By Steve Hynd
The Washington Post's editorial today repeats the conventional wisdom among the VSP set - a wisdom carefully calculated to conceal their own failures - that the war in Afghanistan is not a nine-year war, it's just nine one-year wars.
Gen. Petraeus also made clear that for many of those years, U.S. forces and their allies did not have the resources they needed to fight al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. Only during the past 18 months, he said, have the right strategy, structures and people been put in place. And starting in late spring, the general said, the new commitment began to yield signs of progress.
Wasn't it those generals' duty to speak out and say the strategy was a bust during those last nine years then?
But I'd like to bring in Ann Marlowe at this stage. She's a fellow at the rightwing Hudson Institute who has given speeches on Afghanistan and counterinsurgency theory to the military and has wriiten regularly on Afghanistan for the likes of the WSJ and Weekly Standard - and she says she is done drinking the Kool-Aid.
This �new counterinsurgency strategy� is only yesterday�s strategy with a new general in charge, and it isn�t likely to be any more successful now than it has been in the past.
The parts of Afghanistan that are responsible for the more than seven percent growth in GDP � the north and west � are doing well because their largely non-Pashtun population cares more about improving their families� lives than attacking infidel troops. We didn�t need to build schools there � because Afghans built them themselves. And they don�t burn them down, either � instead they send their kids there even at considerable financial sacrifice. (Afghans have to pay for school books and uniforms for their kids.) These parts of Afghanistan are fine, and little thanks to American government spending. The Afghans did it for themselves.
The parts of Afghanistan where we�ve spent enormous sums bribing Pashtun villagers not to blow up our troops or the Afghan National Security Forces remain violent � they just have better roads and schools than they used to. And they�re still governed for the most part by thugs, drug dealers, and thieves appointed by Karzai. Some of these provincial and district governors also have a sideline in the family narcotics business run by the president�s half brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai.
I have to admit, I drank the Pentagon Kool-Aid and the COIN Kool-Aid in 2008. It was hard not to, when I saw progress in the north and west of Afghanistan, a thriving economy, and the increasing penetration of mobile phones, the Internet, and ideas from outside. And on embeds in RC-East, I saw our Army building roads and schools where none had existed in human history. Commerce was beginning to thrive in remote areas that had always been poor.
Yes, even in 2008 IEDs and suicide bombings were also increasing, but I believed the commanders who told me it was a sign that the insurgents were growing desperate, or a reaction to the forces of order entering areas that had never had a government presence. All we needed was a little more time, or a few more troops, or a few more costly American development projects, and things would calm down. Our troops were doing a magnificent job on the local level in executing counterinsurgency tactics. It was hard not to believe they�d succeed.
Now, with almost 100,000 more foreign troops in Afghanistan, and steadily growing violene, it�s clear something�s wrong with this theory. If you did a graph logging SIGACTS (violent incidents) against the foreign troop presence over time, you�d see a nearly perfect correlation. American �boots on the ground� numbers went from an average monthly level of 5,200 in 2002, to 10,400 the next year; 15,200 in 2004, 19,100 in 2005, 20,400 in 2006, 23,700 in 2007, and 30,100 in 2008. Now we are at 95,000 Americans � and southern Afghanistan has never been so violent.
It isn�t �way to early� to tell which way the wind is blowing in Afghanistan, it�s way too late.
It remains true that no general who says his mission has been a failure has a career left to him. Thus the Pentagon has invented this ever-recycling "new Afghan war" as a means to ensure no general ever needs to. And if the generals get their way then the "new" war will go on as long as neccessary. (Not coincidentally, this absolves pundits and think-tankers of the need to admit their own mistakes too.) Petraeus has made that clear in an interview with fanboy Spencer Ackerman.
�You can reduce your forces. But you thin out,� Petraeus tells Danger Room in an interview from his professorial Kabul office. �You don�t just hand over. The whole unit doesn�t leave.� At least not in the early stages after the Obama administration�s announced date to start a withdrawal. And some of those troops won�t come home right away: They�ll be �reinvested� at first in parts of the country where security remains dicey.
And the parts of Afghanistan that "remain dicey" will be the South, East and some of the North. It's a recipe for endless occupation.
But at least the WaPo's editors got one bit right. Obama shouldn't hide behind the Saintly General, or use him to signal prevarication and even an about-face on withdrawal. He should have the guts to tell us himself.
Mr. Obama needs to explain his rationale to the American people, especially to the many doubters within his own party. He needs to do so not once, not twice, but repeatedly. This isn't Gen. Petraeus's war, and it's not even Mr. Obama's war. It is America's war -- and ultimately, only the president can make that case.
Obama needs to man up and admit he has caved to the Pentagon and the liberal interventionist hawks who make up D.C.'s "very serious person" set, not hide behind Petraeus' reputation.
Update: A friend points out that Marlowe "switched from Kool-Aid to pure grain alcohol", having written earlier (back in May) that the only COIN strategy that provably works is the Sri Lankan one of unrelenting brutality, although she adds that "that�s not who we are" . That's not an unusual obervation and is one of the strongest objections to the notion of "kinder, gentler COIN". As Michael Cohen wrote in July:
If we're not willing to accept the fact that civilians are going to be killed in war - and that lives will be upturned by the determination that our perceived interests in southern and eastern Afghanistan trump those of local civilians - then we have no business fighting this war in the first place.
And the answer to that, for me and about 62% of the American public, is that we shouldn't be fighting this war.
Be that as it may, it doesn't invalidate Marlowe's observations about the way in which the Pentagon is trying to spin a nine year war as a bunch of far shorter ones without ever having said dick about the wrong strategy being employed while it was being employed.
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