The recent announcement of General Mark McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely reflected a need for "fresh thinking," but Stevie Wonder can see it was a stratagem to make McKiernan the fall guy for all the collateral damage caused by the air strikes that President Obama authorized.
Ironically, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, McKiernan’s replacement, has a proven record of executing just the kinds of strikes McKiernan got fired for, and on top of that, Obama still intends to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that McKiernan asked for even though he couldn’t explain what he’d do with them if he got them. When Obama phoned McKiernan and asked him how he’d use the additional troops, all he heard in reply was the sound of sandbags forming a levee.
So we’re on track to escalate a war for which the administration admits there is no military solution by continuing attrition tactics that make more new bad guys than they attrite. It's enough to make Clausewitz claw at his coffin lid.
Here’s how you’re supposed to plan and execute a military strategy. You look at a situation and you decide what kind of political end state you want to achieve. Then you decide if you can formulate a feasible military objective that can accomplish the political aims. Next you determine the adversary’s center of gravity, which is the thing (or collection of things) he can use to thwart your military plan, and the thing you have to defeat. Only when you’ve done those things do you begin to calculate how many troops you need to accomplish the mission, and after that you start working details like logistics.
But with our Bananastan strategy, we started with logistics and worked our way backwards. In January 2009, the Washington Post reported that the Army was already building $1.1 billion worth of new Fort Palookas in Afghanistan to accommodate additional troops, and plans to begin spending an additional $1.3 billion on construction in 2010. That money started queuing up at the hopper well before McKiernan’s request for 30,000 additional troops became public. It’s a cherished military stratagem: throw bad seed money at whatever hooliganism you want so Congress has to throw good money after it or be "weak on national security."
Gate’s rear echelon bull feather merchants had been making a show of working on a Bananastan strategy when they decided to let the stink roll uphill for a change. As the Post reported, they began "looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates." That’s a traditional tenet of military leadership known in the trenches as "the buck stops there."
The White House national security team—laughably described by Robert Dreyfus in a recent Rolling Stone article as "Obama’s chess masters"—unveiled a white paper describing its new Bananastan strategy in late March. National Security Adviser James Jones and the rest of the chess club based their plan on "realistic and achievable" objectives that are fantastic and unattainable. We cannot, as they suggest, make stable governments in Afghanistan or Pakistan. "Increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces" is a pipe dream that, even if it came true, would simply mean we had one more armed outfit in the region that we can’t control. Their initiative for "involving the international community" makes one wonder if they remember anything of the last eight or so years. The international community has been involved in the Bananastans since NATO signed on for the operation, and it hasn’t done a fat bit of good.
The most delusional aspect of the new strategy is its "core goal" which is to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens." Modern terrorists need safe havens like dolphins need power tools. The only "haven" they need to plan, coordinate and finance their operations is a pocket large enough to conceal an iPhone.
The white paper makes no mention of centers of gravity, critical strengths and vulnerabilities, measures of effectiveness, decisive points, courses of action, lines of operations, or any other term that belongs in a proper strategy involving military action. It contains a host of trendy platitudes about a "new way of thinking" and "building a clear consensus." The paper even has talk of bringing non-military forms of power to bear, as if that’s something new. Information, diplomacy and economy were key elements of warfare long before Thucydides and Sun Tsu wrote on the subject around 400 BCE. And make no mistake; when a foreign policy action involves shooting people and blowing things up, it’s not "economic assistance" or "education and training." It’s "war."
When a strategy’s aphorisms morph into non-sequiturs, you know none of the think tankers involved with the project was doing any thinking, new or otherwise. "A strategic communications program must be created, made more effective, and resourced," the chessmen tell us. I wonder which they’ll do first: create the program or make it more effective.
I’ve said before that in order to put an end to the American security state, Obama needs to order every military officer from the full bird level on up to retire. It is now clear that he also needs to purge the national defense apparatus of its thundering flock of civilian foreign policy wonks. It may be that the generals and tank thinkers driving our ship of state will drop dead of old age before they make America the latest superpower to embalm itself in Afghanistan, but don't count on it.
I doubt if Obama will do what needs to be done. Look on the bright side, though. Athens produced most of the art and philosophy that defined western civilization only after it lost its wars with Persia and Sparta, so maybe America can still become Ronald Reagan's "shining city upon a hill."
If we do, we’ll need a new generation of strategists who know that it’s better to charge down a hill than up one.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.