... Success takes time, but how much time does Stanley McChrystal have? The war in Afghanistan is now in its ninth year. The Taliban, measured by the number of their attacks, are stronger than at any time since the Americans toppled their government at the end of 2001. American soldiers and Marines are dying at a faster rate than ever before. Polls in the United States show that opposition to the war is growing steadily.
Worse yet, for all of America's time in Afghanistan - for all the money and all the blood - the lack of accomplishment is manifest wherever you go. In Garmsir, there is nothing remotely resembling a modern state that could take over if America and its NATO allies left. Tour the country with a general, and you will see very quickly how vast and forbidding this country is and how paltry the effort has been.
And finally, there is the government in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai, once the darling of the West, rose to the top of nationwide elections in August on what appears to be a tide of fraud. The Americans and their NATO allies are confronting the possibility that the government they are supporting, building and defending is a rotten shell...
More at The New York Times Magazine.
McChrystal's Afghanistan - Jules Crittenden, Forward Movement
... Critics might say that Filkins, whose reporting notes the military view that Afghanistan and Pakistan are intricately entwined and cannot be separated strategically or tactically, doesn't give the so-called Biden plan a full airing. However, it is a McChrystal profile, not a Biden one. Though that might be entertaining. Embedded in the District of Columbia.
Anyway, you'll want to read the whole thing. You'll come away with the sense of a man who, given the time and resources, might just pull off what he set out to do. Not the blindered military bumbler so popular in modern myth, the image that drives this country's relentless push for political failure in war.* I knew there was a reason why Filkins is my favorite NYT reporter, and not just because his book, The Forever War, is the standout war memoir of our time...
More at Forward Movement.
Comments
Mal:
<blockquote>That is because neither its source nor its center of gravity is confined to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, we have chosen not to address the source, which is Islamist ideology, and we have chosen to fight only in Afghanistan, as opposed to the many places where the enemy rolls new fighters off the assembly line. We have made these choices because we lack the will for a broader fight.</blockquote>
Yeah, McCarthy is super credible on this topic. We need to kill some more Taliban, and some more Muslims all around the world, and problem solved. It's all Islam's fault, right? I mean, look at Iraq, we're never going to be able to deal rationally with Mus-- oh, wait, we did.
That you posted this article here is a little offensive to me.
What Is Victory?
If defeating the Taliban is not our goal, what is?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Rarely has there been such a dramatic disconnect between rhetoric and reality. On Afghanistan, the national-security Right talks about "victory," concerned Democrats talk about "success," and Obama allies such as Sen. John Kerry talk about the "fulfillment of our mission." They arent talking about the same thing. The somnolent press is content to court, rather than clarify, this confusion, but thats no reason for the rest of us to go along for the ride.
What is "victory" or "success"? What is this "mission" of ours that must be fulfilled?
Staunch supporters of our military are seething as President Obama dithers over Gen. Stanley McChrystals request for an additional 40,000 troops. Their frustration would be justifiable if the main issue were Obamas inconstancy. Months ago, the president endorsed the counterinsurgency strategy of McChrystal, his hand-picked commander. Now, he is balking. In what has become a habit for Obama, he changes the rationale for his temporizing almost daily: from the need to study further a situation he had purportedly studied plenty before backing McChrystal; to the notion that a counterterrorism strategy, rather than counterinsurgency, may be the way to go; to the latest excuse, floated this weekend by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, that the uncertainty hovering over Afghanistans fraud-ridden election makes a deployment decision premature.
Whatever the explanation on offer, the conservative reaction is always the same: "Isnt this the war Obama said we had to win?" Nothing has changed, the national-security Right reasons: The Taliban are still our enemies; if they take over Afghanistan they will give safe haven to al-Qaeda, and we will be in grave danger of another 9/11. So why wont Obama just give McChrystal what he needs to defeat the Taliban?
That would be enough for me, too, if General McChrystals plan were to defeat the Taliban. But its not.
The issue is not Obamas inconstancy; it is the dubious nature of the mission. And I dont mean the "mission" implied by the Rights rhetoric; Im talking about the mission as it is conceived by the theater commander. In a lengthy essay for the magazine section of last Sundays New York Times, Dexter Filkins, who was granted extraordinary access to General McChrystal, states the matter succinctly:
What McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge -- a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystals plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted.
Do you favor such a proposal? Is this what you thought American troops were being sent to Afghanistan for? Is this the mission we thought we were setting out to accomplish when American military force was unleashed after the September 11 attacks?
On the right, we like to pride ourselves on seeing things as they are. Abortion is the killing of the unborn, not the "right to choose." Illegal aliens are illegal aliens, not "undocumented immigrants." "Reform" is not a term we would ever use for a government grab of a sixth of the private economy -- and if this "reform" of health care consists of rationing and death panels, we say, "Hey, this consists of rationing and death panels." We dont usually abide a situation in which Robert "Were Gonna Let You Die" Reich is the only guy in the room calling a spade a spade.
So why are we pretending that the mission in Afghanistan is something it is not? McChrystal is not trying to defeat the Taliban. Indeed, McChrystal tells Filkins it would be useless to attempt that. "You can kill Taliban forever," he says, "because they are not a finite number."
And here is the not-so-secret dirty little secret: Islamic militancy, whether in the form of the Taliban or its many other varieties, is "not finite." That is because neither its source nor its center of gravity is confined to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, we have chosen not to address the source, which is Islamist ideology, and we have chosen to fight only in Afghanistan, as opposed to the many places where the enemy rolls new fighters off the assembly line. We have made these choices because we lack the will for a broader fight.
Unwilling to admit that, we miniaturize the challenge. Thus, the war is said only to be in Afghanistan. The "challenge" is framed as isolating a relative handful of aberrant Takfiris -- the Muslims who claim the right to declare other Muslims apostates and kill them -- rather than confronting the fact that tens of millions of Muslims despise the West. And the mission is portrayed as high-minded nation-building, not anything so jingoistic as pursuing Americas national interests, vanquishing the militants whove taken up arms against our country, and demonstrating to jihadist sympathizers the dire consequences of joining the militant ranks.
Heres Filkins again: "At the heart of McChrystals strategy are three principles: protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state, and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents. Killing the Taliban is now among the least important things that are expected of NATO soldiers."
Listening only to the critique from the right, one could be forgiven for being under the misimpression that killing the Taliban is -- besides killing al-Qaeda -- the only important thing expected of NATO soldiers. Filkins, however, is right: Killing the Taliban is not a McChrystal priority. To his credit, the general is not hiding the ball. His written proposal elucidates what he believes he is in Afghanistan to do: build a nation. But if there had been any doubt, the game would have been given away by the slick-talking Emanuel.
The question, Obamas top aide told the Sunday shows, is not "how many troops you send, but do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?" If we were in Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda, having "a credible Afghan partner" would be irrelevant -- as it was in October 2001, when we first invaded. We only need a "partner" because our purpose is not victory. Our purpose is "this process" of ensuring Afghans security and government services -- neither of which they have ever had; neither of which it ever ought to be thought our obligation to provide.
"This process" is the gargantuan burden of building, from scratch, an oxymoronic sharia-democracy in a backwards, corrupt, fundamentalist Islamic armpit. And as if wed learned nothing from the ravages against us, the process absurdly assumes that Islam -- rather than being a major part of the problem -- is an asset that we can turn to our advantage. If such a process could work (it cant), it would take decades, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and cause an unknowable number of American casualties.
But that is the McChrystal plan. The idea is not to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda but to build a modern nation-state that will eventually be both competent to fight and interested in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda on its own.
Here is the irony. Those who favor McChrystals proposal argue, with great force, that a counterterrorism strategy -- i.e., attacking terror nests from remote bases -- cannot work. For that conclusion, they cite no less an authority than General McChrystal, who is the nations leading expert on military counterterrorism. But if "cannot work" is our criterion, then why would anyone favor a democracy-building effort in Afghanistan?
The real dirty little secret is that there is only one way to win the war, and that is to attack our militant enemies and their abettors globally. This being the case, our unwillingness to do that necessarily means anything else we try "cannot work." We have taken real victory off the table. What is left is a series of "cannot work" options, and our burden is to pick the least bad one.
So can we go back to what is best in us, forthrightness, and stop talking about "victory"? Those who favor the McChrystal plan should be prepared to tell us how many lives, years, and hundreds of billions they are prepared to sacrifice on an experiment in Afghan democracy building that will not defeat our global enemies -- and, in fact, will discourage the pursuit of our global enemies since, under our new doctrine, we cant unleash American might without making a similar sacrifice wherever we go.
The question is not whether counterterrorism can work. It cannot -- any more than having a police station a hundred miles away could guarantee that the local bank would never be robbed. The question is why we should think nation-building -- the equivalent of lavish government welfare programs to address the "root causes" of bank robbery -- is a better solution.
Mal says: <i>"Do not the Afghans, men and children, who lined up to watch American men lose their very lives and/or limbs in a drenching shower of blood and guts already count "enemies"?"</i>
Uhh, hell no they do not count as enemies. Are you familiar with the means by which terrorists operate? When they force passive support with murder and intimidation you cannot hold the passive support accountable. Even if they receive passive support by virtue of their ideals, attacking that support only adds to active support, which is why McCrystal goes to great lengths to prevent civilian casualties.
Islam has little to do with anything but the hardest core of the insurgency. You have to separate the rabble rousing cries for jihad from the real motivations for fighting, which are essentially the same in most conflicts - power, money, prestige, etc. Separate the Islamist fanatics from the people with power grievances and you make the insurgency more manageable, which is what McCrystal's plan seeks to do. I guarantee only a small cadre of people would continue fighing Western targets if the Taliban was re-installed tomorrow, and those are the people we went in there to neutralize in the first place.
And I don't think Mal was being tongue in cheek, perhaps trolling is a more likely scenario.
More command dysfunction from the front.
From the NYT's long magazine story about Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- sonorously titled "His Long War" -- a perfect illustration of the circular crash course commanders have ordered US troops to run according to a dizzy-making "strategy" to make them like us.
First, the article set-up. Afghanistan. McChrystal. Dust. Setting down in his Black Hawk helicopter in an Afghan town surrounded by bodyguards and commanders, stripping off his protective gear to walk the streets ... "What do you need here?" he repeatedly asks villagers like some glorified door to door salemans ... Story pulls back to McC's "the assesment" (incompletely described as usual), McC's troop "surge," McC's nation-building "blueprint" (no mention that the US already nation-built for 30-some years to no avail).
Now, the anecdote:
It begins with some Marines walking 12 miles down the road from Garmsir, the town Gen. McChrystal had visited a fews days earlier, asking the townspeople, "What do you need?" as mentioned above.
Here goes:
The Marines had been in plain view for more than two hours. And when they moved down from the old Soviet lookout and walked up the dirt path that runs alongside the hamlet of Mian Poshteh, the Afghans started to come out.
At first, a lone man walked along the edge of one of Mian Poshtehs mud-brick houses. Then he stopped and turned and stood, watching. Then another man, this one in an irrigation ditch, stuck his head up over the ledge. A pair of children stopped playing. They turned to watch.
"Somethings going down," Sgt. Jonathan Delgado said. He was 22 and from Kissimmee, Fla.
"Watch that guy," said Lance Cpl. Joshua Vance, pointing. He was also 22, from Raleigh, N.C.
Two more Afghans arrived. They stopped and stood and looked at a spot just ahead of the Marines. A man on a motorcycle drove past, driving slowly, turning his head. Then the bomb went off. [See photo above.]It had been buried in the path itself, a few feet under the sand, a few feet in front of the Marines.
The blast from the bomb was sharp and deep, and a dirty cloud shot up a hundred feet. Waves from the blast shot out, toward the village and toward us. Ten Marines at the front of the line disappeared.
"Were hit! Were hit!" Delgado shouted, and everyone ran to the front.
Marines began staggering out of the cloud. They were holding their ears and eyes.
"God, Im still here," Cpl. Matt Kaiser said, rubbing his ears. Kaiser had been at the front, sweeping the ground with a mine detector. He was from Oak Harbor, Ohio. "Im still here."
"No ones hit," Delgado said. "Jesus, no ones hit."
The rest of the young men staggered out of the cloud while the Marines trained their guns on Mian Poshteh.
The Afghans were gone....
The bomber had missed. The weapon had been what the Marines refer to as "command-detonated," which meant that someone, probably in Mian Poshteh, had punched a trigger -- on a wire leading to the bomb -- when the Marines came up the path. The triggerman needed to remember precisely where he had buried his bomb. Clearly, he had forgotten. If he had waited five more seconds, he would have killed several Marines.
Delgado, Kaiser and the others gathered themselves and walked toward Mian Poshteh. On their radio, the Marines could hear voices coming from inside the village.
"Is everything ready?" a voice said in Pashto.
"Everything is ready," another voice said. "Lets see what they do."
The Marines stayed back. Earlier in the war, they would have gone into Mian Poshteh; they would have surrounded the village and kicked in doors until they found the bomber. Most likely they would have found him -- and maybe along the way they would have killed some civilians and smashed up some homes. And made a lot of enemies.
Excuse me. Do not the Afghans, men and children, who lined up to watch American men lose their very lives and/or limbs in a drenching shower of blood and guts already count "enemies"? The story continues:
The Marines are a very different force now, with very different goals. They walked to within 50 feet of Mian Poshteh, and Lt. Patrick Bragan shouted: "Send us five men. Five men."
Minutes passed, and five Afghans appeared. They were unarmed and ordinary looking.
"I have no idea who did that," an old man named Fazul Mohammed said.
"Maybe they came at night," a man named Assadullah said.
"I only heard the explosion," a man named Syed Wali said.
The face of Lieutenant Bragan was pink from the heat and from pleading.
"All you have to do is tell us," he said. "Were here to help you."
Why?
General McChrystals "policy" is based on a delusional, factually challenged misunderstanding of Islam, ignores all of Afghanistans lengthy history of indigenous jihadism (dating back to at least Mahmud of Ghazni in the early 11th century), and ignores over three decades of US nation building efforts (costing millions of $$) in Helmand Province itself (now a Taliban hotbed!) from 1946-1979 on a scale of the Tennessee Valley Authority (it was called the Helmand Valley Authority) similarly based on idiotic misconceptions of Islam and its "use" as a bulwark against Communism, which utterly ignored Islams own anti-Western totalitarianism. This ahistorical, doctrinally ignorant idiocy is melded to an even sicker policy which literally sacrifices the lives of our fighting men to McChrystals insane notion of winning Afghan "hearts and minds," while utterly ignoring the only three important strategic objectives in the region:
1) delaying/destroying Irans nuclear program;
2) removing/destroying Pakistans nukes; and
3) destroying Afghanistans opium production.
If those three objectives were accomplished, there would be no strategic need to have "boots on the ground" in the region at all.
We have different premises. I believe there are moderate muslims but there is no such thing as moderate Islam. You argue against this premise.
Anything that adds to your premise you put more weight on. Anything that adds to my premise you put less weight. I hope you are right, and I am wrong. But the facts on the ground are proving me right
I agree with Andrew McCarthy 2 articles
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWQ3Y2U2NjNlYTAyMjI3MTAxZjYyOWZhNT…
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmIwMWYzMWI5ZjgyYTJhMWVmNjJhNWE2ZD…
I'm glad I took the time to read Filkens' article; "The Forever War" just got bumped up to next on my list of books to read. That was a great bit of on-the-ground reporting that did a pretty good job of elucidating the situation for people who are unaware. I find McCrystal's arguments much more persuasive coming from the man himself, and not filtered through several media outlets. The folks calling for a scaled back, non-population-centric-COIN approach would do well to remember McCrystal's extensive experience in prosecuting kinetic operations against insurgents.
<i>As for his current job, McChrystal said there are two lessons from Iraq that apply to Afghanistan. The first is that his role -- killing insurgents -- worked there only because it was part of a much larger effort to not only defeat the insurgency but also to build an Iraqi state that could stand on its own. "Ours was just a supporting effort," he said. The second lesson is perhaps more startling. It is that no situation, no matter how dire, is ever irredeemable -- if you have the time, resources and the correct strategy. In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.
"One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing," McChrystal said. "We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope."</i>
I am of the opinion that given what he asks for, McCrystal's strategy for Afghanistan will prevail. The question is whether it's worth the extra investment compared to the other option, which is pretty much a scaled back occupation where we prop up a highly illigitimate government with training and resources. Both are extremely expensive, but which is the best strategic investment for the US (controlling for the sunken cost bias)?
Mal, I think your points are absurd and your Islamophobia exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of a)Islam itself and b)how Islam is practiced throughout the world.
Islam is nowhere near an integrated system. There are four different schools of law in Sunni Islam alone, not to mention the different theological schools. Even the smaller (by world-wide population) Shia Muslims have three different main branches. Islam has branched off and is segmented like the other main religions - perhaps more than. That doesn't even account for varying levels of devotion in different countries (and within countries). As for Islam and governance, look at Turkey. Having a majority population of Muslims and having a secular government are not mutually exclusive.
Read the article you quote. Netanyahu, as quoted in Mal's link:
<i>"In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times.</i>
Don't chalk up the the entire Islamic faith the work of fanatics. Don't assume that we are the only target. The terrorists we are fighting around the world have as few qualms about killing Muslims not loyal to their cause (the vast majority) as they have about killing Americans. Get your head straight, man. Nothing is black and white. Muslims do not equal terrorists. I thought those imbecilic stereotypes fell into disrepute after the 9/11 frenzy died down.
Jim Sauer has a different idea, which I believe is more practical
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/counterinsurgency_doctrine_and.h…
"For COIN to succeed in Afghanistan, the population would have to share at least some of our values. The fact is they don't! Their "values", whether religious, social, or political, are the same values held by Al Qaeda and the Taliban! Islam is an integrated system! Islam is not just something Muslims do on Friday when it is convenient! The Islamic world is in no way similar to "Christendom" where the faith of many -- particularly in Europe -- has been compromised by progressive secularism. Most Muslims actually believe in the tenets of the Koran. These tenets are not the passive "Five Pillars" and other sanitized junk you read in an English translation. Muslims believe in the tenets that direct that they convert, subjugate, or destroy non-believers -- that means Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and even atheists.
Americans have been conditioned and have become accustomed to tiptoeing about, fearing to offend anyone -- even those who are offensive to the bulk of humanity. Thus, there is not an American politician or a media guru who will speak the truth clearly."