All In On Hearts And Minds

Um, OK...

The Pentagon is replacing the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, less than a year after he took over, marking a major overhaul in military leadership of a war that has presented President Obama with a worsening national security challenge.

Defense officials said that General McKiernan was removed because of what they described as a conventional approach to what has become one of the most complicated military challenges in American history. He is to be replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command who recently ran all special operations in Iraq.

The decision reflects a belief that the war in Afghanistan has grown so complex that it needs a commander drawn from the military’s unconventional warfare branch.

In other words, more of the rise of the counterinsurgents.

This is a big deal. McKiernan was running the biggest national security challenge of the young Administration, and Obama might have felt he needed his own man in there. But it really looks like the war effort has been handed over to the counterinsurgents, with David Petraeus in the lead (Stanley McChrystal, the new general, was essentially the right-hand man for Petraeus in Iraq). At this point, it's important to understand the implications of that. A counter-insurgency strategy is designed to break the links between insurgents and the local population by bringing the locals around to the side of the dominant authority. This is nothing new, by the way - they called it "winning hearts and minds" back in Vietnam. And then as now, the dominant authority, behind the US military, was an illusion of a central government. The Diem and Thieu governments in Vietnam were basically kleptocracies, and the public gradually moved away from them. In Afghanistan, public officials facilitate the drug trade and the central government is hopelessly corrupt. Hamid Karzai has no legitimacy, and has recently taken to offering olive branches to warlords to try and restore it. At some point, you must offer people something beyond endless occupation. If they have no faith in the government to provide services, all the counter-insurgency in the world won't counteract a member of the Taliban offering goods. So COIN must have something attractive at its end, and right now I don't see that being the case in Afghanistan.

There's also this fun bit of McChrystal's record:

One spot on his generally sterling military record came in 2007, when a Pentagon investigation into the accidental shooting death in 2004 of Cpl. Pat Tillman by fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan held General McChrystal accountable for inaccurate information provided by Corporal Tillman’s unit in recommending him for a Silver Star.

The information wrongly suggested that Corporal Tillman, a professional football player whose decision to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks drew national attention, had been killed by enemy fire.

McChrystal also sought a "declaration of victory" over Al Qaeda in Iraq back in October 2007. Hopefully the same kind of rose-colored assessment won't take root in Afghanistan.

Open-Ended Commitment

American military commanders like to tamp down expectations and prep the battlefield for a long commitment, but this stretches it a bit:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan said Monday it will be years before coalition forces can make a complete handoff to Afghan security forces, despite the arrival of thousands of new troops beginning this month and signs of diplomatic progress.

Army Gen. David McKiernan told newspaper executives gathered at The Associated Press annual meeting that militant havens across the border in Pakistan remain a challenge. And while he said that the Afghan army is now leading 60 percent of missions in Afghanistan, Afghan police lag in their ability to provide security [...]

"What we want to do is make a significant impact on the foundation of security ... and continue to move toward developing sufficient Afghan capacity and specifically, their army, their police, so at some point we can get to a tipping point where they lead the security in this country," he said.

"You're going to ask me when is that tipping point. I can't say, but I think it is a matter of years away," he said in a live satellite interview from Kabul.

What McKiernan describes above, frankly, is nation-building. That is a COMPLETELY separate issue from denying and dismantling safe havens for militant extremists. You can argue that the local forces being stood up here will eventually take that role, but the size of the security forces scheduled for Afghanistan, a poor country, would cost more than their total budget to maintain. We could easily move into a strategic overwatch position, using intelligence capabilities and law enforcement, to disrupt those safe havens (which occur throughout the world and not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan) and contain the threat. But instead, we use military means, which may be creating more terrorists than we destroy.

Even as the Obama administration launches new drone attacks into Pakistan's remote tribal areas, concerns are growing among U.S. intelligence and military officials that the strikes are bolstering the Islamic insurgency by prompting Islamist radicals to disperse into the country's heartland.

Al Qaida, Taliban and other militants who've been relocating to Pakistan's overcrowded and impoverished cities may be harder to find and stop from staging terrorist attacks, the officials said.

Moreover, they said, the strikes by the missile-firing drones are a recruiting boon for extremists because of the unintended civilian casualties that have prompted widespread anger against the U.S.

"Putting these guys on the run forces a lot of good things to happen," said a senior U.S. defense official who requested anonymity because the drone operations, run by the CIA and the Air Force, are top-secret. "It gives you more targeting opportunities. The downside is that you get a much more dispersed target set and they go to places where we are not operating."

U.S. drone attacks "may have hurt more than they have helped," said a U.S. military official who's been deeply involved in counterterrorism operations. The official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly, called the drone operations a "recruiting windfall for the Pakistani Taliban."

Ultimately, this is why Americans are wary of Afghanistan. We have a defined goal to start and then it morphs into building security forces and protecting the central government until we are intimately entangled in the lives of millions of people half a continent away. Obama supposedly refined the mission, but the top commander is spouting the same rhetoric of entanglement. Seemingly our wars get longer with each successive generation, and no more decisive, either. The troop morale seems to still be high, but of course that's more a function of people wanting to protect their buddies in the unit than a sense of mission.

It disturbs me that we are already beginning to see signs of mission creep.

Gen. Scott McClellan

I don't really care much about misspeaking the name of a random general here and there. So Sarah Palin calling the NATO Commander in Afghanistan David McKiernan "General McClellan" on a couple occasions doesn't bug me. What bugs me is that she completely misstated McKiernan's opinion of the war in Afghanistan and whether or not you can use surge tactics in that theater, which was big news as it broke TODAY. I even wrote about it.

“Afghanistan is not Iraq,” said Gen. David McKiernan, who led ground forces during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.

During a news conference yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as “a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq.” The country's mountainous terrain and rural population, its poverty and illiteracy, its 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.

“The word I don't use for Afghanistan is 'surge,' ” McKiernan emphasized, saying that what is required instead is a “sustained commitment” to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many more years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.

That is the diametric opposite of what not only Palin, but McCAIN has been saying throughout this campaign. The "surge to Afghanistan" nonsense has been discredited by the general on the ground. And Palin outright lied about it tonight.

Changes Of Seasons In Afghanistan

I know that the media can only focus on one thing at a time, but this is a very sensitive moment for Afghanistan. US commanders and international diplomats alike are seeing a scenario that is very close to being lost.

The cable, written in French, paraphrases the 53-year-old British ambassador as saying:

The security situation is bad and getting worse.

The Afghan people have lost all trust in their current government, partly because of corruption.

The presence of foreign troops in the country is part of the problem, propping up the current regime and thus slowing progress toward Afghans putting a more effective government in place.

Sending more military reinforcements to Afghanistan would have a "perverse effect" on the country's stability and future, sending the message that an occupying force is in control of the country and widening the number of targets for insurgents to attack.

That last two are important. Many have this view that adding forces is all that's needed to stabilize a security problem. Call it "the Iraq delusion." John McCain has outright said this, that we need a "surge" in Afghanistan the way we surged in Iraq. Of course, the commander of NATO forces on the ground knows that the two countries aren't even remotely comparable:

First of all, please don’t think that I’m saying there’s no room for tribal engagement in Afghanistan, because I think it’s very necessary. But I think it’s much more complex environment of tribal linkages, and intertribal complexity than there is in Iraq. It’s not as simple as taking the Sunni Awakening and doing the Pashtun Awakening in Afghanistan. It’s much more complex than that.

But there are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it’s such a poor country, by any set of metrics you can imagine. A country that has very harsh geography. It’s very difficult to move around, getting back to our reliance on helicopters. It’s a country with very few natural resources, as opposed to the oil revenues that [Iraq] has. There’s very little money to be generated in terms of generated in Afghanistan. The literacy rate — you have a literate society in Iraq, you have a society that has a history of producing civil administrators, technocrats, middle class that are able to run the country in Iraq. You do not have that in Afghanistan. So there’s educational challenges, challenges of human capitol that I mentioned earlier.

So there are a lot of challenges. What I don’t think is needed — the word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word “surge.” There needs to be a sustained commitment of a variety of military and non-military resources, I believe. That’s my advice to winning in Afghanistan. It won’t be a short-term solution.

Of course, McKiernan also wants more troops, so while he doesn't use the word "surge," he at least thinks that adding forces can only have a salutary effect on the country. There is Afghanistan as we knew it in 2002, when a grateful nation was happy to have help in getting rid of the Taliban, and there is Afghanistan today, where the public has lost faith in the government, the Taliban is controlling major sections of the country, and those who have endured six years of aerial bombing don't see NATO troops as saviors.

... I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that six or seven years later, we can just roll up our sleeves and rededicating ourselves to achieving the goals we were told we achieved years ago. The situation has changed, windows of opportunity open and close, and our mission has gotten very murky. Oftentimes when this kind of operation goes on long enough the goal becomes “succeeding” — or, rather, doing something or other that whoever’s in charge of the operation could plausibly label success. But we need to think, instead, more concretely about what it is we’re hoping to achieve in Afghanistan — specifically, does preventing portions of Afghanistan from serving as a base for terrorist operation directed at the United States really require us to establish an effective central state in Afghanistan?

That is the key question that I don't think either Presidential candidate has answered. They are arguing for an intervention in Afghanistan circa 2002. Time has changed circumstances.