War Council After Peace Prize

David Kilcullen, Paul McCartney to Stanley McChrystal's John Lennon for the COIN set, unsurprisingly thinks that an outright escalation is the only path to victory in Afghanistan.

(CNN) -- An influential adviser to the U.S. commander in Afghanistan declared Friday that anything less than 25,000 extra international troops in the country would not be enough to win.

David Kilcullen, who also advised U.S. commanders in Iraq, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour the window of opportunity to turn around the war is closing.

Kilcullen's comments came as President Barack Obama, only hours after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, again met with his top advisers to discuss strategy and troop levels in Afghanistan.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is reportedly asking for up to 40,000 extra troops. Some reports say there is an option on the table to send 60,000 additional troops, almost doubling the U.S. force now in the country.

Kilcullen, who has just come back from Afghanistan -- said the Obama administration needs to finish the strategy review as soon as possible. While the war is not as bad as some say, "it's worse than any other time in the past," he said.

Kilcullen is also aware of the problems of governmental corruption and the lack of a partner in the civilian leadership in the country. But he's certainly foregrounding the use of military force to overcome the fact that we'd be protecting the population in service to an illegitimate government.

The discordance of the war council at the White House on the day Barack Obama was handed the Nobel Peace Prize was not lost on the Afghans.

"I'm not sure I understand -- this isn't for peace here, is it?" said bank worker Homaira Reza. "Because we haven't got any."

Irfan Mohammed, whose shop windows were rattled a day earlier by a massive blast outside the Indian Embassy in central Kabul, said he believed Obama was a good man, and perhaps deserving of the laurel.

"But so far as Afghanistan goes, he hasn't made up his mind what to do," Mohammed said.

I still think the Nobel Committee, consciously or unconsciously, is undertaking some behavioral economics here. I don't know if it will work, but clearly Obama is in some kind of box.

The Economics Of Military Action

Here's something you don't see everyday - a member of Congress asking to fiscally quantify endless war:

“There are some fundamental questions that I would ask of those who are suggesting that we follow a long term counterinsurgency strategy:

1. As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it? We are now in the middle of a fundamental debate over reforming our healthcare system. The President has indicated that it must cost less than $900 billion over ten years and be fully paid for. The Congressional Budget Office has had four committees twisting themselves into knots in order to fit healthcare reform into that limit. CBO is earnestly measuring the cost of each competing healthcare plan. Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan? If we add 40,000 troops and recognize the need for a sustained 10 year or longer commitment, as the architects of this plan tell us we do, the military costs alone would be over $800 billion. And unlike the demands that are being made of the healthcare alternatives that they be deficit neutral, we’ve heard no such demand with respect to Afghanistan. I would ask how much will this entire effort cost, when you add in civilian costs and costs in Pakistan? And how would that impact the budget?

Warmongers have had the great luxury in this country of never having to justify their costs. Not just the human costs, but the real financial costs to constant military buildup. The usual retort is that you can't put a price on human lives. If that was the case, there would be no requirement for budget neutrality in health care reform, something that could save as many as 45,000 lives annually - the people who die from a lack of health insurance.

Rep. Obey's full remarks are well worth reading - he makes all the points about the futility of nation-building in a country without a partner in the government, the danger of angering local populations with a heavier occupying footprint, the fantasyland strategy of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, the need for an achievable policy, the potential for the war to crowd out any other Presidential agenda item. But I wanted to highlight this part because it's so alien to the contemporary political debate. It's certainly nothing you'd ever hear coming from the mouths of one of the fiscal scolds. The Pentagon budget, the budget for perpetual war, is inviolable and somehow magic - it doesn't create deficits, it doesn't produce burdens on long-term spending, it is never "at risk of going bankrupt." David Obey at least is trying to change that misimpression.

Some insider leaked the idea that the top-level troop request is actually 60,000, in an effort to make the 40,000 number seem like the middle course. Maybe they can write down on paper how much that would cost. And do it in a ten-year budget window to make sure the costs are inflated as possible.


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Nobel Committee Behavioral Economics

Robert Naiman hits on a theme:

But anyone who thinks this award is unprecedented hasn't been paying attention.

The Nobel Committee gave South African Bishop Desmond Tutu the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his leadership of efforts to abolish apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid wasn't fully abolished in South Africa until 1994. The committee could have waited until after apartheid was abolished to say, "Well done!" But the point of the award was to help bring down apartheid by strengthening Bishop Tutu's efforts. In particular, everyone knew that it was going to be much harder for the apartheid regime to crack down on Tutu after the Nobel Committee wrapped him in its protective cloak of world praise.

That's what the Nobel Committee is trying to do for Obama now. It's giving an award to encourage the change in world relations that Obama has promised, and to try to help shield Obama against his domestic adversaries. The committee is well aware that history is contingent and that Obama might fail. It knows very well that the same country that elected Obama also gave the world George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, the chairman of the Nobel Committee said today that they wanted to “enhance Obama’s diplomatic efforts so far rather than reward him for events in the future.” At a time when the President is trying to figure out what to do in Afghanistan, and has reached conclusions that are far more minimalist than the hawks would have wanted, maybe the Nobel Committee is trying to "nudge" him in the right direction?

As it reviews its Afghanistan policy for the second time this year, the Obama administration has concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a political or military movement, regardless of how many combat forces are sent into battle.

That's just not something the previous Administration would have concluded.

I hope the nudge works. Sincerely.

...And as for the most important actor in the outcome of this award? George W. Bush isn't releasing a statement. Class act. Actually, I wouldn't either if I were him. "Congratulations on being recognized as the repudiation of everything I did!"

We Don't Even Have A Partner To Receive Aid

As a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of war go down, the Administration and Congress has talked of a "civilian surge" in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, providing more non-military and development aid to both countries. This was realized in the Kerry-Lugar bill, which gave $7.5 billion in aid over 5 years to Pakistan. It was one of Joe Biden's old bills that they repurposed, and would give an opportunity for the US to help Pakistanis out of grinding poverty and achieve some goodwill with them.

And Pakistan went apeshit:

The Obama administration's strategy for bolstering Pakistan's civilian government was shaken Wednesday when political opposition and military leaders there sharply criticized a new U.S. assistance plan as interfering with the country's sovereignty.

Although President Obama has praised the $7.5 billion, five-year aid program -- approved by Congress last week -- Pakistani officials have objected to provisions that require U.S. monitoring of everything from how they spend the money to the way the military promotes senior officers.

Their criticism threatens to complicate the administration's efforts in the region, where Pakistan's assistance is seen as crucial to the war in Afghanistan.

"Obviously, it demonstrates we've still got work to do," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said of the Pakistani criticism.

Kerry and Lugar tried to push back by calling out some myths being put forward by the Pakistanis. For example:

MYTH: The $7.5 billion (Rs. 62, 500 crores) authorized by the bill comes with strings attached for the people of Pakistan.

FACT: There are no conditions on Pakistan attached to these funds.

The $7.5 billion (Rs. 62,500 crore) authorized is all for non-military aid. These funds are unconditioned— they are a pledge of U.S. friendship to the Pakistani people. There are strict measures of financial accountability on these funds that Congress is imposing on the U.S. executive branch—not the Pakistani government, to make sure the money is being spent properly and for the purposes intended. Such accountability measures have been welcomed by Pakistani commentators to ensure that funds meant for schools, roads and clinics actually reach the Pakistani people and are not wasted.

MYTH: The bill impinges on Pakistan’s sovereignty.

FACT: Nothing in the bill threatens Pakistani sovereignty. Period.

This bill is an extended hand of friendship, from the people of America to the people of Pakistan. It will fund schools, roads, energy infrastructure, and medical clinics. Even when Americans are going through a deep recession and tough economic times, the United States is pledging $7.5 billion (Rs. 62,500 crore) as a long-term commitment to Pakistan. Those seeking to undermine this partnership, to advance their own narrow partisan or institutional agendas, are doing a serious disservice to the people of the United States and of Pakistan.

But this isn't going to be good enough. The real problem here is that the Pakistani people HATE the Americans, and any effort to infringe on their sovereignty will be met with this kind of anger, whether true or false. There are many in Pakistan who would probably want to be left alone rather than be given aid as a fig leaf for the destruction and death in the region. And disapproval of this package probably equals popular support across much of the country. In particular, the Pakistani army is angered by this, I would guess because so much of it is non-military aid, and they control a lot of the economy there. And remember, the Pakistani army and Pakistani intelligence is intimately linked to insurgent forces of the kind who may have blown up the Indian Embassy in Kabul, just like they did a year ago.

If we can't give money to Pakistan without an international incident, it says quite a lot about our prospects for controlling outcomes in the region.

The Narrowness Of The Afghan Debate

The White House, a day after stating that the only part of Afghanistan war policy off the table is ending it, is throwing up a trial balloon that they will pull back on their nation-building project there:

President Obama’s national security team is moving to reframe its war strategy by emphasizing the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan while arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States, officials said Wednesday.

As Mr. Obama met with advisers for three hours to discuss Pakistan, the White House said he had not decided whether to approve a proposed troop buildup in Afghanistan. But the shift in thinking, outlined by senior administration officials on Wednesday, suggests that the president has been presented with an approach that would not require all of the additional troops that his commanding general in the region has requested.

It remains unclear whether everyone in Mr. Obama’s war cabinet fully accepts this view. While Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has argued for months against increasing troops in Afghanistan because Pakistan was the greater priority, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have both warned that the Taliban remain linked to Al Qaeda and would give their fighters havens again if the Taliban regained control of all or large parts of Afghanistan, making it a mistake to think of them as separate problems [...]

The White House appears to be trying to prepare the ground to counter that by focusing attention on recent successes against Qaeda cells in Pakistan. The approach described by administration officials on Wednesday amounted to an alternative to the analysis presented by General McChrystal. If, as the White House has asserted in recent weeks, it has improved the ability of the United States to reduce the threat from Al Qaeda, then the war in Afghanistan is less central to American security.

I'm glad that there's at least some pushback on the silly "safe havens" theory, which if allowed to predominate would lead us down a road of endless escalation. So scaling back the mission from one that is simply unachievable to a more achievable one makes sense. The counter-insurgency cult is quite dangerous. The best you can say about it is that it keeps warmongers away from an anti-China defense buildup.

Joking aside, it’s worth keeping in mind when you see arguments about counterinsurgency that there are really two different debates happening. One is the debate inside the military and the defense policy establishment which is really a debate about COIN versus non-COIN military activity. Another is a debate about that pertains to the larger question of the strategic and budgetary priorities of the United States. In my experience COIN enthusiasts tend to have the better of the limited argument about the relative allocation of military resources, but generally decline to engage in a serious way with the larger question of national priorities. In other words, a debate that ranges from “we should fight a series of small wars against Muslims” to “we should prepare for a big war against China” is really seen as “lively” rather than incredibly cramped and narrow.

Perhaps policymakers are coming to their senses about COIN, but not about the overall need to disengage from pointless wars. But they should. New liberal hero Alan Grayson, who's been saying this stuff for a while, effectively articulated the alternative the other day:

"I think that the aid program is a fig leaf trying to make congress and the American people feel better about the war and about killing. I think that diplomacy in the areas of fig leaf to try to make the American people think that there is some constructive alternative to the war when the war itself is destructive and not constructive [...]

If we wanted to rethink Afghanistan in our image, we’d have to destroy the north to save it, and I don’t think the American people are ever going to do that to anybody. So I think that the underline premise is simply wrong.

I’ve been to 175 countries all around the world including Afghanistan, including every country in that region, and what I’ve seen everywhere I go is that there are some commonalities everywhere you go, everywhere you go people want to fall in love. It’s an interesting thing. Everywhere you go, people love children. Everywhere, they love children. Everywhere you go, there’s a taboo against violence. Every single place you go. And everywhere you go, people want to be left alone. And that’s the best foreign policy of all. Just to leave people alone."

President Obama is holding a troop request in his hands and deciding between a big escalation or a small escalation. Nowhere is there a strategy for no escalation, to shut it down, in the words of Charlie Wilson, the original American interventionist in Afghanistan.

Objectively Pro-Rape

Al Franken went out deep on a limb and made his first amendment to face a roll-call vote to stop the practice of defense contractors essentially allowing consequence-free rape on their overseas bases:

On Tuesday night, the Minnesota Democrat got his first piece of legislation passed by the United States Senate via roll call vote. The amendment stopped federal funding for those defense contractors who used mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of assault the right to bring their case to court. It passed by a 68-30 margin with nine Republicans joining each voting Democrat. And in the immediate aftermath, Franken was granted the chance to revel, ever so slightly, in his victory.\

"The story came to my attention of Jamie Leigh Jones who, when she was 19, went to Iraq to work for [defense contractor] KBR and she was put in the barracks with 400 men and was sexually harassed," Franken told the Huffington Post in a brief interview shortly after the vote. "She complained. But they didn't do anything about it. She was drugged and gang raped and they locked her up in a shipping container. She tried to sue KBR and they said you have a mandatory arbitration clause in your contract. She tried to fight back and said this is ridiculous. She took it to court and they have been fighting her for three years."

"This bill would make it so that anybody in business with the Department of the Defense can't do this," he concluded emphatically. "They can't have mandatory arbitration on issues like assault and battery."

You'd think this kind of amendment wouldn't only get 100 votes, but somehow former Senators would storm the floor and demand that they too could offer their support for the legislation. Instead, in the culture we now have in Washington, 30 Republicans voted against this. I don't know how you characterize this other than saying that they think it's perfectly reasonable for women to be raped on Defense Department-funded American bases, left in shipping containers, and barred from bringing up charges subsequently. They actually called this a political attack aimed at Halliburton, even though the bill named no contractor specifically.

Um, what would you call the "Defund ACORN Act," exactly? And while I know that was the biggest scandal in the history of scandals, AFAIK ACORN has never protected their employees from raping someone and detaining them in a shipping container. Again, to the best of my knowledge.

These Republicans should be completely ashamed of themselves.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, while the Franken amendment was nice, the overall defense authorization bill includes lots of spending for the war in Afghanistan, and would ban the transfer of any detainee at Gitmo to the United States. As Franken would say, "Oy."

Bringing Afghanistan Back To Core Strategy

Yesterday's big bipartisan meeting on Afghanistan hasn't resolved the decision from the White House, although it clarified a few data points:

House and Senate leaders of both parties emerged from a nearly 90-minute conversation with Obama with praise for his candor and interest in listening. But politically speaking, all sides appeared to exit where they entered, with Republicans pushing Obama to follow his military commanders and Democrats saying he should not be rushed [...]

Obama said the war would not be reduced to a narrowly defined counterterrorism effort, with the withdrawal of many U.S. forces and an emphasis on special operations forces that target terrorists in the dangerous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two senior administration officials aides say such a scenario has been inaccurately characterized and linked to Vice President Joe Biden, and that Obama wanted to make clear he is considering no such plan [...]

Obama may be considering a more modest building of troops — closer to 10,000 than 40,000 — according to Republican and Democratic congressional aides. But White House aides said no such decision has been made.

The New York Times confirms this. This seems to almost be the worst possible option. If you're continuing a counter-insurgency strategy, all of the literature on it dictates that it needs a certain amount of resources far greater than what exist in the country now. If you're shifting to counter-terrorism, you would necessarily need less ground troops. This just seems like a recipe for muddling through, and shifting really to the same kind of air war that we saw under George Bush. I know there's data that the drone attacks are working to disrupt Al Qaeda in Pakistan, but an air war in more populous areas, where the Taliban is essentially embedded with local populations, doesn't seem like a useful option.

This Quinnipiac poll has fairly good news for advocates of muddling through. While only 30% want to stay in Afghanistan "as long as it takes," 65% are willing to have soldiers fight there, at least for the moment. A plurality believe that the fight will not be successful in defeating any terrorist threat, however. So it's muddled as well. I think there's a base of support for antiwar actions, but that voice has been stilled for so long that I'd say the mass of the public is generally resigned to a seeming perpetual war, and will accept whatever decision the President makes.

It doesn't seem like Obama is seeking out voices apart from Congress and his staff of advisors. You know who he should ring up? Audrey Kurth Cronin from the US National War College, who is focusing on the core question of how the terrorist threat can be reduced.

The history of terrorist groups points to various ways they may decline and end: the destruction of leadership, failure to transition between generations, achieving their stated cause, negotiating a settlement, succumbing to military or police repression, losing popular support and transitioning to other malignant activities such as criminality or war [...]

American use of military force signified Western resolve, killed al Qaeda leaders and prevented attacks, all of which were vital; but force alone cannot drive this group to its end.

A loss of popular support has ended many terrorist groups, and it is a plausible scenario for al Qaeda. Support can be compromised through miscalculation, especially in targeting, and popular backlash. The Real Irish Republican Army and India's Sikh separatists come to mind. Or a campaign can fail to convey a positive image or progress toward its goals, which amply applies to al Qaeda.

While the group continues to be dangerous, the faltering popularity of this campaign with most Muslims provides clear evidence of this dynamic underway [...]

In this regard, it is counterproductive to consider al Qaeda as a global insurgency. This concept bestows legitimacy, emphasizes territorial control, encourages our enemies to join forces and puts the United States into an us-versus-them strategic framework that precludes clear-eyed analyses of the strategies of leverage that are being used against the United States and its allies.

In short, if we are thinking about classic pathways to the end, the secret to undermining this campaign is not "winning hearts and minds" but enhancing al Qaeda's tendency to lose them.

I read this to mean that the dynamic of military force to subdue the Al Qaeda threat is misplaced. They are diminishing of their own accord and we can accelerate that through strategic engagement and public diplomacy with the Muslim world. Obama has a foothold here - his presence has actually lifted the status of the United States to the world's most admired country again. But that can be fleeting. And intensifying a war in the Muslim world will sap at that goodwill. We can use intelligence capabilities to weaken Al Qaeda and allow their extremist rhetoric to play itself out among their constituency. None of this necessarily involves nation-building.

I don't think this framework is part of the discussions in the White House at all. And that's tragic.

The Safe Haven Lie

Today on Hardball, Ike Skelton advanced a familiar argument in Washington, not just now but over several decades, about the presumed consequences of failure that are always brought out as an argument for escalating warfare and continued foreign policy intervention:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well let me ask you about the moral question, Mr. Skelton. The question is, and you're chairman of the (House Armed Services) Committee, and you do make strategy, because we have a co-equal branch that you represent. The question is, we had a moral case to go in there and punish the people who attacked us and to knock them out of power. But today are we fighting the people who attacked us on 9/11? Are the Taliban forces attacking us now the people who attacked us on 9/11?

IKE SKELTON: What will happen if the Taliban regains hold in either part or all of Afghanistan, just bet your bottom dollar, as sure as God made little green apples, the Al Qaeda terrorists will go back in there and have a safe haven from which to plan, plot and attack America and American interests, wherever they may be. And consequently we have to finish the job. The job should have been finished back in 2002, and put the resources there were put into Iraq, and sadly they were not. And now the war really begins as a result of President Obama giving a strategy speech. And hopefully he will listen to the recommendations of his commanders.

This is a lie, and I can prove it.

We know right now that there are no signs of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As long as we're listening to the commanders, General Petraeus said this back in May, and so has General McChrystal just last month. Both of them maintain that Al Qaeda maintains undefined "links" to insurgents, but they aver as an absolute that Al Qaeda forces are not in the country, having moved to areas of western Pakistan and the border region. Just today, the President said that Al Qaeda has less than 100 core fighters overall and has "lost operational capacity," and that their presence has diminished significantly in Afghanistan.

And yet, we know right now that the Taliban controls as much as 80% of Afghanistan. This report by the International Council on Security and Development from September of this year authoritatively estimated this:

The Taliban now has a permanent presence in 80% of Afghanistan, up from 72% in November 2008, according to a new map released today by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS). According to ICOS, another 17% of Afghanistan is seeing ‘substantial’ Taliban activity. Taken together, these figures show that the Taliban has a significant presence in virtually all of Afghanistan.

“The unrelenting and disturbing return, spread and advance of the Taliban is now without question,” said Norine MacDonald QC, President and Lead Field Researcher for ICOS.

Previous ICOS maps showed a steady increase in the Taliban’s presence throughout Afghanistan. In November 2007, ICOS assessed that the Taliban had a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan, and in November 2008, using the same methodology; the result was a finding of a permanent Taliban presence in 72% of the country.

The new map indicates that the Taliban insurgency has continued to expand its influence across Afghanistan. “The dramatic change in the last few months has been the deterioration of the situation in the north of Afghanistan, which was previously one of the most stable parts of Afghanistan. Provinces such as Kunduz and Balkh are now heavily affected by Taliban violence. Across the north of Afghanistan, there has been a dramatic increase in the rate of insurgent attacks against international, Afghan government, and civilian targets“, stated Mr. Alexander Jackson, Policy Analyst at ICOS.

So the Taliban has been in control of at least half the country for at least two years, more than enough time for Al Qaeda to pack up from the border region and reinstall themselves into these safe havens. Skelton stated specifically that if the Taliban regains hold in "all or part of Afghanistan," Al Qaeda would return to plot attack. Well, the Taliban control 80% of the country. But Al Qaeda aren't there. They don't need to be.

This persistent lie about Al Qaeda's aims in the region underpins the entire case for escalation, just the way the domino theory underpinned consistent troop buildup in Vietnam. And yet nobody in the media, up to and including Chris Matthews today, has bothered to challenge this basic falsehood. Nobody has asked the question, "If Al Qaeda is so desperate to find a safe haven, why haven't they returned to Afghanistan now, when the Taliban controls 80% of the country?" It's not like they aren't under as much threat from drone attacks in Pakistan as they would be in Afghanistan.

Will anyone present these basic facts to the "serious foreign policy" dittoheads when they go on and on with a demonstrably false argument about safe havens and how we must send as many troops as possible into danger or we'll all be killed in our beds?

Printing Gossip As News

Robert Gates has now added his opinion to the debate over the public comments of Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Afghanistan:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that President Obama's advisors should keep their guidance private, in effect admonishing the top commander in Afghanistan for publicly advocating an approach requiring more troops even as the White House reassesses its strategy.

The comment by Gates came a day after Obama's national security advisor, James L. Jones, said that military commanders should convey their advice through the chain of command -- a reaction to Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's public statements in support of his troop-intensive strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan.

The exchanges suggested some disarray in the Obama administration's attempts to forge a new policy on Afghanistan and underscored wide differences among top officials over the correct approach.

I don't know that the comments suggested anything but the plain fact that the media treats generals like heroes whose pronouncements should never be questioned, unnecessarily distorting policy debates about foreign policy. News outlets are never going to be good at figuring this out because they try very hard not to understand the impact they have on political debates. But simply put, McChrystal makes a public statement for more troops, and the narrative immediately becomes "will the President go against the advice of his generals? How COULD he?" So a policy of not allowing that narrative to form seems perfectly reasonable, especially because generals have a narrow focus on their own area of responsibility and are not supposed to have a big-picture approach, and furthermore because they have a very explicit chain of command for recommendations of this types. McChrystal probably knows how this works and is using the system to his advantage, but his is not the first sin. It's a media failure to properly contextualize in favor of a yen to sensationalize.

Nancy Pelosi parroted Gates last night, so it's a full-on talking point, but again, her target is McChrystal instead of the media process that turns McChrystal into a deity. That's probably because it's impossible to get the media to understand their personal failure, so you have to shut down the debate entirely. And now, of course, the gossip-mongers on cable news are headlining: "Gates and Pelosi SLAM McChrystal," turning it into a personality-based he-said/she-said, when if they were the least bit responsible about handling public comments from leaders of the military this wouldn't even be a problem.

...And Americans have subconsciously figured out how this all ends: it doesn't. Because we cannot have a serious debate on anything in this country without it devolving into bitchy gossip and meta-critiques of how things "play" politically, tough decisions just don't get made. And so 68%, in this poll, said America will not win or lose the war in Afghanistan; it will just go on without resolution.

Tragically, people have actually gotten USED to this outcome.

Meetings On Endless War

The President abruptly summoned Congressional leaders in both parties to the White House for a meeting tomorrow about Afghanistan. This is the first bipartisan White House meeting in months, and considering that Republicans support the war far more strongly than Democrats, that stands to reason.

The White House does want everyone to know that they're not leaving, however.

Obama may take weeks to decide whether to add more troops, but the idea of pulling out isn't on the table as a way to deal with a war nearing its ninth year, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

"I don't think we have the option to leave. That's quite clear," Gibbs said.

Of course we can't leave. We can't seem to leave anywhere. US troops still live in Germany and Japan and Korea. America is the house guest that overstays its welcome by 50-60 years.

Maybe instead of the Congresscritters, Obama could invite Peter Galbraith to the meeting. He was the UN official who witnessed the fraudulent Afghan election and got fired for having the temerity to want to address the situation realistically instead of handing the country to Hamid Karzai. Maybe lawmakers could benefit from his experience in the country. He certainly has some settled views:

GALBRAITH: In the absence of having a credible Afghan partner…it makes no sense to ramp up. On the other hand we cannot afford to pull out. … At this point, no surge. … [W]e also don’t have unlimited resources and unless those troops can secure an area in a way that then Afghan partners, the government, the Afghan army, the Afghan police can come in and fill in after them, we’re going to be there as an occupying force for a very long time and that to me doesn’t make sense [...]

Unfortunately, there is no analogy between what happened in Iraq and what’s going on in Afghanistan. In Iraq in the Sunni areas of the country, the al Qaeda element, the fundamentalists, moved from attacking the Shiites to attacking the tribal sheiks themselves so this was a matter of their self-defense.

In Afghanistan the tribal elders, many of them are supporting the Taliban, they are the Taliban or and this is the more common situation, they are neutral. They see no reason to choose a government which they experience as inexperienced, corrupted and abusing power.

Galbraith isn't advocating an immediate withdrawal, but his logic inevitably leads you to the conclusion that we cannot have an open-ended commitment to fight a war where we have no partner to defend.

Rep. Barbara Lee has introduced a bill to block the escalation. It's HR 3699. There's one problem, however:

However, something she told me at the meeting yesterday put me on DefCon-5 alert. The House has already passed (with Lee in opposition of course)-- and the Senate is considering-- a bill that will exempt Department of Defense from coming under the budgetary pay-go strictures. Let me explain why that is so dangerous for those eager to end the deadly and catastrophic U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

Bush funded his wars with supplemental budgets which meant he just printed money-- trillions of dollars-- to pay for them without having to worry about raising taxes (on current voters) or about cutting services directly. One result has been the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Obama campaigned on a promise not use supplemental budgets but to ask Congress for money through established budgetary procedures. That would kick in pay-go and a member of Congress voting for funds to escalate expensive occupations of other countries would have to agree to either raise taxes on his or her constituents-- what do you think Boehner, Cantor, Pence, Ryan and other leading GOP warmongers will think of that?-- or cut back on social programs, a prospect none too attractive to many of the conservative and moderate Democrats who have gone along with Bush's outrageous supplemental budgeting and are thereby complicit in the economic disaster that has ensued.

I really thought "pay-go" was our ace-in-the-hole to stop the war in Afghanistan. Not even a political thug like Rahm Emanuel could bully and bribe enough Democrats and Republicans to go for this, especially not at a point when the war is as increasingly unpopular as it is. If the Senate doesn't kill the legislation that the House passed, it is, in effect, a vote for a war that will last until Obama is voted out of office.

It's not surprising that Congress would willingly constrain itself when it comes to helping provide health care to all or strengthen the social safety net for the needy, but has no problem waiving those constraints when it comes to permanent war and occupation. This is just dangerous. The money will inevitably flow to war as a kind of stimulus package. It's got to be stopped.

No More Military General Pronouncements

James Jones has cordially invited Gen. Stanley McChrystal to shove it.

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested Sunday that the public campaign being conducted by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan on behalf of his war strategy is complicating the internal White House review underway, saying that "it is better for military advice to come up through the chain of command."

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, warned bluntly last week in a London speech that a strategy for defeating the Taliban that is narrower than the one he is advocating would be ineffective and "short-sighted." The comments effectively rejected a policy option that senior White House officials, including Vice President Biden, are considering nearly eight years after the U.S. invasion.

McChrystal's statement came a day after senior White House officials challenged him over his dire assessment of the war, and what it will take to improve the U.S. position there, during a videoconference from Kabul with President Obama and his national security team. Obama then summoned McChrystal to Copenhagen the day after the general's speech for a private meeting aboard Air Force One.

We're simply unused to the chain of command predominating in this day and age, but there really was a time where military commanders didn't make public statements about strategy and troop requests. And Jones is right in wishing for that time to return. While some don't see McChrystal's statements as objectionable, and certainly they aren't a prelude to a coup or anything, because of our military conferring hero status on generals they are overweighted in the debate, and have a tendency to place Presidents in a box should they want to disagree. That's what has angered people, Jones included.

Meanwhile, this WaPo piece offers a lot of good thoughts about the problems in Afghanistan - particularly with respect to jobs. I don't know if the country facing 10% unemployment should be seen as a savior in this regard.

McChrystal's Loose Lips

Depending on who you read, Stanley McChrystal is either an insubordinate creep for speaking about policy he'll have to implement whether he gets his way or not, or an honest broker who is willing to defend his Commander in Chief. Depends on what part of the London speech he gave you cite.

On the one hand...

But when it comes to talking perhaps General McChrystal might want to do less of it publicly. First there was Sunday's 60 Minutes valentine to population centric COIN, now this from a speech McChrystal delivered this week in London:

General McChrystal was asked by a member of an audience that included retired military commanders and security specialists whether he would support an idea put forward by Mr. Biden to scale back the American military presence in Afghanistan to focus on tracking down the leaders of Al Qaeda, in place of the current broader effort now under way to defeat the Taliban.

“The short answer is: no,” he said. “You have to navigate from where you are, not where you wish to be. A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”

Look I understand that General McChrystal believes counter-insurgency is the only way forward in Afghanistan - and certainly that is pretty clear from reading this review - but this airing of views in public and denigration of alternative strategies (including one that may be forced upon him by his civilian commanders) is really over the top. Shouldn't the correct answer here be 'no comment' or something along the lines of 'the US military will carry out whatever strategy is decided upon by the civilian leadership'? McChrystal is continuing to put President Obama in the difficult position of either adhering to his strategy or publicly breaking with their military commander on the ground [...]

McChrystal is welcome to his views; he's not welcome to go public with his views in such a way to put pressure on the Obama Administration to accept them.

On the other hand:

I suppose there’s a question of whether McChrystal should be making any public comment ahead of President Obam’s decision on the proper strategic course for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it’s not like he’s advocating anything he hasn’t already been publicly revealed to advocate by the leak of his strategy assessment last week.

And he defended the review: “The process,” he told a reporter who tried and failed to get him to disclose details, “of going through a very detailed, policy-level debate, is incredibly important and incredibly healthy. The president led that very effectively, and so I think this is a very necessary process to go through so we come to a clear decision and then move forward.”

In the same breath, he also appeared to defend election thief Hamid Karzai, which is supremely odd, but I guess if you want a population-centered COIN, you have to make everyone think there's an actual government partner.

He added this interesting bit:

...a few days ago, just before we left to travel here, a bus south of Kandahar struck an improvised explosive device (IED) killing 30 Afghan civilians. That is tragic.

On the one hand, you might say that the Afghan people would recoil against the Taliban who left that IED. To a degree, they do, but we must also understand that they recoil against us because they might think that, if we were not there, neither would be the IED. Therefore, we indirectly caused the IED to be there. Second, we said that we would protect them, but we did not. Sometimes, then, the most horrific events caused by the insurgents continue to reinforce in the minds of the Afghan people a mindset that coalition forces are either ineffective, or at least that their presence in Afghanistan is not in their interest. That does not happen all of the time. There are times when they feel differently, but you have to put things in that context to understand what we must do.

Look, I think McChrystal is wedded to his policy, and as a general he's not exactly used to being wrong. He talks about protecting the civilian population but he hasn't done much of a job to that end. He thinks that, with the proper amount of troops, he can protect the Afghanis and yield a better future.

The White House is not on the same timeline, nor do they have the same single-minded focus. By design they necessarily have to think about the overall national security implications, the strength of the military, and the financial and human cost. And there are more and more signs that they don't consider the costs to be worth it.

Senior White House officials have begun to make the case for a policy shift in Afghanistan that would send few, if any, new combat troops to the country and instead focus on faster military training of Afghan forces, continued assassinations of al-Qaeda leaders and support for the government of neighboring Pakistan in its fight against the Taliban.

In a three-hour meeting Wednesday at the White House, senior advisers challenged some of the key assumptions in Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's blunt assessment of the nearly eight-year-old war, which President Obama has said is being fought to destroy al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and the ungoverned border areas of Pakistan.

McChrystal, commander of the 100,000 NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has asked Obama to quickly endorse his call for a change in military strategy and approve the additional resources he needs to retake the initiative from the resurgent Taliban.

But White House officials are resisting McChrystal's call for urgency, which he underscored Thursday during a speech in London, and questioning important elements of his assessment, which calls for a vast expansion of an increasingly unpopular war. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, "A lot of assumptions -- and I don't want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions -- were exposed to the light of day."

Among them, according to three senior administration officials who attended the meeting, is McChrystal's contention that the Taliban and al-Qaeda share the same strategic interests and that the return to power of the Taliban would automatically mean a new sanctuary for al-Qaeda.

McChrystal met with Obama this morning. I don't know if all this got across, but the President does hold the cards in this debate. It may be politically difficult to go against the advice of the generals, but the people are on his side.

Listen To The Afghanis

I guess there was a big confab of the War Council yesterday about what to do in Afghanistan, and clearly the team has split over a counter-insurgency or a counter-terrorism strategy. Now, in many ways that's two sides of the same coin, just a matter of how to explain the killing of foreigners. And I don't know if either strategy gets us closer to an exit - we're not going to kill every terrorist, as surely as we're not going to convert every Afghani into a tribune of democracy. But I do think it's clear that shifting away from a COIN strategy at least offers the possibility of getting us out of the region in a shorter period of time, and hopefully with less blood on our hands. So I'm rooting for the Biden faction. It appears that Bob Gates is the key swing vote here.

That said, the next War Council meeting could maybe have a representative of the people from the country whose destiny is being decided.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - Take advice from locals instead of trying to impose your own ideas on a tribal society. Invite the Taliban to the negotiating table. Use traditional governing structures rather than reinventing the wheel. And spend a lot more money on plowshares than on swords [...]

Afghans interviewed in their shops and on the streets have plenty of advice for the U.S. president and his allies: Don't necessarily leave, but for your sake and for ours, you'd better get a lot smarter about what you do here.

Several said they welcomed the presence of U.S. and NATO troops, whom they view as far more benign than the Soviets who occupied the country in the 1980s. They fear that a rapid withdrawal of foreign forces could throw the country into another civil war.

But they don't necessarily think a foreign military buildup is the answer.

"I'm afraid the Taliban will only get stronger," said Obiadullah Zahir, 30, a dress merchant, standing beside a row of attired mannequins with broken noses and missing arms. "I'm afraid America will leave and war return." [...]

Either you try to get the Taliban to buy in, said Amin Khatir, 24, a student in the capital, or you face an enemy that is increasingly entrenched, organized and more broadly distributed. That's a big problem, no matter how many pieces of fancy equipment foreign armies may wield.

"The Americans only want to deal with those they meet with, who speak English, not the ones farther away," Khatir said. "An election can't solve more than 1% of our problems. We must find a new way, and the main issue is security." [...]

Rather than sanction some minimally acceptable election, he said, Afghanistan should convene a traditional loya jirga, or meeting of power brokers from around the country, as it did after the Taliban was ousted.

"If you pile more bricks onto an unstable house, the whole thing will collapse," he said.

Are any of these sentiments making it into the War Council?

Mr. President, you're being very deliberative about this process. Be sure you get some local perspectives, too. It's their county, after all.

Another Cheney, Another Kagan

Liz Cheney's father basically presided over the biggest mess of a Presidency in American history. So of course, she's lionized as a real up-and-comer in Republican politics. That's because she tells the crowd what they want to hear - for example, the glories of torture:

“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake,” she said, “are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”

By speech’s end, the crowd was standing, and the former vice president’s daughter was being mobbed for photos and hounded to run for office.

For this, she's called "one of the fresh faces of our movement" by one sycophant. It's somewhat appalling to see torture used as an applause line.

But that's the party out of power. I'm not really concerned how unmoored from reality they have become. It's far more disturbing that another neocon scion, in this case Fred Kagan, is personally advising the top general in Afghanistan during the Obama Administration.

It had been reported that Kagan and his wife, military historian Kimberly Kagan, were part of the group that advised McChrystal on the high-profile assessment that warns of "mission failure" if more troops are not sent. But it wasn't previously known that Kagan's work with McChrystal extended beyond the review.

It's striking that Kagan, who writes for the Weekly Standard, guest blogs at National Review, and advised the Bush Administration on Iraq, is now advising President Obama's top commander in Afghanistan.

A McChrystal spokesman said that the commander gets a lot of information, but his troop request for Afghanistan lines up PERFECTLY with Kagan's escalation numbers in a recent WaPo op-ed. And the truth is that the foreign policy establishment is littered with groupthink, and whether it's Brookings or AEI or CNAS or whatever other think tank, all of official Washington wants to send 40,000 or so more American men and women halfway around the world to fight.

As much as we get angry that a Liz Cheney can rise through the ranks in Washington, it's more the norm than anything out of the ordinary.

Days Of Decision

The McChrystal request for more troops in Afghanistan is reportedly as much as 45,000. It's now on a shelf at the Pentagon as deliberations continue in the White House on reviewing the overall strategy. Obama has no scheduled events today. That could be in observation of Yom Kippur (Emanuel and Axelrod are certainly indisposed today), but what's also likely is a day of internal discussion over the way forward in Afghanistan. The President has reached beyond his circle of advisors and even to Colin Powell in making this decision.

The competing advice and concerns fuel a pivotal struggle to shape the president’s thinking about a war that he inherited but may come to define his tenure. Among the most important outside voices has been that of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star Army general, who visited Mr. Obama in the Oval Office this month and expressed skepticism that more troops would guarantee success. According to people briefed on the discussion, Mr. Powell reminded the president of his longstanding view that military missions should be clearly defined.

Mr. Powell is one of the three people outside the administration, along with Senator John F. Kerry and Senator Jack Reed, considered by White House aides to be most influential in this current debate. All have expressed varying degrees of doubt about the wisdom of sending more forces to Afghanistan.

Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has warned of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, where he served, and has floated the idea of a more limited counterterrorist mission. Mr. Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and an Army veteran, has not ruled out supporting more troops but said “the burden of proof” was on commanders to justify it.

In the West Wing, beyond Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has advocated an alternative strategy to the troop buildup, other presidential advisers sound dubious about more troops, including Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, according to people who have spoken with them. At the same time, Mr. Obama is also hearing from more hawkish figures, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even inside the Pentagon, opinions are mixed as to whether more troops will make a difference.

The assumption of the hawks, that allowing Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban will automatically signal a return of Al Qaeda into the country in a safe haven, reminds me of the domino theory - speculative, ignorant of the local dynamic, based on scant evidence. James Jones, the national security advisor, seemed to dismiss it the other day. While Al Qaeda's presence in the border region hasn't been wasy, with drone strikes and other pressures, the severe anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, such that the government is openly hindering government visa requests and de facto protecting Al Qaeda, suggests that they are much more comfortable where they are than moving back into Afghanistan, where the Taliban suffered decapitation the last time they gave them harbor, are not as ideologically aligned with them this time around and would be wary of entering into the same agreement. Notwithstanding the argument that "safe havens" in host countries are unnecessary for a plot to be carried off in, for example, Denver and Queens, or for core leadership to gravitate to North Africa or some other area. An Afghanistan-centered strategy, in this context, seems foolish.

I think the linchpin of all of this is Joe Biden. He was maybe the pre-eminent humanitarian interventionist in the Democratic Party for a long time, until coming up against Afghanistan and recognizing that the nation-building effort had no partner and was doomed to failure. It's the personal meetings between Biden and Hamid Karzai that appear to have soured him on the whole project and shift to a counter-terrorism focus:

Nothing shook his faith quite as much as what you might call the Karzai dinners. The first occurred in February 2008, during a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan that Biden took with fellow senators John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Dining on platters of rice and lamb at the heavily fortified presidential palace in Kabul, Biden and his colleagues grilled Karzai about reports of corruption and the growing opium trade in the country, which the president disingenuously denied. An increasingly impatient Biden challenged Karzai's assertions until he lost his temper. Biden finally stood up and threw down his napkin, declaring, "This meeting is over," before he marched out of the room with Hagel and Kerry. It was a similar story nearly a year later. As Obama prepared to assume the presidency in January, he dispatched Biden on a regional fact-finding trip. Again Biden dined with Karzai, and, again, the meeting was contentious. Reiterating his prior complaints about corruption, Biden warned Karzai that the Bush administration's kid-glove treatment was over; the new team would demand more of him.

Biden's revised view of Karzai was pivotal. Whereas he had once felt that, with sufficient U.S. support, Afghanistan could be stabilized, now he wasn't so sure. "He's aware that a basic rule of counterinsurgency is that you need a reliable local partner," says one person who has worked with Biden in the past. The trip also left Biden wondering about the clarity of America's mission. At the White House, he told colleagues that "if you asked ten different U.S. officials in that country what their mission was, you'd get ten different answers," according to a senior White House aide. He was also growing increasingly concerned about the fate of Pakistan. Biden has been troubled by the overwhelmingly disproportionate allocation of U.S. resources to Afghanistan in comparison to Pakistan, a ratio one administration official measures as 30:1. Indeed, before leaving the Senate last year, Biden authored legislation that would triple U.S. non-military aid to Islamabad to $1.5 billion per year. (House-Senate bickering has tied up the plan for months, and Biden has recently been working the phones to broker a compromise.)

Actually, that tripling of aid for Pakistan passed the Senate unanimously this past week.

Biden actually lost this fight the first time around to the hawks, but the futility of the fraudulent election has brought things into a different view. And yet the White House and other NATO members feel obliged to actually support Karzai, mainly because of his ethnicity (a Tajik like Abdullah Abdullah would lose the Pashto-dominated country quickly). Just writing a sentence like that leads to the conclusion that building a stable government here is impossible.

Frank Rich looks at the deliberations in the White House through the prism of the Vietnam era and the release of a new book detailing that policymaking:

George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book, drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. “Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration [...]

As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.

We shall know the outcome of these days of decision within weeks. Obama has a responsibility, not to rubber-stamp the views of Washington hawks and counter-insurgency lovers, but to outline the best possible policy for the future. I don't see how committing 100,000-plus troops to Afghanistan for five years or more, to defend an illegitimate government, to fight an invisible enemy, fits with that mandate.

MoveOn Joins The Fray

The big progressive groups hadn't yet spoken on the question of escalation in Afghanistan - their silence was pronounced. MoveOn finally broke that silence today, appealing to the President to commit to a clear exit strategy. It's a pretty big step.

U.S. policy in Afghanistan has reached a pivotal moment. President Obama is poised to make a critical decision about the Afghanistan war in the next few weeks. And there’s a big debate happening right now about what to do.

Pro-war advocates both inside and outside the administration—including John McCain and Joe Lieberman—are calling for a big escalation. The general in charge of Afghanistan is expected to request tens of thousands more troops, and that may just be the beginning. They’re cranking up the pressure for an immediate surge.

But other powerful voices are urging caution: Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have raised real concerns about the idea of sending more troops to Afghanistan without a clear strategy, as have Democrats in Congress. And a majority of Americans oppose increasing troop levels.

Can you write to the White House and tell them we need a clear exit strategy—not tens of thousands more US troops stuck in a quagmire? You can send the President a message by clicking below:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51843&id=&t=1

Some administration officials are arguing for a smaller, nimbler approach with a narrow focus on the threat from al-Qaeda. But cheerleaders for the war refuse to acknowledge that there could be any viable strategy other than more and more troops. So they’re trotting out the same tired old lines and questioning the motives of those who disagree with them.

They figure they can cut off any debate about our ultimate goals in Afghanistan and the region. But President Obama has consistently shown a willingness to stand up for his more thoughtful approach to foreign policy, and that’s what he needs to do here, too.

The hawks are making their position heard. Now, the majority of Americans—those of us who are for as quick and as responsible an end to the war as possible—need to make our voices heard, too.

With Democrats opposing escalation by more than two to one, MoveOn is just reflecting the opinions of their membership. They're a bit late to the debate, but better than ducking it entirely.

Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred Soldiers

According to Tom Andrews, the McChrystal strategy in Afghanistan would need just under that many to carry out the mission:

Embedded in General Stanley McChrystal's classified assessment of the war in Afghanistan is his conclusion that a successful counterinsurgency strategy will require 500,000 troops over five years.

This bombshell was dropped by NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday:

The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops - boots on the ground - and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way. [Morning Joe, September 23, 2009]

Spencer Ackerman cautions against reading too much into the numbers, saying that they would include Afghan Army and police boots on the ground, which in McChrystal's ultimate vision reaches 400,000. So we're talking about 100,000 coalition troops for five years, which roughly correlates to current levels. However, the Afghan security forces that make up 4/5 of this commitment, which is aspirational and not concrete at the moment, are 90% illiterate, frequently desert their posts and simply cannot be relied upon as a fighting force.

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn't the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to "operate independently," but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of "Basic Warrior Training" 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40 percent of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin -- the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets -- and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

In addition, maintaining a 400,000-strong security force would probably take three times the gross national product of the country at a minimum. It's naive to the extreme to assume that the Afghans will live up to the 400,000 end of the bargain, and similarly to assume that McChrystal would not seek reinforcements from American troops should the Afghan security forces falter. Putting the number 400,000 Afghan security forces on a piece of paper and expecting them to deliver in any meaningful way is as silly as expecting that they have a legitimate government to defend.

Which means that US military might and treasure will get dragged in once again to another futile war, with an escalation bringing mostly destruction to Afghanistan instead of development. It is for this reason - and maybe others - that the President may be rethinking such a commitment. Dan Froomkin has a superb post about how the President could actually lead on this issue by changing his mind.

Should Obama actually change his mind about Afghanistan, our elite journalists -- obsessed as they are with how the game is played -- will almost inevitably characterize this as vacillation and declare it a sign of political weakness. But that really misses the point.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that over the last several months, what's emerged when it comes to Afghan policy is a sort of consensus of the realists -- from across the political spectrum. The consensus: That our national interests in Afghanistan are pretty limited and that the harder we try to change things over there, the more resistance we face; that Afghanistan, after eight years of U.S. occupation, has become a Vietnam-like quagmire where escalation only leads to more escalation, not victory; and that what little we could possibly accomplish there is not worth more American blood [...]

Another important thing that could happen here is that, by fully explaining his decision, Obama could go a long way toward restoring a balanced and rational sense of what it means to "support the troops." Former president George W. Bush and his political henchmen used that phrase as a bludgeon to beat Democrats into submission on any issue even vaguely related to national security -- even when it actually resulted in putting the troops in greater danger. Most notably, Bush insisted that once troops had been committed to Iraq, he bore the responsibility to make sure they had not died in vain -- and that anything short of victory would be a betrayal of those soldiers who had already made the ultimate sacrifice. Democrats were way too terrified to demand a pullout from Iraq, even when they controlled Congress, for fear of being accused of undercutting our brave fighting men and women.

It would be a sign of strength and not weakness to base strategy on the available evidence, and change it when the evidence points in that direction. It may not get you far in the Washington commentariat and foreign policy establishment, where only bombing countries to smithereens and sending in every able-bodied man and woman in America halfway around the world are seen as serious and acceptable options. But it would reflect strength, nonetheless.

The McChrystal troop request should reach the Pentagon within days. So we'll see if the President bends to the will of the neocon-establishment complex, or makes his own assessment. The shitstorm that would ensue if he nixes the counter-insurgency strategy would make the health care town halls look like (actual) tea parties. So Froomkin's take provides a response that will need to be echoed.

Twisting The Knife

Digby noted that A Man Called Petraeus was ramping up his 2012 strategy. It continued today:

WASHINGTON, Sept 23 (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Central Command, Army General David Petraeus, said on Wednesday that both he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen had endorsed an assessment by the top commander in Afghanistan that says more troops would be needed.

"Obviously I endorsed, the chairman endorsed... Gen. (Stanley) McChrystal's assessment and description," Petraeus said at a counterinsurgency conference in Washington.

It's a little more complicated than that. Spencer Ackerman was there.

Question time. Trainor reminds everyone not to ask about Afghanistan. Did Petraeus’ strategy review ahead of the Obama administration include a resource request? Twenty counterinsurgents per thousand civilians was the recommendation in the counterinsurgency field manual, Petraeus says. “Concentrate your efforts in the areas where the insurgency is… most threatening the population.” He references Bruce Riedel’s strategy review for the Obama administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, and shows a slide of insurgent activity focusing on the Afghan south and east to demonstrate where counterinsurgency efforts ought to focus.

Unprompted, Petraeus defends Obama’s review of Afghanistan strategy. “We said we expected some form of assessment that we thought would take place in the fall,” he said, and muses on the Afghan election. There have been “events like election that looks like it may not produce a government with greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people.” He praises Gen. McChrystal’s “superb” counterinsurgency guidance and his “highlight[ing] of the need to change the culture” by such things as obeying Afghan traffic laws. As for the resources McChrystal will request, Petraeus says, “the resource options piece will be in in a few days as well.”

It looks like Petraeus is content to let Obama walk into his own problem here. He asserts an endorsement of the McChrystal strategy, but is solicitous of the President's review process. Of course, with each passing day the Pentagon and the neocons can team up to bang on the "indecisive" President (Mitt Romney's already calling him Hamlet), so Petraeus can just sit on the sidelines, offer a hint of approval for escalation, expect everyone in the media to run with that and slowly constrict the President's options.

Petraeus is a better politician than anyone the Republicans have, at least from where I'm sitting.

The Biden Plan For Afghanistan

This would be a serious strategy shift, and the right one, IMO:

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said [...]

Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics [...]

A shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to a focus on counterterrorism would turn the administration’s current theory on its head....But the Afghan presidential election, widely marred by allegations of fraud, undermined the administration’s confidence that it had a reliable partner in President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden already had raised doubts about Mr. Karzai, which were only exacerbated by the fear that even if he emerges from a runoff election, he will have little credibility with his own people.

Counter-terrorism was the initial goal and is still cited as the main reason for being in Afghanistan, so I don't know if I'd call it a shift in strategy more than a return to the actual strategy, the only one with national security implications.

This is probably another trial balloon, but it's clear that there is no unanimity of opinion in the White House on Afghanistan. Some people look at a country with no functioning government and a fraudulent, illegitimate leader, and they wonder how you can run a counter-insurgency campaign around that. And they would be right. Heck, General McChrystal said they're right, basically (via K-Drum):

McChrystal's point is that it's not simply "resources," not just U.S. and NATO troops, that will settle the war. It's also whether the Afghan government earns the trust of its people — whether the Afghan president and his entourage of ministers, governors, and warlords are willing — or are willing to be lured — to clean up their act, end their corrupt practices, and truly serve their people.

When Obama says he needs to review the strategy before he decides on troop levels, he almost certainly means that he needs to assess whether a counterinsurgency strategy makes sense if the Afghan government — the entity that our troops would be propping up and aligning themselves with — is viewed by a wide swath of its own people as illegitimate.

Given this fact, the parallels to Vietnam and the Diem government become clear. They never had a popular legitimacy there, either, making the fight a losing battle.

America does not have a good track record of de-escalating a war in the face of the evidence. It would be a very bold maneuver for a President not inclined toward bold maneuvers, at least so far. But getting trapped in a war because of the tauntings of hawks, when there's so much else to get right, would be a disappointment. I'm pleased that he hasn't rushed to the conclusion of the generals here, and is seriously thinking about the reality of the situation instead of some fantasy world where America builds an oasis of democracy in a country that has never known it.

...by the way, this sounds like a really good cover story, showing Bob Woodward and the Washington Post's commitment to the safety of the troops, without addressing the elephant in the room, that whoever leaked the document wanted to force the President's hand and Woodward let them. That would be the opposite of the "Pentagon Papers," to which Woodward likened it. It's a propaganda ploy designed to embarrass the commander-in-chief into escalation. And Woodward played along. What a hero.

Obama's Choice In Afghanistan

The presiding general in Afghanistan is delaying his troop request, providing more time for the President to assess the strategy in the light of a stolen election and a lack of legitimacy for the government. The White House official quoted in here is absolutely correct.

Even the best counterinsurgency strategy "cannot work" without a legitimate government in place, one White House official said, underscoring the intense debate within the administration about how to move forward [...]

One U.S. defense official said the fallout from the election was "certainly a complicating factor" in the way of swift consideration of McChrystal's troop recommendations.

Officials said the main question being asked was whether the counterinsurgency strategy could still succeed if Karzai's government was not seen by the Afghan people as legitimate.

"I don't think so," one official said when asked that question. "Will the Afghan people accept the results of the election? We don't even know that yet."

We're seeing McChrystal start to mass his forces in Kabul and other population centers, as if stability in the city means the same thing as stability in Baghdad, which was crucial to Iraq. Or maybe he's just preparing early for the inevitable riots once Karzai is named President. Either way, it's another example of an Iraq-centric strategy for a far different fight.

McChrystal is eventually going to ask for more troops. That's not only what all managers ask for - more resources - but what passes for wisdom in the foreign policy community. You can never withdraw, only escalate, troops are the answer to any question, and the other tropes common to both neocons and the entire foreign policy establishment in Washington, despite the fact that neocons have been proven wrong time and again.

Given this, it's remarkable for Obama to waver even the slightest bit at rubber-stamping the escalation. But he appears to be actually taking a look at reality, for a change.

Senator John McCain gave us a compelling insight into these matters in a foreword that he wrote about Vietnam for David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest”:

“War is far too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily,” he said. “It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.

“No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”

The only thing that needs to be updated about Mr. McCain’s comments is that we now regularly send women as well as men off to war.

In the case of Afghanistan, we’re sending them off to fight and possibly die in support of a government that is incompetent and riddled with corruption and narcotics traffickers. We’re putting them in the field with Afghan forces that are ill trained, ill equipped and in all-too-many instances unwilling to fight with the courage and tenacity of the American forces. And we’re sending them off to engage in a mishmash of a mission that alternates incoherently between aggressively fighting insurgents and the admirable but unachievable task of nation-building in a society in which most Americans are clueless about the history, culture, politics and mores.

During the campaign Obama supported a return to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But that was really about a return to focus on Al Qaeda and their ability to attack the US. Obama has actually done so, getting the Pakistanis to deal with their own internal threat and using intelligence and law enforcement to disrupt core leadership and satellite plots. Adding to that a nation-building effort in a country without a functioning government does not have to be part of the program. And of course, there's the prime fallacy at work, this notion that saving Afghanistan is connected to denying Al Qaeda a "safe haven," which falls apart upon scrutiny:

However that may be, the 'safe haven' argument just doesn't seem to add up. The safe havens or rather the training camps in the safe havens, where so many would-be terrorists apparently did an endless stream of calisthenics on those iconic monkey bars, were neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the 9/11 attacks. They were funded through too loosely guarded global financial networks, planned and organized in cities in Europe and executed right here in the USA. You certainly wouldn't want the Taliban again more or less openly hosting al Qaida or bin Laden and his main associates, which would allow them to operate more openly and presumably more easily communicate with their conspirators. But even if the Taliban again ruled the country, it's difficult to imagine that with our forces in the region and our army of drones, we'd have much problem raining down a ton of ordinance the first time they really put up their head.

This is known popularly as a containment strategy, one that says we can protect the country without a 100,000-odd military troop commitment to a country that is rejecting our presence and has no means to carry out the future we seem to be planning for them.

I don't see why we have to assume that the world remains static. We stepped away from Afghanistan at a crucial point to go fight an unnecessary war in Iraq, yes; but that doesn't mean that we return focus with Afghanistan in the exact same state as before. The Taliban are essentially a popular front insurgency now, not a group of radicalists, and Al Qaeda is not nearly as robust as before. We are not viewed as any kind of liberators in Afghanistan, and the government is despised. We don't have the same opportunities as we did in 2002-2003. Therefore, we can leave, and pursue a containment strategy, and end this fiction of bringing democracy to the Khyber Pass.