"Flooding The Zone" - How McChrystal Bulldozed Obama

By Steve Hynd

The best piece you're likley to read on how the Obama administration came to the decision to surge 40,000 extra US and allied troops in Afghanistan is by Mark Perry, writing for the Asia Times (h/t Russ Wellen). Unlike the stenographed versions in the Washington Post or New York Times, it wasn't written by someone channeling White House and Pentagon figures inent on making themselves look good. Perry has a long and impressive track record in national security reporting and has always concentrated on the turf fights between the Military-Industrial Complex and civilian leadership.

An excerpt that illustrates how McChrystal, in Perry's phrase, "flooded the zone" as Obama considered his request for more troops:

Eikenberry won friends among professional diplomats for his easygoing manner and quick understanding of their problems - and for his open irritation at McChrystal's imperious manner. "McChrystal came in and he just thought he was some kind of Roman proconsul, a [Douglas] MacArthur," an Eikenberry colleague notes. "He was going to run the whole thing. He didn't need to consult with the State Department or civilians, let alone the ambassador. This was not only the military's show, it was his show."

But McChrystal was not only able to "flood the zone" in Afghanistan, he was able to do so in Washington. As the director of the Joint Staff, a position he held just prior to arriving in Kabul, McChrystal established the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordinating Cell (PACC), a 70-person military-civilian operations group housed in the Pentagon's National Command Center, one of the most secure offices in the world. "This isn't a place you just wander in and out of," a senior Pentagon official says. The "PACC" bypassed the normal command structure - and the State Department. It reported to McChrystal, who rotated its officers in and out of Kabul every three to four months.

The PACC is "a stovepipe operation", this senior Pentagon official notes. "It's beautiful. It's headed up by McChrystal acolytes, former special operations officers who view him [McChrystal] as their patron. So they follow his lead. And there is no requirement for them to share any of the information they get from Kabul with the State Department or anyone else - let alone with Eikenberry. This is McChrystal's game. The PACC people in Washington pass information to McChrystal without going through any channels and they take the best information from Kabul and they brief [JCS chairman Admiral Mike] Mullen - and he briefs the president. So during the run-up to the Afghanistan decision, the military always looked current. They had the best information. Everyone else looked like a bunch of amateurs. Eikenberry was out of the loop. He had no chop [influence] on any of it. They just ran circles around him."

The tensions in the Eikenberry-McChrystal relationship came to be defined by Eikenberry's growing anger that the State Department's views were not getting an adequate hearing, either in Kabul or in Washington. That is: because the military was the sole voice in determining what was wrong in Afghanistan, they would be the sole voice in determining what to do about it. To deal with the first problem - in Kabul - Eikenberry confronted McChrystal after the general had had one of his private, face-to-face meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "Don't you think I ought to be a part of these meetings?" Eikenberry asked. McChrystal shrugged him off. "I'll keep you informed," he said. Eikenberry was enraged: the American in-country effort was supposed to be a coordinated military-civilian initiative. According to a Pentagon official, the Eikenberry-McChrystal confrontation, which "first took place in July", was repeated again and again. "It got worse and worse."

But Perry writes that McChrystal overplayed his hand in his London speech, during which he described Biden's skepticism as "short-sighted". That gave Eikenberry the opportunity to send and leak his own cable which baldly stated that, as Perry puts it, "America's problems in Afghanistan weren't going to be solved by killing people, but by helping the Afghans build credible governing institutions".

Now, suddenly, Eikenberry was weighing in. McChrystal felt undercut. "Where had this guy been?" one CENTCOM officer asked. "It was pretty damned late in the day to be giving an opinion. And that's all it was."

American diplomats don't disagree, but defend Eikenberry by pointing out that McChrystal's decision to "flood the zone" was designed to take the impetus for handling the war in Afghanistan out of the hands of the State Department as much as it was out of the hands of the Taliban. Other voices and other views, they believed, had been cut out of the loop - and they had decided to strike back.

"You can only be treated like a bunch of idiots for so long before you get fed up," one State Department employee says. "It was PowerPoint after PowerPoint, all filled with this lingo and it all sounded pretty scientific. But it all amounted to the same thing - who do we kill. Well, it won't work."

In the end, McChrystal won the day. But Eikenberry's cable had an effect, according to Perry: McChrystal and the pro-military faction are on their last chance. If they don't show strong progress in 18 months, then the consensus will be to head rapidly for the exit.

Critics of Obama might conclude from his recent West Point speech that the military is in charge of the American government - but don't tell the Pentagon. The military got what it wanted, but it emerged from the three-month Afghanistan review process with a keen sense of its limits and a strong feeling that while it might have succeeded in flooding the zone this time, it won't happen again.

When it comes time for McChrystal to justify his surge, he'll surely mount a well co-ordinated dog-and-pony show on the Hill akin to the one Petraeus on Iraq in 2008. Let's hope neither the White House nor lawmakers are so easily fooled again.