If the president assents to McChrystal’s request, he will void his promise of change at least so far as national security policy is concerned. The Afghanistan war will continue until the end of his first term and probably beyond. It will consume hundreds of billions of dollars. It will result in hundreds or perhaps thousands more American combat deaths - costs that the hawks are loath to acknowledge.
That is a key paragraph in an op ed by Andrew Bacevich in today's Boston Globe. in Afghanistan - the proxy war Bacevich argues that we are at a pivotal moment: if the President accedes to McChrystal's request, he will lock us - and him - into a continuation of the kinds of policy pushed by Cheney and Rumsfeld that have been so disastrous in their effects.
You should read his column. I have some additional thoughts
Bacevich is not alone in seeing a risk of Afghanistan consuming Obama's presidency the way Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson. Mark Kleiman at SameFacts, in a short piece entitled Hamid van Thieu?, opines
We seem to be committed to a counterinsurgency campaign on behalf of a government than can’t govern. I’ve seen this movie before, and I didn’t like the way it ended.
Our nation was not effectively broke during Johnson's presidency, we still had a draft to ensure a sufficient supply of troops for the military, and Johnson nevertheless was able to enact into law the sweeping changes of his Great Society Program. So there are differences between Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Still, an ongoing war not only costs treasure and lives, it also costs international prestige - including that recently gained by the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. It will cost domestic political capital, something of great importance for making other major changes desperately needed by our nation.
Bacevich offers a frame different than that of the war hawks - like McCain? - who argue that not to support McChrystal is tantamount to accepting defeat. There is no doubt that some on the right - far too many of whom are themselves chickenhawks with no military service of their own or by members of their families - would love to use such a "defeat" as a bumper-sticker slogan for 2010 and beyond.
But consider what Bacevich offers in his analysis of what accepting McChrystal's proposal will mean:
■ Anoint counterinsurgency - protracted campaigns of armed nation-building - as the new American way of war.
■ Embrace George W. Bush’s concept of open-ended war as the essential response to violent jihadism (even if the Obama White House has jettisoned the label "global war on terror’’).
■ Affirm that military might will remain the principal instrument for exercising American global leadership, as has been the case for decades.
Here I feel it important to look back beyond Bush. Clinton's final SecDef, Bill Cohen, was long an advocate of unconventional warfare, of building our capacity for "low-intensity" conflict. McChrystal's career is in a sense a product of policies Cohen pushed first while in the Senate and then at the Pentagon. Not having read the report the General is now offering - only summaries - it is not clear to me how much his approach depends upon the use of such unconventional forces and how much his request for troop increases is to approach the normal ratios for suppression of insurgencies. While this is not my area of expertise, IIRC the ratio is calculated not on the basis of troops to insurgents, but troops to population, which would require a force several times that which McChrystal would have even were he granted the maximum increase he is expecting. Given that, as Bacevich rightly acknowledges, no one seriously believes that Afghanistan seriously matters to our national security, there would be no popular will for a force exceeding half a million troops.
Bacevich puts things bluntly about McChrystal's plan:
Its purpose - despite 9/11 and despite the failures of Iraq - is to preserve the status quo.
Bacevich has long been a critic of the status quo approach. I have written about his thinking before. In this diary I offered the following quote from a column he had done criticizing the results of the Bush approach:
Defined the contemporary era as an "age of terror" with an open-ended "global war" as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;
Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;
Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;
Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, "defense is not a budget item";
Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;
Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising "global leadership";
Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.
I have also reviewed a book by Bacevich that covers many of the issues touched upon by the column today. In The End of American Exceptionalism - what no President will acknowledge one quote I offered from Bacevich was this:
America doesn't need a bigger army. It needs a smaller - that is, more modest - foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities. Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions. When it comes to supporting the troops, herein lies the essence of a citizen's obligations.
I concluded that piece by noting We have won an election, but our work is only beginning. Being informed is part of our continuing task. I believe this book will help with that process.
Bacevich ends today's column like this:
This is a pivotal moment in US history. Americans owe it to themselves to be clear about what is at issue. That issue relates only tangentially relates to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the well-being of the Afghan people. The real question is whether "change’’ remains possible.
I can only hope that at least some of those advising President Obama on the decision he is pondering with respect to Afghanistan have read Bacevich. I might further hope that the President would invite Bacevich for a direct conversation, although that might be too much for which to hope.
With my limited, non-professional knowledge about what is at stake, I find myself tilting very much in the direction of Bacevich's thoughts, even as I recognize a real political danger in treading the pathj at which he points. From those I personally know who have been in Afghanistan and/or who seriously study the nation and the region, and from what I am able to read in various publications, it is not only the non-functionality of the Karzai government, as Kleiman rightly points out. It is the corruption as embodied by the role Karzai's brother plays in the burgeoning drug trade. It is the ludicrous way Karzai's supporters rigged the recent election, an election now seriously questioned by a key UN observer.
Afghanistan is apparently no longer the center of Al Qaeda activities, which have moved across the border to Pakistan, perhaps as soon as Bush failed to block escaped from Tora Bora. We are wreaking havoc on a nation which does not want a large American presence, killing innocents, building up resentment by destruction and by our support of an increasingly unpopular and unaccepted regime. We cannot "win" a conventional war, because Afghanistan is not a conventional nation. It may not be an exact parallel to South Vietnam in the Johnson administration because there is no equivalent of North Vietnam - a nation allied with the forces against whom we battle. Pakistan has been a main source for the Taliban in the past, but we are not about to attack them, nominally our ally. And our continued presence in Afghanistan serves to further destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan - now that should be a greater concern than the functioning of the Taliban against the corrupt and useless central government.
Bacevich is far more credible on military and security matters than I can hope to be. He influences my thinking. And I think more should pay attention to what he has to offer.
Thus I have taken the time to offer this diary, in the hopes that perhaps a few more will consider what he has to say.
And in this case, I think my final salutation is more than applicable:
Peace.