Ever since somebody leaked General Stanley McChrystal's strategic assessment of the situation in Afghanistan late last month, we've had a smidgen of debate in the megamedia about what it all means. An improvement over the dead silence that preceded it, without a doubt, but hardly what one could call a robust discussion.
Ultimately, what it all boils down to is whether the United States should, after eight years, continue to be involved militarily in Afghanistan, or rather what Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke calls "Af-Pak," the Afghanistan-Pakistan region where the remnants of al Qaeda and a growing insurgency partly mislabeled as Taliban operate amid a corrupt mish-mash of tribal and warlord loyalties as well as militaries of divided loyalties. Absent a grassroots movement in opposition, something that was, at best, only marginally effective in the matter of Iraq, the question seems already answered. The U.S. appears determined to remain, whether its increasingly uncomfortable NATO allies stick it out or not,
So, it comes down to whether President Obama will escalate U.S. military presence beyond the escalation begun last spring, or hold somewhere near the current levels. The latter isn't, obviously, what General McChrystal and Centcom Commander General David Petraeus seek. As McChrystal wrote in his wide-ranging assessment:
Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.
To fulfill the requirements of their favored counterinsurgency strategy, they need more troops, far more troops, in fact, than the highest of three numbers McChrystal is said to have sought, about 60,000, according to The Wall Street Journal. Even if the pitifully inadequate Afghan National Army could be brought up to the ludicrously optimistic 240,000 troops that have been called for, and NATO could be spurred to quadruple the 32,000 troops it now fields but is slowly withdrawing, the numbers would fall more than 100,000 short of what counterinsurgency strategy calls for.
Some critics have focused on McChrystal's middle suggestion, 40,000. As Robert Naiman points out here at Daily Kos and his own web site Just Foreign Policy, the 40,000 number (and the 60,000) is a "hoax."
But let him tell you:
It's a time-honored Washington tradition. If you want to bully the government into doing something unpopular and the public into accepting it, manufacture a false emergency. Iraq war? If you don't approve it, mushroom cloud. Banker or IMF bailout? If you don't approve it, financial collapse. Social Security privatization? If you don't approve it, the system will go "bankrupt." Our brand is crisis, as James Carville might say.
General McChrystal says that if President Obama does not approve 40,000 more U.S. troops for Afghanistan, and approve them right away, "our mission" - whatever that is - will likely "fail" - whatever that is.
But even if President Obama were to approve General McChrystal's request, the 40,000 troops wouldn't arrive in time to significantly affect the 12-month window McChrystal says will be decisive. So McChrystal's request isn't about what's happening in Afghanistan right now. It's about how many troops the U.S. will have in Afghanistan a year from now and beyond.
There is no emergency requiring a quick decision by President Obama.
The current situation in Afghanistan is being used as a bloody shirt to try to lock America into an endless war, and, as Andrew Bacevich argues in the Boston Globe, lock the Obama Administration into the continuation of military force as the main instrument of U.S. foreign policy.
An endless, unwinnable war. A war that already is slated to consume - before any further escalation - $65 billion this fiscal year.
The Wall Street Journal points out that:
a recent study by the Institute for the Study of War - a Washington, D.C., think tank headed by Kimberly Kagan, a military analyst who worked on Gen. McChrystal's assessment team - suggested it would be difficult to move enough troops from other posts to deploy anywhere close to 40,000 troops before next summer at the earliest.
The military agrees with the institute's overall findings, although [it] has identified different units it could deploy over the course of the next year.
Naiman goes on:
Let's say that "12 months" equals 12 months. So, McChrystal's window is between now and next October.
Let's say that "next summer at the earliest" equals June.
We're in October now, so June is eight months away.
That means that for 2/3 of McChrystal's window that will "probably determine" whether we "win" or "lose" in Afghanistan, the 40,000 troops that Obama is being pressured to approve will be mostly irrelevant.
There is no crisis demanding a quick decision on McChrystal's troop request, and plenty of time to explore alternatives, including dramatically reducing our list of enemies, and dramatically increasing the role of diplomacy, negotiations, and deal-making, in Afghanistan and in the region.
In particular, if it's true that 70% of the insurgency consists of "$10-a-day Taliban," as a Senate report estimates, that suggests that we could make deals with (at least) 70% of the insurgency. Suppose that these deals cost us $20 per day, per fighter, and that there are 15,000 Taliban fighters overall. Then a deal with 70% of the insurgency would cost $210,000 per day. The war, on the other hand, costs $165 million per day.
If you assume that fighting this 70% of the insurgency has average cost, then fighting these 70% of Taliban fighters costs $115.5 million per day. So, if we made a deal with them, instead of fighting them, we'd save $115.3 million dollars, every day, for an annual savings of $42 billion dollars. By comparison, if the 10 year cost of health reform is a trillion dollars, then the annual cost is $100 billion. So making a deal with 70% of the Afghan insurgency would pay for roughly half of the cost of health care reform.
Then, of course, there is the reduction in the number of U.S. and other NATO troops killed and maimed. And the decrease in the number of non-combatant Afghans killed and wounded, widowed and orphaned.
Is that something the escalators care about? As hints emerge that President Obama may be prepared to drop the full-fledged counterinsurgency approach desired by the generals, Gareth Porter writes that U.S. national security advisors are saying fresh intelligence evaluations show that if the Taliban won, it would allow al Qaeda to reestablish itself in Afghanistan.
But two former senior intelligence analysts who have long followed the issue of al Qaeda's involvement in Afghanistan question the alleged new intelligence assessments. They say that the Taliban leadership still blames Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda for their loss of power after 9/11 and that the Taliban-al Qaeda cooperation is much narrower today than it was during the period of Taliban rule. ...
...John McCreary, formerly a senior analyst at the Defence Intelligence Agency, wrote last week on NightWatch, an online news analysis service, that the history of Taliban-al Qaeda relations suggests a very different conclusion. After being ousted from power in 2001, he wrote, the Taliban "openly derided the Arabs of al Qaida and blamed them for the Taliban's misfortunes".
The Taliban leaders "vowed never to allow the foreigners – especially the haughty, insensitive Arabs – back into Afghanistan," wrote McCreary. "In December 2001, [Mullah Mohammad] Omar was ridiculed in public by his own commanders for inviting the 'Arabs' and other foreigners, which led to their flight to Pakistan."
McCreary concluded, "The premise that Afghanistan would become an al Qaida safe haven under any future government is alarmist and bespeaks a lack of understanding of the Pashtuns on this issue and a superficial knowledge of recent Afghan history."
In the days ahead, we can expect to hear many more arguments like that.