of every other good (such as "development" or "the rule of law"); a rhetorical tradition in which all goods are seen as consistent and mutually reinforcing; and an Enlightenment faith that there is nothing intrinsically intractable about Afghan culture and society and that all men can be perfected (to a Western ideal) through the application of reason and the laws of social science.
But perhaps more importantly there are our more recent theories about the global order. There is the credit we take for the success of postwar Germany, democracy in Eastern Europe post-1989, and economic growth in South and East Asia. There are our apparent mistakes with Mossadeq in Iran in the 1950s; fighting in Vietnam in the 1960s, Latin America in the 1980s, and Somalia in the 1990s; the September 11 attacks; North Korea today; and the different lessons we have chosen to take about working against the popular will, supporting dictators, leaving, or failing to act. All of this experience is reflected in our division of the world into friendly, puppet, rogue, fragile, and failed states and our anxieties about instability, insurgency, terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction.
All these fears, frustrations, and doctrines contributed to the relentless logic that drove Obama to state, last year, "We must win in Afghanistan"; and to claim that Bush failed in Afghanistan because he did not invest enough resources. Even Obama's latest speech began with the story of how Afghanistan fell and September 11 occurred because "the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere," and the speech reminded us of "a nuclear-armed Pakistan,...NATO's credibility,...failed states."
Such arguments explain why he sent an extra 17,000 troops last March, insisting that "there is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated," and he committed the US to "promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government" and "advance security, opportunity and justice." This is also why he announced a more maximalist counterinsurgency strategy in the March White Paper and appointed a new commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, to implement it.
By agreeing to a counterinsurgency strategy, Obama implicitly committed to all the doctrine contained in a two-hundred-page field manual, derived from the analysis of seventy-three previous insurgencies. "Full-spectrum counter-insurgency," or COIN, the President was informed in the manual, "is all-encompassing." It is expressed in aphorisms such as "the center of gravity is the population" and "we are not being out-fought but out-governed"; and mottoes like "Clear, Hold, Build." It includes economic development, infantry tactics, political negotiation, building capacity for governance, and eliminating "high-value" targets using predator drones. The soldiers, according to the COIN doctrine, need to have considerable cultural sensitivity, knowledge, and good fortune. They must work in close and constructive concert with a credible local government. They need to be able to control the borders and protect communities during the lengthy process of reconstruction.
It is almost impossible to say what counterinsurgency does not include. But it almost always requires more troops. I first heard almost a year ago that General Petraeus was pressing for another 40,000 troops. When I finally saw McChrystal in Kabul in October, he had completed his report and formally requested another 40,000 troops. Obama could not refuse the bulk of the general's requests without being personally blamed for the future of Afghanistan.
Little wonder that some called (in the President's words) "for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort—one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade." How could they ask for any other course when they argued from within a conceptual prison, founded on fears, boxed in by domestic political calculations, restricted by misleading definitions, buttressed by syllogisms, endorsed by generals, and crowned with historical analogies? Yet this is what the President said about full-scale escalation:
I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests. As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I don't have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I'm mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who—in discussing our national security—said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."
I felt as though I had come to hear a fifteenth-century scholastic and found myself suddenly encountering Erasmus: someone not quite free of the peculiarities of the old way, and therefore haunted by its elisions, omissions, and contradictions; but already anticipating a reformation. Obama's central—and revolutionary—claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, "we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars." Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing "whatever it takes" and "whatever it costs"—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don't have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
The US must husband its resources to meet other strategic challenges. Obama's description of these is still narrowly focused on failed states and terrorism: it does not include the threats posed by states such as China or Russia, still less Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, or Kashmir, and it does not attempt to compare the conflict in Afghanistan to the risks posed by climate change or threats to the supply of food in poor nations. But he names Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as posing challenges. The US responsibility to the Afghan people is only one responsibility among many and "the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own." He emphasizes the competing demand of domestic priorities and costs:
Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We've failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.
Or to return to poker, he argues that we have limited chips and the amount we stake in Afghanistan should reflect the amount we stand to gain and the likelihood of winning.
This may imply that Obama has given up and is in favor of a rapid exit. (I, for one, have rarely managed to convince anyone during the last four years that I can be both against troop increases and against withdrawal.) But Obama opposes precipitate withdrawal. He acknowledges that although "our responsibility, our means, or our interests" are limited, they exist in Afghanistan. We have a certain responsibility to the Afghan people who would suffer a civil war if we withdrew. This would initially be between the Taliban and the Karzai government, but it could expand (as it did in the 1990s) into more fragmented local conflicts, fueled by neighboring countries, in which no faction is strong enough to win or weak enough to give up the fight, and in which Afghans are plunged back into anarchy, cruel conflict, and poverty. We have the means, however, to make a positive contribution and we have an interest in preventing a defeat that would wreck our hopes, humiliate the United States and NATO, embolden our enemies, and weaken our allies (and not only in Pakistan). He implies that just because we cannot do everything does not mean we can do nothing.
Obama's objectives in remaining in Afghanistan are as follows:
We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.... And we will also focus our assistance in areas—such as agriculture—that can make an immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people.
In other words, he would continue to use intelligence and special forces to keep the pressure on Osama bin Laden. He would continue to deliver humanitarian assistance and economic development aid particularly to the many poor and neglected communities who want to work with us in the north and center of Afghanistan. In addition (which differentiates this model from the strictly counterterrorism approach), he would retain a sufficiently robust presence to prevent the Taliban from ever gathering an army or mounting a conventional threat or rolling artillery and tanks up the highway to take an Afghan city like Kabul. And combine US military presence with political action and incentives to keep tribal leaders and other regional power brokers on our side and away from the Taliban. And ultimately, through all these techniques, decrease the likelihood of civil war, increase the likelihood of a political settlement with the Taliban, and leave Afghanistan in twenty years' time a more stable and prosperous country than it is today.
This strategy assumes that the Afghan Taliban are less of a threat to Pakistani stability and NATO than they appear. It also assumes that a counterinsurgency strategy and Iraq-style surge will not—on their own—succeed and a state-building strategy will not work. Obama still needs to find the language to express these insights without falling into the trap of withdrawal.
There are, in reality, no inescapable connections between Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There are positive and negative effects of our Afghan operations on Pakistan, (positive, through increasing pressure on the Taliban; negative, through inflaming Islamist anti-US sentiment in Pakistan and driving "bad guys" over the border into Afghanistan). But the future of Pakistan will be determined predominantly by factors internal to Pakistan, such as the military, the feudal system, and the relationship between the institutions of Islam and the Pakistani state. Similarly, although al-Qaeda and the Taliban cooperate and share funding, they are still largely divided between a non-Afghan group focused on international terrorism and Afghan–Pakistani groups whose primary aim is to drive foreign troops from Afghanistan and spread Islamist rule in Pakistan. You could at least in theory defeat the Taliban without eliminating al-Qaeda, and the Taliban could return to power in Afghanistan without bringing back al-Qaeda.
The counterinsurgency strategy and surge in Iraq led to a drop in violence (against predictions), but the same will not happen in Afghanistan. The Iraq insurgency was the movement of a minority sectarian group, the Sunnis, whose supporters have been driven from most of the neighborhoods in the capital city and whose leaders were tribal figures with a long-standing relationship to the central government. The Shia-dominated Baghdad government was a powerful, credible force, from the majority ethnic and sectarian group, and was supported by mass political parties, with their own militias. The challenge for Petraeus and his predecessors in Iraq was to grasp this political opportunity; provide support, money, and status to the losing Sunni groups to separate them from al- Qaeda; and convince Nouri al-Maliki to disengage from some of the Shia militias and endorse the settlement. In Afghanistan, neither the Karzai government nor the Taliban have the history, the structure, or the incentives to foster such a deal.
Afghanistan contains a diffuse rural insurgency spread among a population of 30 million people, 80 percent of whom are scattered among 20,000 remote, often mountainous villages. It is different from Iraq, where the insurgency was largely centered around the flat urban areas surrounding Baghdad. Nor is it like the much smaller Malaya of the 1950s, where the British in their antiguerrilla operations were able to move villagers to walled and guarded camps. At least half of Afghanistan (a country almost the size of Texas) is now threatened by insurgency, and the COIN doctrine requires sufficient troops to secure and protect the population areas.
This is why the architects of the COIN doctrine are calling for a ratio of one "trained counterinsurgent" (a category that includes Afghans, if they have been given the necessary skills) for every fifty members of the population or a combined total that would amount in Afghanistan to 600,000 troops, if they intended to cover the country (though most theorists believe it is only necessary to cover half). The effective, legitimate Afghan government, on which the entire counterinsurgency strategy depends, shows little sign of emerging, in part because the international community lacks the skills, the knowledge, the legitimacy, or the patience to build a new nation. In short, COIN won't work on its own terms because of the lack of numbers and a credible Afghan partner and in absolute terms because of the difficulties of the country and its political structures.
But equally history does not doom the allies to absolute failure. The situation may not be that of Iraq in 2006 or Afghanistan in 1988, but neither is it Afghanistan in 1842, still less in 330 BC (even if we actually understood the victories of the Victorians or Alexander). Pakistan may not be a failed state and mullahs may not be a hand's breadth from its nukes; but Pakistan is facing serious instability and a moderate, constructive policy in Afghanistan could at least prevent Afghanistan from con- tributing further to its instability. The US and its NATO allies would be able to survive withdrawal from Afghanistan but it would be damaging to their reputations. While we cannot write a blank check to Afghans, we would like to prevent their country from falling into civil war, which would probably result in tens of thousands of deaths. It makes sense to stay, if we can maintain a realistic, affordable, and legitimate presence in Afghanistan and do some good.
It is difficult to find the appropriate language to express such insights. A moderate, light policy runs against a natural tendency to invest extravagantly in defending against even minor threats to our national security (the reverse of our systematic tendency to "lowball," i.e., to undercompensate for, or underprice, risk in our banking system or the environment). This partly reflects a general, ancient view of the "night watchman" state, involved not in internal regulation but in security. It is partly because terrorism seems a much more immediate and horrifying prospect than financial collapse, climate change, or threats to food security and is more directly linked to loss of life (even if the other issues ultimately may kill many more people). And our culture puts a very high value on life (though a higher value on the lives of our own citizens than on those of other nationals).
We would prefer, therefore, to believe that any war in which we engage is a vital threat to our very existence—in which case the odds of victory are irrelevant and any sacrifice is justified. And there must be a defined end. It would be difficult for a president to argue that we should sacrifice lives without winning in order to prevent something worse (although we build dams when we can't control the flow of water and employ a police force when we can't end crime).
We would be revolted by someone who tried to calculate how many lives the objectives in Afghanistan were worth (fifty? a thousand?). And these are all healthy intuitions: we would not want to be in a world where lives were treated simply as units, to which we assigned a definite and explicit expendable value in a grand cost-benefit analysis. But these intuitions still reinforce an all-or-nothing approach to foreign policy.
The simple process of naming our past and present strategies already generates and restricts our response. Thus by naming operations in Afghanistan a counterinsurgency, we may feel compelled to deploy one trained counterinsurgent for every fifty members of the population; by labeling our approach "an Afghanistan–Pakistan strategy," we imply that our actions in Afghanistan are vital to the security of Pakistan; by putting the Taliban in the category of those pursuing a global jihad, we conclude that we cannot negotiate with them; by naming Afghanistan a terrorist safe haven or a failed state, we conclude that failure (or even a light "footprint") is not an option.
Obama deftly avoided all these words and traps in his speech, perhaps because he has become aware of their extreme implications. There was no talk of victory. His aim was no longer to defeat but to contain the Taliban: to "deny it the ability to overthrow the government." He explicitly rejected a long "nation-building project." He talked not of eliminating but of keeping the pressure on al-Qaeda. He did not speak of a moral obligation to the Afghan people. He did not specify any necessary logical connections between the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He asserted that "there's no imminent threat of the [Afghan] government being overthrown." He emphasized that "we will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens." He did not draw parallels with the surge in Iraq. And most strikingly of all, whereas he had referred four times in March to insurgency, now he stated that "unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency."
Such moderate analysis disappointed those who wanted a call to arms. The West Point cadets in the audience yawned, stared at the floor, and clapped only halfheartedly. Bush's surge in Iraq was a troop increase of only 20 percent; Obama's contributions to Afghanistan since he took office will more than double US troop presence on the ground. Bush spoke at a time of overwhelming public opposition to the war and with one of the lowest popularity ratings ever recorded; but it was Bush, not Obama, who spoke about determination, commitment, victory, and doing whatever it takes. Obama sounded like those he criticized for wanting to "simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through."
But this moderate tone gains Obama the leverage that Bush lacked. As long as the US asserted that Afghanistan was an existential threat, the front line in the war on terror, and that, therefore, failure was not an option, the US had no leverage over Karzai. The worse Afghanistan behaved—the more drugs it grew and terrorists it fostered—the more money it received. If it sorted out its act, it risked being relegated to a minor charitable recipient like Tajikistan. A senior Afghan official warned me this year "to stop referring to us as a humanitarian crisis: we must be the number one terrorist threat in the world, because if we are not we won't get any money." By asserting convincingly that Afghanistan is not the be-all and end-all and that the US could always ultimately withdraw, Obama escapes this codependent trap and regains some leverage over the Afghan government. In his politer words:
It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security, and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.
But perhaps even more importantly, defining a more moderate and limited strategy gives him leverage over his own generals. By refusing to endorse or use the language of counterinsurgency in the speech, he escapes their doctrinal logic. By no longer committing the US to defeating the Taliban or state-building, he dramatically reduces the objectives and the costs of the mission. By talking about costs, the fragility of public support, and other priorities, he reminds the generals why this surge must be the last. All of this serves to "cap" the troop increases at current levels and provide the justification for beginning to reduce numbers in 2011.
But the brilliance of its moderate arguments cannot overcome that statement about withdrawal. With seven words, "our troops will begin to come home," he loses leverage over the Taliban, as well as leverage he had gained over Karzai and the generals. It is a cautious, lawyerly statement, expressed again as "[we will] begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." It sets no final exit date or numbers. But the Afghan students who were watching the speech with me ignored these nuances and saw it only as departure.
This may be fatal for Obama's ambition to "open the door" to the Taliban. The lighter, more political, and less but still robust militarized presence that his argument implies could facilitate a deal with the Taliban, if it appeared semi-permanent. As the President asserted, the Taliban are not that strong. They have nothing like the strength or appeal that they had in 1995. They cannot take the capital, let alone recapture the country. There is strong opposition to their presence, particularly in the center and the north of the country. Their only hope is to negotiate. But the Taliban need to acknowledge this. And the only way they will is if they believe that we are not going to allow the Kabul government to collapse.
Afghanistan has been above all a project not of force but of patience. It would take decades before Afghanistan achieved the political cohesion, stability, wealth, government structures, or even basic education levels of Pakistan. A political settlement requires a reasonably strong permanent government. The best argument against the surge, therefore, was never that a US operation without an adequate Afghan government partner would be unable to defeat the Taliban—though it won't. Nor that the attempt to strengthen the US campaign will intensify resistance, though it may. Nor because such a deployment of over 100,000 troops at a cost of perhaps $100 billion a year would be completely disproportional to the US's limited strategic interests and moral obligation in Afghanistan—though that too is true.
Instead, Obama should not have requested more troops because doing so intensifies opposition to the war in the US and Europe and accelerates the pace of withdrawal demanded by political pressures at home. To keep domestic consent for a long engagement we need to limit troop numbers and in particular limit our casualties. The surge is a Mephistophelian bargain, in which the President has gained force but lost time.
What can now be done to salvage the administration's position? Obama has acquired leverage over the generals and some support from the public by making it clear that he will not increase troop strength further. He has gained leverage over Karzai by showing that he has options other than investing in Afghanistan. Now he needs to regain leverage over the Taliban by showing them that he is not about to abandon Afghanistan and that their best option is to negotiate. In short, he needs to follow his argument for a call strategy to its conclusion. The date of withdrawal should be recast as a time for reduction to a lighter, more sustainable, and more permanent presence. This is what the administration began to do in the days following the speech. As National Security Adviser General James Jones said, "That date is a 'ramp' rather than a cliff." And as Hillary Clinton said in her congressional testimony on December 3, their real aim should be to "develop a long-term sustainable relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, primarily our abandonment of that region."
A more realistic, affordable, and therefore sustainable presence would not make Afghanistan stable or predictable. It would be merely a small if necessary part of an Afghan political strategy. The US and its allies would only moderate, influence, and fund a strategy shaped and led by Afghans themselves. The aim would be to knit together different Afghan interests and allegiances sensitively enough to avoid alienating independent local groups, consistently enough to regain their trust, and robustly enough to restore the security and justice that Afghans demand and deserve from a national government.
What would this look like in practice? Probably a mess. It might involve a tricky coalition of people we refer to, respectively, as Islamists, progressive civil society, terrorists, warlords, learned technocrats, and village chiefs. Under a notionally democratic constitutional structure, it could be a rickety experiment with systems that might, like Afghanistan's neighbors, include strong elements of religious or military rule. There is no way to predict what the Taliban might become or what authority a national government in Kabul could regain. Civil war would remain a possibility. But an intelligent, long-term, and tolerant partnership with the United States could reduce the likelihood of civil war and increase the likelihood of a political settlement. This is hardly the stuff of sound bites and political slogans. But it would be better for everyone than boom and bust, surge and flight. With the right patient leadership, a political strategy could leave Afghanistan in twenty years' time more prosperous, stable, and humane than it is today. That would be excellent for Afghans and good for the world.
Meanwhile, Obama's broader strategic argument must not be lost. He has grasped that the foreign policy of the president should not consist in a series of extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles, driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine. Instead the foreign policy of a great power should be the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty. Obama, we may hope, will develop this elusive insight. And then it might become possible to find the right places in which to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States. We might hope in South Asia, for example, for a lighter involvement in Afghanistan but a much greater focus on Kashmir.[*]
I began by saying that "calling" in poker was childish and that grownups raise or fold. But there is another category of people who raise or fold: those who are anxious to leave the table. They go all in to exit, hoping to get lucky but if not then at least to finish. They do not do this on the basis of their cards or the pot. They do it because they lack the patience, the interest, the focus, or the confidence to pace themselves carefully through the long and exhausting hours. They no longer care enough about the game. Obama is a famously keen poker player. He should never be in a hurry to leave the table.
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