Afghanistan: Obama wants to know how it ends

This has already set off howling and teeth-gnashing from the right:

President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.

In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

National Review’s Kathryn Lopez laments: “What is Obama thinking?” If you thought we’d already heard a lot of talk about “dithering” from conservatives, just you wait: It’s going to blow up now.

I’m not privy to Obama’s discussions, obviously, but here’s my conjecture: He wants to get the war right. Now you obviously can’t wait around forever to commit to a course of action while people are fighting and dying — but after eight years of fruitless war against the Taliban, taking an extra month or two to figure out the correct way to do something that hasn’t been done correctly might not be the worst thing in the world.

This is particularly true because it appears that Obama wants an answer to the perennially unanswered question: How will we know when we’ve won? When it’s time to leave? The new reports suggest he’s not signing off on a new commitment of resources — American lives, in particular — until he has a better idea that we’re not committing to endless war in Afghanistan. Good on him, I say.

And by the way: Ambassador Eikenberry’s warnings should give everybody pause. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said American can’t win Afghanistan without a stable and relatively corruption-free Afghan government. Eikenberry’s saying that’s not the case. Why in the world is committing American lives here a good idea if we already know that a critical leg of the stability stool can’t bear the weight?

Nearing the point where we can call the Afghanistan war “folly”

Oh yeah, this is going to work out great:

If the foreign forces are not seen so by Afghans already, they are on the cusp of being regarded as occupiers, with little to show people for their extended presence, fueling wild conspiracies about why they remain here.

The feeling is particularly acute in the Pashtun south, but it is spreading to other parts of the country. More American troops could tip the balance of opinion, particularly if they increase civilian casualties and prompt even more Taliban attacks.

The grass-roots view among Afghans is at odds with those of top Afghan officials, as well as many American military commanders, who strongly endorse a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy, including a large troop increase.

Let’s see: We’re losing what support we had from the Afghan public. The training of the Afghan Army — a lynchpin of the counterinsurgency strategy — is going lousy. And it’s likely that our presence in the country is intensifying the insurgency. How in the world does this not end in disaster?

Barack Obama, Stanley McChrystal and dithering in Afghanistan

That’s the subject of this week’s Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk. You’ll probably not be surprised that I’m suggesting it’s time to ratchet down our endless war against the Taliban. You might be surprised to find out my conservative colleague seemingly agrees. He writes:

Trying to pacify the ungovernable Afghan countryside or win the support of people who are nothing if not xenophobic is a waste of time, money and precious American lives. If the goal is to secure Americans at home, we’re unlikely to accomplish it on the present course.

Point-counterpoint columns are probably less entertaining when the point and the counterpoint make the same point. But still. My take:

In his memo to President Obama, Gen. Stanley McChrystal suggested that even if America does everything right, it might still lose the war. Why? Because victory depends on having a stable, corruption-lite ― nobody expects corruption-free ― Afghan government that meets the needs of its people. Afghan President Hamid Karzai cannot provide that government, which means America cannot win. More troops won’t change that.

There have been other signs that after eight years, Afghanistan is a quagmire. We’ve now been in that country about the same amount of time as the Soviet Union was during its doomed war in the 1980s. Karzai’s brother ― long known to be dealing in the drugs that finance Taliban operations in that country ― was this week revealed to be on the CIA payroll. And an American Foreign Service officer resigned after concluding that the presence of U.S. and NATO troops has fueled the insurgency. We’re still there because they’re fighting us; they’re fighting us because we’re still there. It’s a complete mess.

And it is a mess that was mostly achieved under President George W. Bush, who let his attention wander ― disastrously ― to Iraq. Dick Cheney’s recent criticism of President Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan policy is thus remarkable. Having screwed it up so badly, you would think the former vice president would have the good sense and grace to simply shut up. But political bickering won’t solve Afghanistan. Probably nothing can.

America originally invaded Afghanistan because al- Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11, was headquartered there. But fighting an endless war against the Taliban is not doing much, if anything, to make Americans safer from terrorism. It might be making things worse. Time to try something new.

The meaning of Dover: Afghanistan is Obama’s war now

Here’s a picture that you never saw during the Bush Administration: The commander-in-chief at Dover Air Force base, solemnly welcoming home America’s fallen dead.

I’m certain that some folks on the right will pooh-pooh President Obama’s trip to Dover as making it “all about him.” (Though reaction at The Corner is surprisingly restrained.)

To me, this is the biggest signal that Obama understands — whatever his cherished domestic priorities — that he is a war president, like it or not. Allowing himself to be photographed with a flag-draped coffin shows that he understands that he is accountable for the results of that war: Not just to the American public, but to every family that sacrifices a son or daughter because of the president’s decision to continue to commit troops to battle. And that, in turn, signals that he won’t make his war decisions based on how well it’s polling, but with the safety of Americans — at home and abroad — in mind.

At least, that’s what I hope. It could be that the president doubles down in Afghanistan, and while I think that would be a mistake, I have renewed confidence that he understands the stakes.

Matthew Hoh resigns over the Afghanistan war

Interesting story in today’s Washington Post about Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and a decorated Iraq War vet who joined the Foreign Service to serve in Afghanistan — and has now resigned.

Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there — a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn’t want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him “how localized the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away.” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

If Hoh is right — and there’s quite a bit of his analysis that overlaps with Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s — then many of the insurgent groups lumped together under the label of “Taliban” are fighting against the U.S. and NATO because the U.S. and NATO are there. And we are there, fighting these groups, because they’re there fighting. We’re in a cycle in Afghanistan that we’re fighting the war there because we’re fighting the war there. That’s not really a smart way to protect Americans from terrorism.

Dick Cheney should shut his mouth about Obama and Afghanistan

Oh, this is rich:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama of “dithering” in failing to make a decision about escalating troops in Afghanistan. “Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy endangers them and hurts our cause,” Cheney said in a speech Wednesday night. Unlike former President George W. Bush, Cheney has been a vocal critic of the current administration.

This is coming from a vice president who was more than willing to essentially abandon the Afghanistan War in favor of an unnecessary but costly invasion of Iraq that still constrains our options to act elsewhere in the world. It’s the fault of Cheney and Bush that the war in Afghanistan is in the straits it is in.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal implicitly criticized the Bush Administration in his recent strategy memo to the White House. Some excerpts:

Our campaign in Afghanistan has been historically under-resourced and remains so today. Almost every aspect of our collective effort and associated resourcing has lagged a growing insurgency – historically a recipe for failure in COIN.

This is an important -~ and likely decisive ~~ period of this war. Afghans are frustrated and weary after eight years without evidence of the progress they anticipated. Patience is understandably short, both in Afghanistan and in our own countries. Time matters; we must act now to reverse the negative trends and demonstrate progress.

And so on and so forth. The Afghanistan war didn’t suddenly go badly because Obama took office. If Afghanistan is in bad shape today, it’s in large part because Cheney helped take America’s eye off the ball. Remember this from 2007?

The U.S. military’s top officer acknowledged on Tuesday that for all the importance of preventing Afghanistan from again harboring al-Qaida terrorists, Washington’s first priority is Iraq.

“In Afghanistan, we do what we can,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “In Iraq, we do what we must.”

It was Cheney who helped make sure the war in Afghanistan was underresourced — as officials acknowledged at the time. You’d think he’d have the graciousness to realize his error and shut up instead of behaving like an arrogant pit bull.

Do more troops worsen the war in Afghanistan?

Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist, makes that case in today’s Times. A (lengthy) excerpt:

In 2001, the United States toppled the Taliban and kicked Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan with just a few thousand of its own troops, primarily through the combination of American air power and local ground forces from the Northern Alliance. Then, for the next several years, the United States and NATO modestly increased their footprint to about 20,000 troops, mainly limiting the mission to guarding Kabul, the capital. Up until 2004, there was little terrorism in Afghanistan and little sense that things were deteriorating. Then, in 2005, the United States and NATO began to systematically extend their military presence across Afghanistan. The goals were to defeat the tiny insurgency that did exist at the time, eradicate poppy crops and encourage local support for the central government. Western forces were deployed in all major regions, including the Pashtun areas in the south and east, and today have ballooned to more than 100,000 troops.

As Western occupation grew, the use of the two most worrisome forms of terrorism in Afghanistan — suicide attacks and homemade bombs — escalated in parallel. There were no recorded suicide attacks in Afghanistan before 2001. According to data I have collected, in the immediate aftermath of America’s conquest, the nation experienced only a small number: none in 2002, two in 2003, five in 2004 and nine in 2005.

But in 2006, suicide attacks began to increase by an order of magnitude — with 97 in 2006, 142 in 2007, 148 in 2008 and more than 60 in the first half of 2009. Moreover, the overwhelming percentage of the suicide attacks (80 percent) has been against United States and allied troops or their bases rather than Afghan civilians, and nearly all (95 percent) carried out by Afghans.

The picture is clear: the more Western troops we have sent to Afghanistan, the more the local residents have viewed themselves as under foreign occupation, leading to a rise in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. (We see this pattern pretty much any time an “outside” armed force has tried to pacify a region, from the West Bank to Kashmir to Sri Lanka.)

Something to ponder.

Afghanistan: No to the troop increase

Frank Rich is a bad mammajamma in today’s New York Times, making a pretty compelling case that the crowd calling for deeper entrenchment in Afghanistan pretty much has no credibility. It deserves to be quoted at length, and read in full.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

(Snip)

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.

To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that “there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members” — a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.

The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must “win” in Afghanistan — but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.

Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.”

Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and Graham who rant about deficits being “generational theft” have an obligation to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to use the dread words “sacrifice” and “higher taxes” when they want us to believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.

For the last week or so, I’ve also been pondering a short op-ed by David Kilcullen, who was one of Gen. Petraeus’ key counterinsurgency advisers in Iraq. Kilcullen bona fides — and, incidentally, his personal bravery — are well-established: He doesn’t run away from fights because he lacks the stomach for them.

His advice to the president:

COUNTERINSURGENCY is only as good as the government it supports. NATO could do everything right — it isn’t — but will still fail unless Afghans trust their government. Without essential reform, merely making the government more efficient or extending its reach will just make things worse.

Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms, so at the very least we need to see a genuine run-off election or an emergency national council, called a loya jirga, before winter. Once a legitimate president emerges, we need to see immediate action from him on a publicly announced reform program, developed in consultation with Afghan society and enforced by international monitors. Reforms should include firing human rights abusers and drug traffickers, establishing an independent authority to investigate citizen complaints and requiring officials to live in the districts they are responsible for (fewer than half do).

If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should “Afghanize,” draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban — which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.

This of course echoes Gen. McChrystal’s own memorandum on Afghanistan strategy. He does ask for more troops, yes, but like Kilcullen he suggests that military efforts won’t work unless the Afghanistan government reforms itself into a (relatively) uncorrupt and effective organization. We can assist the Afghans in doing that, of course, but we can’t do it for them. And I’ve seen no signs that they really will. We must continue to try to capture and kill people who pose a threat to the United States – and the president, after his initial bump up of troops in Afghanistan — must clearly explain a new strategy and also be committed to it, or he’ll be undone by a reputation for fecklessness; this is a one-time do-over, and as a political matter it is very risky. But doubling down in Afghanistan has costs that far outweigh the likely benefits. The president should reject McChrystal’s troop request.

A really bad reason to stay in Afghanistan

In the Washington Post, Richard Cohen weighs the arguments, then seems to suggest the reason to stay: So Barack Obama can show he has guts:

Foreign policy realists question whether any effort in Afghanistan can succeed. Possibly they are right. The interventionists, if I may call them that, suggest the realists are being unrealistic — that Afghanistan matters and it matters much more than Iraq or, before that, Vietnam ever did and that we can prevail. Possibly they are right.

But the ultimate in realism is for the president to gauge himself and who he is: Does he have the stomach and commitment for what is likely to continue to be an unpopular war? Will he send additional troops, but hedge by not sending enough — so that the dying will be in vain? What does he believe, and will he ask Americans to die for it? Only he knows the answers to these questions.

Apparently the “whether we can win or not” question is irrelevant — brushed off by Cohen with a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders. All that matters is the president’s gut. Haven’t we been down that road before?

The Afghanistan debate

Just to be clear, right now the choice isn’t between adding more troops or bringing them all home. It’s between adding more troops or refocusing the mission that the existing troops have.

The White House also tried to make it clear on Monday that Mr. Obama did not envision actually pulling out of Afghanistan no matter how he rules on General McChrystal’s request. “I don’t think we have the option to leave,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

Even the option advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for a scaled-back approach would not reduce the current force of 68,000 troops, officials said. Instead, it would keep troop levels roughly where they are now but shift emphasis to the sort of Predator drone strikes and Special Forces operations that have been used more aggressively over the last year.

For what it’s worth.