By Dave Anderson:
What's not to love about a metricless and stratecally expansive and ill-defined war? The American public is starting to get antsy about Afghanistan as it sure looks like there is significant mission creep with ill-defined at best objectives that are tangentially related to national security instead of protecting the Beltway concensus.
Here is CNN's latest poll on support for the Afghanistan war:
Forty-one percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday say they favor the war in Afghanistan � down 9 points from May, when CNN polling suggested that half of the public supported the war. Fifty-four percent say they oppose the war in Afghanistan, up 6 points from May.
The May polling had a narrow 50:48 support for the war in Afghanistan. I am speculating but I think the combination of increased casualties, strategic indirection and economic concerns are the factors that are eating away at public support.
And yet, we are still going to get COIN without the army, the clients or the coins to pay for it. Wonderful as the promises of COIN are conditioned on having plenty of troops, plenty of money, plenty of time, and plenty of domestic political support as preconditions for COIN. COIN, especially foreign power COIN, which is the only type that we are conducting, has serious strategic problems as I noted last February:
the political costs of the COIN strategy were very high; promises of ten to twenty year wars, consumption of the society's productive surplus, the consistent threat of de-pacification, severe social and domestic political instability and legitimacy threats. These costs could be borne if the theatre of war was critical to the existence and maitenance of a desired social order as these costs were borne in World War Two. However in both examples, especially in Vietnam, the objective loss function was fairly small as Vietnam was a tertiary interest for the United States.
COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.
And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security that operational and tactical successes may or may not generate.
So if we assume that democracies are not likely to support doctrines, strategies and techniques that produce long term ongoing costs with minimal prospects of producing desired long term political benefits, the problem in the Clauswitzian perspective is not the grand strategic level, but at the strategic and operational levels where the COIN doctrine is implemented in disregard to the grand strategic appreciation of forces and reality.
What's not to love and what not to sacrifice in order to keep the Beltway cocktail parties civil.
Good post.
ReplyDeleteTwenty-five years of cowboy diplomacy seems to have left a deep scar on the country. Even in the face of Vietnam Redux a significant number of folks still love rattling the sabers. The polls may be inching downward, but they should have hit rock bottom a couple years ago. Too bad.
We have Obama's campaigning to thank in part. He had to defeat an honored POW while committing to ending the Iraq adventure. He balanced the contradiction with a macho appeal in the direction of Afghanistan. The atavistic tendency to kill enemies is embedded in all human populations and politicians cannot risk coming across as pusillanimous.
The unasked question is whether Barack Obama is finally ready to cut and run from his failed 100-day run at bipartisanship and go for some Chicago-style partisan politics. If health reform, his pet project, gets any more savaged, it may be necessary to get down and dirty with Republicans. When you cut to the chase there are ways to deal with those in your own party, even the Blue Dogs, and that may be the next development in administration politics.
In the case of the Afghanistan Adventure, the question is how hard would it be to handle Blue Dogs and their constituents be if he tried to take away their war? And more importantly, how much would he want to?