July 1, 2010
It was every reporter's dream: to write a small article that brings down a big guy. Not only that, but an easy article to boot: Do a little background research, summarize others' previous reportage and publicly available documents, interview your subject, his wife, and his aides, have a few beers with them to glean some loose-lipped quotes (expletives undeleted), and tie it all together in 8,000 very readable words. No need to invoke the Freedom of Information Act, no need to face jail for refusing to name names, no Deep Throat. Can't beat it.
The reporter himself, Michael Hastings, probably had no idea that his piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, published in Rolling Stone magazine last week, would have the effect it did: the summary dismissal of the architect of allied military policy in Afghanistan. The Big Guy was gone before the hard copies hit the newsstands.
If you haven't read Hastings' story, read it. You'll see that there's virtually nothing in there that you didn't already know or suspect: that there is widespread disagreement within the administration and the military over how to conduct the operation in Afghanistan; that there is open contention between the military and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and National Security Adviser Jim Jones; that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a corrupt and capricious ally; that many troops bitterly complain that McChrystal's policy of avoiding civilian casualties has left them vulnerable to Taliban attacks; that last spring's incursion into Marja, the test-case for the McChrystal counterinsurgency plan — "clear, build, hold, transfer" — has become, in the General's own words, a "bleeding ulcer."
It's all common knowledge. How could a story like this have had a result like that?
The answer lies not in the collection of facts but in Hastings' engaging profile of McChrystal that, almost entirely by inference, makes the general look big and the president look small.
Ostensibly, Obama fired McChrystal to maintain a united front in the conduct of the war. "I believe," Obama stated when he accepted the general's resignation, "that this mission demands unity of effort across our alliance and across my national security team. ... I welcome debate among my team, but I won't tolerate division."
I'm not quite sure what's the difference between debate and division, but Hastings' article succinctly showed that the "team" is about as dysfunctional as the French World Cup soccer squad. Indeed, the coach and his star player seem like the only ones sharing the same page; after all, the counterinsurgency strategy was McChrystal's idea, and Obama gave him almost everything and everybody he asked for to attempt it. Obama has long tried to present himself as the picture of confidence, in control of things Afghan, but the fact is that there are too many variables out there for anyone to be in control.
What really stuck in Obama's craw was that one little line in the article, where McChrystal (according to unnamed sources) "thought Obama looked ‘uncomfortable and intimidated' by the roomful of military brass" in his first meeting with them after the inauguration.
That's it? Sure, across the article the general and those unnamed sources shot their mouths off, but the words come across as griping, what all soldiers do, not as insubordination, conduct that in Obama's words "undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system."
A lot has been made about Obama's "Truman moment," but analogies with the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur are thin. MacArthur repeatedly upbraided Truman in the press for supposed faint-heartedness and "appeasement" in not escalating the Korean War into mainland China, but far beyond personal insults, he committed a truly undermining act of insubordination in going over the president's head with his own communiqué to China, threatening an invasion. By contrast, Obama himself on Dismissal Day acknowledged that "Stan McChrystal has always shown great courtesy and carried out my orders faithfully." Just as McChrystal, to his credit, is no MacArthur, so Obama is no Truman.
What McChrystal's firing really demonstrates is just how deeply disarrayed the situation in Afghanistan is. McChrystal was the scapegoat, symbolically bearing the whole sorry mess into the wilderness. But the illusion of unity evaporated into the summer air of the Rose Garden as soon as the words left the president's lips.
About the only ones to benefit are Michael Hastings and Rolling Stone. Despite the dire predictions about the death of journalism, the press, or whatever we should call it nowadays, can still bring down the big guys.
Showing posts with label afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label afghanistan. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
EXPERIMENT IN AFGANISTAN
February 25, 2010
It's brilliant, really: a mini-war with minimum bloodshed, followed by a mini-MacArthur stabilization plan, a quintessentially American combination of prudent military force and benevolent reconstruction.
Rather than attempting to pacify all of Afghanistan at once — finally recognized as impossible in a country dominated by feudal war-lords — the American military settled on a localized strategy. They would pick a large city infested for years by the Taliban — in this case, Marja, population 80,000. They would give the enemy two weeks' notice of the upcoming invasion in the hope that most of the foe would flee, thus minimizing the devastating door-to-door combat that characterized the early days of the Iraq War, and with it minimizing civilian casualties. After two or three days of fighting — that was the initial prediction — the Taliban that remained would be taken care of — the die-hards would either die or get out of town, and the rest, persuaded more by their pocketbooks than by ideology, would be bought off.
Once the city had been secured, an indigenous government would be set up (much like General Douglas MacArthur did in postwar Japan), guided by career Afghan bureaucrats from Kabul: "We've got government in a box, ready to roll in," said Commanding General Stanley McChrystal before the incursion began. Schools, medical facilities, and rebuilding projects would be provided, mainly staffed by local people. Opium-poppy fields and heroin-processing plants would be replaced by legitimate agriculture. Finally, with all running smoothly, the U.S. and British troops would withdraw, leaving a stable and harmonious city-state and a model for similar actions in the future.
As David Sanger of the New York Times wrote recently: "In the Bush years, the rallying cry when operations like Marja began was ‘clear, build and hold.' President Obama has added a fourth step, ‘transfer.' At the end of the three-month-long review of Afghan strategy, Mr. Obama vowed he would begin no military operation unless a plan was in place to transfer authority promptly to the Afghans."
The idea is so beautiful, so simple, so American — but will it work?
The "clear" phase has already met with obstacles. The advance notice apparently did make a significant number of the Taliban leave, but it also gave them plenty of time to riddle the city with roadside bombs, which the military acknowledged it had not anticipated — imagine that. The allied troops have also been meeting unexpectedly strong resistance from resourceful Taliban snipers, and have been impeded in their efforts by stringent "rules of engagement" designed to avoid civilian casualties. The predictions of two or three days to subdue the Taliban have turned into a month or more.
Meanwhile, the "build" phase has already started. Two "schools in a box" — something I guess like FEMA trailers with desks and supplies for 25 students each, and presumably complete with teachers — have opened, and over a hundred locals have been hired for maintenance tasks, a small but quick infusion of cash into the economy.
The "hold" and "transfer" phases will be the most difficult to implement and sustain, because as configured they are much more difficult for the Americans to direct and control.
The news on "hold" does not look particularly good, if it ever did. The Afghan military, which was supposed to take the lead in the conflict and provide a friendly and familiar face to the occupation, has in fact lagged behind the American and British forces, suffering only two deaths to the allies' dozen. Its field commander, Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, last week proffered a fanciful account of the operation that conflicted entirely with the American version. Elsewhere, defections of Afghan troops to the Taliban have occurred, and there are reports that soldiers' wages are being siphoned off by their paymasters.
The Obama extension, "transfer," which is really the linchpin of the operation, seems like pure idealism. If, as the State Department has acknowledged, the Afghan central government is corrupt, why should we expect that any government set up in Marja could be any less so? As easy as it may be to buy off the Taliban, it may be just as easy for the Taliban to buy everybody back, including the government in a box.
The Marja project, hopeful as it looks now to Gen. McChrystal, may be hopelessly utopian. "Clear, build, hold, and transfer," though not called such at the time, was a strategy that worked in postwar Japan and Germany because those countries had a long history of social order and, astonished at the absence of Allied retribution, embraced their rebuilding plans enthusiastically.
It's different in Afghanistan. Nation-building can't work if there isn't a nation to build. The city-state experiment, because of its modest size, offers a better chance. But, I would predict, not much better.
It's brilliant, really: a mini-war with minimum bloodshed, followed by a mini-MacArthur stabilization plan, a quintessentially American combination of prudent military force and benevolent reconstruction.
Rather than attempting to pacify all of Afghanistan at once — finally recognized as impossible in a country dominated by feudal war-lords — the American military settled on a localized strategy. They would pick a large city infested for years by the Taliban — in this case, Marja, population 80,000. They would give the enemy two weeks' notice of the upcoming invasion in the hope that most of the foe would flee, thus minimizing the devastating door-to-door combat that characterized the early days of the Iraq War, and with it minimizing civilian casualties. After two or three days of fighting — that was the initial prediction — the Taliban that remained would be taken care of — the die-hards would either die or get out of town, and the rest, persuaded more by their pocketbooks than by ideology, would be bought off.
Once the city had been secured, an indigenous government would be set up (much like General Douglas MacArthur did in postwar Japan), guided by career Afghan bureaucrats from Kabul: "We've got government in a box, ready to roll in," said Commanding General Stanley McChrystal before the incursion began. Schools, medical facilities, and rebuilding projects would be provided, mainly staffed by local people. Opium-poppy fields and heroin-processing plants would be replaced by legitimate agriculture. Finally, with all running smoothly, the U.S. and British troops would withdraw, leaving a stable and harmonious city-state and a model for similar actions in the future.
As David Sanger of the New York Times wrote recently: "In the Bush years, the rallying cry when operations like Marja began was ‘clear, build and hold.' President Obama has added a fourth step, ‘transfer.' At the end of the three-month-long review of Afghan strategy, Mr. Obama vowed he would begin no military operation unless a plan was in place to transfer authority promptly to the Afghans."
The idea is so beautiful, so simple, so American — but will it work?
The "clear" phase has already met with obstacles. The advance notice apparently did make a significant number of the Taliban leave, but it also gave them plenty of time to riddle the city with roadside bombs, which the military acknowledged it had not anticipated — imagine that. The allied troops have also been meeting unexpectedly strong resistance from resourceful Taliban snipers, and have been impeded in their efforts by stringent "rules of engagement" designed to avoid civilian casualties. The predictions of two or three days to subdue the Taliban have turned into a month or more.
Meanwhile, the "build" phase has already started. Two "schools in a box" — something I guess like FEMA trailers with desks and supplies for 25 students each, and presumably complete with teachers — have opened, and over a hundred locals have been hired for maintenance tasks, a small but quick infusion of cash into the economy.
The "hold" and "transfer" phases will be the most difficult to implement and sustain, because as configured they are much more difficult for the Americans to direct and control.
The news on "hold" does not look particularly good, if it ever did. The Afghan military, which was supposed to take the lead in the conflict and provide a friendly and familiar face to the occupation, has in fact lagged behind the American and British forces, suffering only two deaths to the allies' dozen. Its field commander, Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, last week proffered a fanciful account of the operation that conflicted entirely with the American version. Elsewhere, defections of Afghan troops to the Taliban have occurred, and there are reports that soldiers' wages are being siphoned off by their paymasters.
The Obama extension, "transfer," which is really the linchpin of the operation, seems like pure idealism. If, as the State Department has acknowledged, the Afghan central government is corrupt, why should we expect that any government set up in Marja could be any less so? As easy as it may be to buy off the Taliban, it may be just as easy for the Taliban to buy everybody back, including the government in a box.
The Marja project, hopeful as it looks now to Gen. McChrystal, may be hopelessly utopian. "Clear, build, hold, and transfer," though not called such at the time, was a strategy that worked in postwar Japan and Germany because those countries had a long history of social order and, astonished at the absence of Allied retribution, embraced their rebuilding plans enthusiastically.
It's different in Afghanistan. Nation-building can't work if there isn't a nation to build. The city-state experiment, because of its modest size, offers a better chance. But, I would predict, not much better.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
HEARTS AND MINDS
December 10, 2009
It took President Obama months to decide what to do next in Afghanistan; he finally presented his plan at West Point on December 1. Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy examination of his decision-making process — days and nights of meetings with his advisors, many of whom held widely divergent views. He displayed a comprehensive grasp of the issues, the article recounts, prodding the participants with questions and comments, resembling both "a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner," as one of them put it.
In one sense you can't help placing confidence in this man's judgment. By these accounts, he was not "dithering" but discerning, exercising a measured quest for clarity, not shooting from the hip. And yet, the sheer multiplicity of perspectives among the experts does not inspire confidence at all. The fact that everybody has a different idea on what will work means that nobody really knows what will work.
Even the "what" in "what will work" yields almost as many opinions as there are people to express them. Is the objective to keep Al Qaeda from regaining a "safe haven" in Afghanistan? Is it to keep the Taliban insurgents from regaining their pre-invasion oppressive control of the country? Is it to recruit and train a national army and police force to take over the task of stabilizing the country? Is it to make an end-run on Pakistan, our fickle ally, which may have been the terrorists' real safe haven all these years? Is it to do "nation-building" toward a Western-style democracy? Is it to eradicate the opium poppy crop that the Taliban had all but eradicated before the Americans deposed them?
Is it all of the above?
After so much deliberation, it was disconcerting to find the president's decision entirely conventional, preserving General Stanley McChrystal's recommendations almost intact: an Iraq-like "surge" of 30,000 more troops, a temporary deployment that would "get the job done" in a year and a half and pave the way for withdrawal.
In his speech at West Point, the president presented himself as absolutely sure of the outcome: "We will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's capacity over the next 18 months."
"Will"? Not "could," "should," or "might"? You'd like to trust Obama's rhetoric of certainty, but will-power never seems to have succeeded in Afghanistan; from the British to the Russians to the Americans, the wheels of their military juggernauts have all bogged down in the mountainous muck.
What are the American people to think of all this, we who are supplying most of the troops and are financing this operation to the tune of $100 billion a year? Obama's approach may have been a stroke of political genius in disarming Republicans with an escalation and Democrats with a drawdown, but it leaves honest ordinary citizens in confusion. What in the world is going on there?
This isn't World War II, and it isn't Vietnam either; in both those instances you had a unified government and military to fight; here you have the elusive, hydra-headed Taliban, everywhere and nowhere at once. (Obama, flouting conventional usage purposely, I think, referred to the Taliban in the singular — "the Taliban is" — though the word in Pashto is the plural of talib, meaning "student," and the reality is plural too.) This isn't even an Iraq, with its long history of dictatorship and powerful standing armies; here you have a kind of virtual country, ruled locally by countless warlords. The nominal "central government" commands little respect or loyalty; how can Western military advisors, no matter how skillful, recruit and train an indigenous army and police force when it's payoffs, not patriotism, that's the major inducement for joining up?
And speaking of payoffs, there's talk of trying to duplicate Iraq's "Anbar Awakening" by luring warlords and Taliban cells over with dollars — a most ironic strategy, given that bribery is endemic in the country and allegiance is as fungible as money is.
Frankly, there doesn't seem any way out of Afghanistan except the way out — but that course was impossible for Obama, who has long labeled the occupation as a "war of necessity" and took any option for immediate withdrawal off the table at the beginning of his consultations.
The Taliban can never be defeated because they're not an army but a movement; they can only be managed, and they may best be managed by the warlords themselves. The allegorical "war on terror," inherited from the Bush vocabulary, cannot be "won" by killing off a few Al Qaeda along the Pakistan border because terrorist cells are all over the world, connected by computer; they can only be inhibited by enhanced surveillance and prudent covert operations.
The example of Greg Mortenson, the intrepid American who is building schools in Pakistan, seems to make far greater sense than further military action: He has pacified whole areas there by offering what people really want — an education, to give them their own way out and up.
One hundred billion dollars a year to support 100,000 troops makes easy math for Mortenson — that's a billion dollars per soldier, and for the cost of keeping just one soldier he says he could set up and run 20 schools.
Wouldn't that be a better way to win hearts and minds? Wouldn't that be change we can believe in?
It took President Obama months to decide what to do next in Afghanistan; he finally presented his plan at West Point on December 1. Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy examination of his decision-making process — days and nights of meetings with his advisors, many of whom held widely divergent views. He displayed a comprehensive grasp of the issues, the article recounts, prodding the participants with questions and comments, resembling both "a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner," as one of them put it.
In one sense you can't help placing confidence in this man's judgment. By these accounts, he was not "dithering" but discerning, exercising a measured quest for clarity, not shooting from the hip. And yet, the sheer multiplicity of perspectives among the experts does not inspire confidence at all. The fact that everybody has a different idea on what will work means that nobody really knows what will work.
Even the "what" in "what will work" yields almost as many opinions as there are people to express them. Is the objective to keep Al Qaeda from regaining a "safe haven" in Afghanistan? Is it to keep the Taliban insurgents from regaining their pre-invasion oppressive control of the country? Is it to recruit and train a national army and police force to take over the task of stabilizing the country? Is it to make an end-run on Pakistan, our fickle ally, which may have been the terrorists' real safe haven all these years? Is it to do "nation-building" toward a Western-style democracy? Is it to eradicate the opium poppy crop that the Taliban had all but eradicated before the Americans deposed them?
Is it all of the above?
After so much deliberation, it was disconcerting to find the president's decision entirely conventional, preserving General Stanley McChrystal's recommendations almost intact: an Iraq-like "surge" of 30,000 more troops, a temporary deployment that would "get the job done" in a year and a half and pave the way for withdrawal.
In his speech at West Point, the president presented himself as absolutely sure of the outcome: "We will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's capacity over the next 18 months."
"Will"? Not "could," "should," or "might"? You'd like to trust Obama's rhetoric of certainty, but will-power never seems to have succeeded in Afghanistan; from the British to the Russians to the Americans, the wheels of their military juggernauts have all bogged down in the mountainous muck.
What are the American people to think of all this, we who are supplying most of the troops and are financing this operation to the tune of $100 billion a year? Obama's approach may have been a stroke of political genius in disarming Republicans with an escalation and Democrats with a drawdown, but it leaves honest ordinary citizens in confusion. What in the world is going on there?
This isn't World War II, and it isn't Vietnam either; in both those instances you had a unified government and military to fight; here you have the elusive, hydra-headed Taliban, everywhere and nowhere at once. (Obama, flouting conventional usage purposely, I think, referred to the Taliban in the singular — "the Taliban is" — though the word in Pashto is the plural of talib, meaning "student," and the reality is plural too.) This isn't even an Iraq, with its long history of dictatorship and powerful standing armies; here you have a kind of virtual country, ruled locally by countless warlords. The nominal "central government" commands little respect or loyalty; how can Western military advisors, no matter how skillful, recruit and train an indigenous army and police force when it's payoffs, not patriotism, that's the major inducement for joining up?
And speaking of payoffs, there's talk of trying to duplicate Iraq's "Anbar Awakening" by luring warlords and Taliban cells over with dollars — a most ironic strategy, given that bribery is endemic in the country and allegiance is as fungible as money is.
Frankly, there doesn't seem any way out of Afghanistan except the way out — but that course was impossible for Obama, who has long labeled the occupation as a "war of necessity" and took any option for immediate withdrawal off the table at the beginning of his consultations.
The Taliban can never be defeated because they're not an army but a movement; they can only be managed, and they may best be managed by the warlords themselves. The allegorical "war on terror," inherited from the Bush vocabulary, cannot be "won" by killing off a few Al Qaeda along the Pakistan border because terrorist cells are all over the world, connected by computer; they can only be inhibited by enhanced surveillance and prudent covert operations.
The example of Greg Mortenson, the intrepid American who is building schools in Pakistan, seems to make far greater sense than further military action: He has pacified whole areas there by offering what people really want — an education, to give them their own way out and up.
One hundred billion dollars a year to support 100,000 troops makes easy math for Mortenson — that's a billion dollars per soldier, and for the cost of keeping just one soldier he says he could set up and run 20 schools.
Wouldn't that be a better way to win hearts and minds? Wouldn't that be change we can believe in?
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