Tag: Afghanistan

Dispatches: Wrong questions

I’m posting my Dispatches column a day early directly to the blog. I’ll repost as a link tomorrow.

DISPATCHES: Wrong questions
On Afghanistan, it’s not how to win, but why are we still there
By Hank Kalet

If you keep asking the wrong questions, you are going to keep getting the wrong answers.

That’s what we have been facing in Afghanistan.

Rather than asking the correct question — why are we fighting in the south Asian country? — we seek the elusive winning strategy: What do we need to do to win what is, plainly, an unwinnable war?

The uproar over the comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff to Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine, comments that led to his ouster as commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, focused on the general’s insubordination, his dismissive attitude toward civilian leaders and the frat-boy environment the general appears to have encouraged. These were legitimate concerns, especially given the need to ensure civilian control of the military.

Gen. McChrystal resigned — or was forced to — and is expected to be replaced by Gen. David Petraeus, his boss and the chief architect of the counterinsurgency philosophy that is governing our war strategy. As Roger Daltry sang, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

President Barack Obama, in choosing Gen. Petraeus, made it clear that he is committed to his failed Afghan policy and is unwilling to ask the right questions about Afghanistan, the war on terror and U.S. war-making power in general.

As The Washington Post put it in its coverage last week, the decision to turn to Gen. Petraeus “allowed the president to keep his war strategy intact” and maintain “crucial (Republican) support for a war that a majority of Americans routinely say is no longer worth fighting.”

The president, in announcing the change, called it “a change in personnel,” but not “in policy.”

But shouldn’t the policy, itself, come under scrutiny? We have been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly nine years with little to show for it. The Taliban, which we forced from power, remains a factor and the government of Hamid Karzai, which we support, is viewed as corrupt and out of touch with the population.

Al Qaeda, which had used Afghanistan as a safe haven in 2001 before the 9/11 attacks, has moved across the border into Pakistan and has organized itself in a number of failed states around the globe, according to numerous press reports.

And yet, we continue to wage this misguided war.

The question is why. The answer, I think, is that the foreign policy establishment has gamed the argument by only asking questions that result in the answers it wants to get and by building its rationale on set of questionable premises designed to elicit its desired result.

Basically, it has built its arguments on statements of value masquerading as statements of fact. It is an argument premised on the notion that Afghanistan’s stability and movement toward democracy are imperative to safeguard Americans in the United States, and that our ability to disrupt terrorist activities and dismantle terrorist cells depends on victory in a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan.

These premises, however, are debatable; they express opinion and not fact. Before we can argue about the best strategy to employ in Afghanistan, we need to discuss the premises of the arguments made by the Obama administration.

Afghanistan’s stability and movement toward democracy are in our national interests. No doubt, a stable and democratic government will be better for the people of Afghanistan and the region, but are they any more important to our national security than a stable Somalia or a democratic Egypt? Isn’t it likely that the terrorist networks will just flee a suddenly stable Afghanistan for some other failed state, forcing us to chase them and putting us in a position of waging a roving, worldwide war?

Victory in Afghanistan is required to fight terrorism. Given that the United States has broken up several, unrelated terror plots in recent years, it seems evident that our efforts in Afghanistan are, at best, tangential to the fight against terrorism. Just as importantly, al Qaeda no longer calls Afghanistan home; rather, it has moved across the border into Pakistan, a nation we consider an ally. The foreign policy establishment is not questioning these assumptions and remains committed to this nasty war, one that has grown deadlier by the month for American soldiers.

The situation is analogous to the American experience in Vietnam, down to the language used to describe our counterinsurgency strategy, as numerous commentators have pointed out. There is no winning strategy in Afghanistan, but fight we must our leaders say because, well, to not fight is to admit defeat. It is a dangerous tautology, and not only because it has resulted in a growing number of American casualties. Our continued presence in Afghanistan — along with the seemingly forgotten, but no less deadly, misadventure in Iraq — is like a spark to the gasoline of resentment that creates new terrorists.

Like Vietnam, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are draining the treasury and busting our federal budget, siphoning needed money from domestic aid programs.

It’s time we asked the correct question about Afghanistan: How many lives are we willing to sacrifice to a war we never should have fought?

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Maddow via OpenLeft: McChrystal comments bigger than McChrystal

We need more people to make this point: The war in Afghanistan is a failure, can be nothing more than a failure and we need to pull the plug.

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New face, same failed war (cont.)

Anyone who seriously thought President Barack Obama might use the McChrystal affair to alter the course in Afghanistan needs to understand that the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal will do nothing to change direction.

On the contrary, his firing and replacement with his boss, Gen. David Petraeus, shows that the president is committed to the current course and has no intention to change directions:

In the short term, choosing Petraeus to replace Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal avoids many of the problems associated with removing the commander of a war effort involving 120,000 U.S. and NATO troops, billions of dollars in reconstruction projects and sensitive diplomatic negotiations.

As the head of the U.S. Central Command, Petraeus is more steeped in the Afghan war than any other four-star general in the military. He has played an active role in shaping the overall strategy as well as McChrystal’s tactical plans, and he knows Afghan President Hamid Karzai and many other senior Afghan government officials. During a recent trip, he met with the Afghan leader’s half brother, the chief power broker in the violence-plagued province of Kandahar.

“The decision to name Petraeus is the least disruptive way of removing McChrystal,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the leader of an Afghanistan-strategy review team for Obama in early 2009. “Petraeus knows the strategy inside and out, he knows the plans — he is as much of an architect of this as General McChrystal.”

The Petraeus appointment, therefore, stands as a recommitment to the failed policy, one that compounds mistakes made first by President George W. Bush and exacerbated when President Obama approved his surge.

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New face, same failed war

This is a dicey one, because there must be dissent within the war council and any administration, but it is clear that public ridicule of one’s bosses is not the best way to get your point across. In any case, this was not about the conduct of the war — which is, in many ways, a Gen. McChrystal production — but about the president asserting his authority.

The saddest part of this mess, however, is this:

Mr. Obama stressed that the change in leadership did not signal a shift in his overall war strategy in Afghanistan, where thousands of new American troop levels have been arriving in recent months among increasing casualties and growing questions about the progress of the war.

“It is a change in personnel, but it is not a change in policy,” Mr. Obama said.

In the end, this is the real issue. We need a change in strategy — i.e., we need to get out. The Afghanistan war has been a disaster and will remain so. Our best hope for stabilizing the region is to leave.

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Lead yourself

Several years ago, Neil Young issued a solid, if overrated, musical polemic directed against the Bush White House and its ideology of endless war called Living with War. The disc worked, as far as it went, full of piss and vinegar, as the saying goes, but lacking the kind of poetry that has made his best work remain timely and relevant in changing times.

In this respect, however, the record was no different than most protest records — think of “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire or much of the Country Joe and the Fish catalogue. One song on the record, however, stood out for me as capturing the cultural zeitgeist. “Looking for a Leader,” with its bald desire to have someone rise up and save us, some kind of political Christ figure who could lead us to a new promised land (or, given that this is Neil Young, back into the mythical American past), encapsulates our tendency to demand action through our own paralysis, the idea that all it will take is the right man or woman in the White House (or State House or mayor’s house) to make things right and restore America’s lost prestige and power.

One just has to look at our castrated left and its relationship to Barack Obama to see the devastating consequences of this kind of political sycophancy.

But this post is not really about the left and Obama. It is about Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the potential hijacking by the military of Afghan War policy. McChrystal did something that generals are not supposed to do: He spoke openly and derisively of the nation’s civilian military leadership. McChrystal may be the “man” in Afghanistan, but he reports to Gen. David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and, ultimately, to President Barack Obama.

I was watching the news last night when the issue came up — should Obama fire the general? My dad, who is in from Las Vegas, let slip with, “maybe the general should fire Obama,” as though he had the authority to do so (a strange comment from my dad, who dislikes Obama but likes to offer a veneer of rationality and moderation in his political thinking). My dad’s comment, though, comes from the same kind of thinking about leadership that de-animates the left when it comes to the president.

The problem is that we have invested our leaders with too much authority, too much prestige, with an almost royal sense of power. We have lost sight of our own authority, especially in regards to war.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.