What, is General McChrystal trying to wash off the stench of failure from his tenure as a shiny new four-star?
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has given the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan 60 days to conduct another review of the American strategy there, the fifth since President Barack Obama took office less than five months ago.
The Defense Department announced Monday that Gates has ordered the new U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, to submit a review of the U.S. strategy within 60 days of their arrival in Afghanistan.
The National Security Council, the U.S. Central Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff each have already reviewed the U.S. Afghan strategy, and civilian departments conducted a separate interagency review. On March 27, shortly after those reviews were completed, the administration announced a new strategy that called for defeating al Qaida, reducing civilian casualties and eliminating terrorist safe havens.
Five reviews. Five months. Same old crap, wishing for preferred outcomes (and maybe a few ponies while they’re at it) without actually articulating a strategy. We’ll see if McChrystal’s group—who is in that group, I wonder?—comes up with anything new. Even in the SOF community, there is precious little original thinking about Afghanistan. Hell, even in the think tank community, there is precious little original thinking any more. Then there’s this:
The Pentagon is setting up a unit of about 400 officers and senior enlisted personnel devoted to Afghanistan, continuing a broad revamp of how it handles the war there.
The Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell is the creation of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Obama administration’s nominee to run the Afghan war. Gen. McChrystal says he wants military personnel to accumulate expertise about the war by doing repeated deployments to Afghanistan and continuing to work on the conflict when back in the U.S.
This may be about seven years too late, but it is a good idea. My question: there are already entire Army programs set up to provide continuous, year-over-year understanding of Afghanistan. I used to work for one. How are those inadequate? Yes, there is no substitute for having repeated experience in an area, but where is the part about integrating existing experts into the command and decision-making process so that they don’t have to start from scratch? While he enjoys a free hand, McChrystal is not demonstrating an understanding of the assets he already has; no wonder, then, that he feels the need to create yet more of them.
General McChrystal is reinventing the wheel several times over. Can we afford to do that at this stage of the game?
This brings up a good chance to highlight Judah Grunstein’s musing over the Afghanistan policy paper CNAS wrote (Andrew Exum hired me to provide feedback on the Afghanistan section). His first bit is here, and he makes a point that bears following up:
A more significant problem with the report is that, to paraphrase Foust, there is a fundamental disconnect between what we’ve said we will do in Afghanistan and what the CNAS report expects to happen. The political/strategic goals articulated by President Barack Obama (quoted in the report, no less) are “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” That does not support the authors’ operational prescription for Counterinsurgency with a big “C”, as opposed to tactical counterinsurgency with a small “c.”
Neither the strategic mission articulated, the resources invested, nor the partner government in Kabul make a Counterinsurgency campaign a realistic goal. What we’re left with is counterinsurgency tactics, spread thin, with a one-year time horizon for shifting the momentum in the war.
He continues today:
War, in other words, whether total or population-centric, can not be strictly controlled. I know that the COIN advocates recognize this in the abstract. But when I mentioned a “vaguely un-nerving” quality to the CNAS report, this is what I was referring to. COIN advocates have been fighting an internal institutional battle within the U.S. military to get their ideas heard and implemented. To do that takes commitment, determination and faith in the cause.
But faith can often become certainty. And if there’s one thing that warfare does not forgive, it’s certainty. COIN was to a large extent a result of the U.S. military coming to terms with the central paradox of contemporary warfare: In winning the battle, conventional militaries found themselves losing the war. COIN advocates would do well to keep that in mind.
That is absolutely true. I think part of what Grunstein is referring to is the phenomenon I discussed several months ago about the challenge of tool boxes.
Much like in Kapisa Province, in Afghanistan as a whole you can reliably get a temporary improvement that might even last a few months, but those methods don’t encompass policy sustainment, even if there is a new class of doctrine in place meant to provide such a thing…
No one has yet come up with a reliable way to both wean Afghanistan off opium, address the serious funding and salary and cultural issues that drive corruption, minimize the extremist religious tendencies (and corruption) that distort the legal system, or revamping the entire structure of the government so it can be more responsive to its people and less responsive to Hamid Karzai’s remarkably fragile ego. This presents an enormous danger of falling into Patton’s trap: adjusting the situation to fit the approach, and not necessarily letting the situation determine the approach.
Two months after writing that, I noticed something else: “The one good thing about the war dragging on this long is we actually have a good record now of failures (and far fewer successes).”
Indeed, there is actually a substantial body of work about what is most likely to be successful and what is most likely to be unsuccessful in Afghanistan. While I haven’t read them all in detail, the four previous strategic reviews didn’t seem to recognize that—and most didn’t reach beyond 2 or maybe 3 years ago. With only sixty days to do yet another top-to-bottom review, what McChrystal is guaranteeing is yet more of a “tool box approach” to the war, in which the convention wisdom will continue to be expressed in broad policy cliches (“protect the people” “out-govern don’t out-gun” and so on), that actually lend themselves to an extremely limited—and already tested—set of policies.
In the meanwhile, there are actually a number of government agencies—both military and non-military—that have collectively acquired decades of experience in the post-911 environment in Afghanistan. They have retained personnel for years, and some (I am not referring to my former employer) have a remarkable understanding of the country, its issues, and where the capability gaps are. In all the hoopla about McChrystal’s Jesus-like patina cast over the Afghan War, they’re not even off-handedly mentioned. I truly hope McChrystal’s group is not going to reinvent the wheel yet again, pretending preferred outcomes are an acceptable substitute for a strategy, and discarding all the other good work people have done to try to understand and reverse the campaign’s seeming inevitable slide into defeat. I hope it will happen, but I am not hopeful that it will.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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{ 4 comments }
Has anybody asked the Taliban how much they’d take to kick al Qaeda out?
The Sunni Arab tribes in al-Anbar did so for a reasonable price, far less than we were spending fighting them plus al Qaeda.
As for the other goals, they are a mixture of the quixotic and the impossible. No wonder repeated “policy reviews” have had so little effect. The first step must be wean the reviewers off opium.
Well, remember in 2001 the Taliban asked for proof that al Qaeda had perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. Apparently video of Osama bin Laden bragging about it wasn’t enough for them.
The Sunni Arab tribes in al-Anbar were bought for a few years. Now they’re getting violent again as the money dries up. Purchasing outcomes is only a temporary measure.
As for your last point… well, yes — that is PRECISELY the point.
I don’t see the connection between the Taliban asking for proof about 9-11 and my suggestion. Did we offer cash, or was this a theoretical discussion (i.e., one without cash on the table)?
As for “temporary measures” — if you believe *anything* we do there will result in more than temporary success, I suggest a lie down. Some rest will restore your perspective. I suspect we could buy a long period of limited cooperation for the cost of the planned military operations. With less bloodshed.
Fabius
I’m not trying to be a Dick, and I’m going to seemingly contradict myself in a couple more lines, but the buy off is a tricky thing, even temporarily.
We all realize that some will be cranky not getting as much as that dude and some will have to be paid more because they have a proven track record of doing great damage while this knucklehead here is an un proven entity blah blah blah. The real problem I see here is the group of dudes that want nothing more than to kill Americans. The irony here is, I see them as not being open to any cash deal for a lil’ rest, they want to kill US soldiers, but some of the ones I’m thinking of right now become absolutely no threat to the US as soon as we leave Afghan soil. They aint gonna spend 3 weeks at night school learning how to “only” fly the plane, they aint gonna save all their afghanis selling goat’s milk so that they can one day come to Philly and blow up the flyers. Nope, the ones who I see as un approachable under a paid truce ( which really aint a bad short term idea, except for the refitting etc the bad guys might do, which they can pretty much do at will as we like to hide in the FOBs) are the very ones that are no longer a threat to Americans once we leave them be. Quite the existential paradox eh? Yes, given there are hard core types that want to blow America up, but man, I’ve seen blips and flashes that these dudes aren’t as dedicated as they are made out. They seem to sometimes equivocate quite nicely and get the “hard fervor’ when it’s convenient.
It has been shown in some areas that approaching a neighboring village and offering to hire some local dudes to do very little work at a cop or little FOB has reduced or eliminated the ieds and rockets that are attributed to local day fighters.
Make no mistake, I see no big easy answer, and as Josh has written in the past, the “tool box” thing is a dangerous route but a go to panacea. I see many small, different but simple, easier in complexity but more difficult in scope ( example, living as small teams, among the villagers, scary, hard, dangerous at first, but the template for success is there and the success seems to be more than short term, all other things being constant of course) approaches needed and many have been shown to have success. This has to be under the complete and total control of men who have the responsibility for things but so far have not had the authority to act and with the understanding that we have to call a spade a spade. Some folks are not cut out for this.
We need the understanding that accountability needs to be complete and authority is given to the lowest level where real time adjustments are sometimes required by the minute.
In other words it’s time to hang up the big “retards need not apply’ sign and stick to that harsh higher criteria.