Humvees In A China Shop
By Steve Hynd
When is a policy review not a policy review?
When the conclusions are a foregone certainty and the review is simply a cosmetic exercise to conceal that fact from the public. It's the fifth such review and the foregone certainty is that military leaders will ask for even more troops for Afghanistan in 2010, and that the Obama administration will give them those troops.
Despite concerns that too large a U.S. military presence would undermine efforts to put the Afghans eventually in charge of their own security, Jones said McChrystal is "perfectly within his mandate as a new commander to make the recommendation on the military posture as he sees it. We have to wait until he does that. There was never any intention on my visit [to Afghanistan] to say don't ever come in with a request or to put a cap on troops."
...McChrystal's "argument, and ultimately the argument of the Defense Department" will be that "if you only have one or two years to change the opinion of the people" of Afghanistan then "let's get on with it," one Defense official said. McChrystal now has what the official called a "halo effect," similar to that of Gen. David H. Petraeus when he arrived in Iraq in early 2007 to preside over a major troop expansion and change in strategy that ultimately succeeded in turning the tide of that war.
Petraeus is now the commander of the U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan. "If you've got Stan's word . . . and Petraeus standing behind him" in requesting more resources, the official said, Obama can stress the need for a "marginal adjustment" based on advice from commanders on the ground.
The 21,000 deployments already approved for this year will not be completed until the fall. If new deployments are approved, "generating that force, identifying it, training and organizing it will take time," the official said. That would likely extend their arrival into early 2010 and might mitigate any political problems the White House might foresee in authorizing additional troops.
Several officials said that McChrystal's assessment of shortfalls in Afghanistan will be outlined in broad terms, citing the need to expand and train the Afghan force along with proposed solutions to make that happen. In addition to trainers and advisers, he is also expected to outline organizational changes for U.S. troops and the need for enhanced language, intelligence and other skills.
The public told Barack Obama that they didn't want an endless occupation of Afghanistan, with no exit strategy beyond the possibility that one day Afghan-provided security, government and economic success might be raised, at great American expense in blood and treasure, to the level of - say - Chad. Accordingly, back in March, Obama announced that the mission would not be open-ended, would have strict benchmarks for success and would have a laser focus on killing the bad guys and getting out.
Since then, however, we've seen "mission creep" party like it was the 1960's, with exactly as little public knowledge about and debate over the changes as during the early days of Vietnam. The Bush-lite mission, and its requirements, have been incrementally escalated by an axis of Village pundits, military planners and neoliberal interventionists in such a way as to conceal the deep change from what Obama told us would happen to something very different indeed. Indeed, we've yet to see the benchmarks we were promised.
The new motto at State, the Pentagon and the think tanks that bind the two together in the Obama administration is "Can we occupy it? Yes we can!". The result is a long colonialist war, at least another decade, with a dollar price tag of over a trillion and at least as many injured and dead as we've seen in Iraq. And even then, the militarization of our efforts will guarantee failure because the U.S. cannot purge itself of its penchant for airstrikes, force protection at the expense of civilian protection, buying dodgy information, super-embassies that scream "colonial occupation" and other mistakes which make a nonsense of the notion of people-centric counterinsurgency as a real-life exercise rather than an on-paper fable. The evidence is that America can't do COIN.
when military structures perform or oversee civilian tasks, the nonmilitary humanitarian work often gets politicized and militarized, and the difference between the two is blurred. If executed as planned, the "civilian surge" may worsen the situation here.
Integrating more civilians into military structures means further militarizing what has traditionally been humanitarian work. This is not in the interest of the Afghan people, who expect security from coalition forces and assistance from civilian aid agencies.
The main destination of this "surge" will be the U.S.-led provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), whose performance in Afghanistan has been criticized by humanitarian groups on the ground: One aid worker from a European nongovernmental organization said they behave like "Humvees in a china shop."
...Simply put, PRTs are a military tool attempting to perform civilian tasks. Inherently, they undermine the necessary distinction between the development objectives of humanitarian aid workers and the political-military objectives of coalition forces.
Relief and development work is more effectively done by experienced and independent aid agencies, working in partnership with the communities they serve. Staff members at the main NGOs in Afghanistan are mostly national (99 percent of IRC staff is Afghan) and know the local languages and culture. As such, they do not require expensive protection. They are also experienced in aid delivery. Most NGOs have been working with Afghans for many years and are committed to long-term stabilization and recovery.
So why aren't the NGO's and civilian agencies like USAID being more used in Afghanistan? Partly because the US military has argued, and won the argument inside the Obvama administration, that it has far more capacity for "nation-building" than they do. That the kind of nation building the military does only ends with a nation reliant on that military forever is probably regarded as a feature, not a bug. I've been mystifyied forever as to why the non-military COINdinistas at both State and neoliberal think tanks are so gung-ho to hand the Pentagon every practical tool of US outreach - and the budget, as well as bureaucratic clout, to go with it. Have they just been conned by their military allies or are they just too invested reputation-wise now to see the wood for the trees? It's a military-industrial complex wet dream.
Afghanistan and its neighbour Pakistan are a perfect Gordian Knot; when you tease out one bit to untangle it, another bit just gets pulled tighter, and there's no sword sharp enough to cut it. Anyone (including myself) who puts forward a solution for one tangle without mentioning how their solution would make other bits of the knot more intransigent is just blowing smoke up their reader's asses. Frankly, though, the notion that all of this can be untangled by military forces - practising counter-insurgency or otherwise - is truly worthy of the description "laughable". The best bet remains that put forward by Rory Stewart.
After seven years of refinement, the policy seems so buoyed by illusions, caulked in ambiguous language and encrusted with moral claims, analogies and political theories that it can seem futile to present an alternative. It is particularly difficult to argue not for a total withdrawal but for a more cautious approach. The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance – not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.
A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.
However, the neoliberals and the military planners are busy ensuring that America doesn't get to have a debate over what goes on in America's Afghan colony. The end result, I believe, will be a Vietnam scale disaster.
While it's certainly going to end badly it won't be as bad as Vietnam. The country is already tired of war and they don't have the draft for an endless supply of canon fodder.
Posted by: Ron Beasley | July 10, 2009 at 07:57 PM
Posted by: Russ Wellen | July 10, 2009 at 11:02 PM
Ron: ...and they don't have the draft for an endless supply of canon fodder.
They don't need the draft -- they have a 'recession' with 20+% real unemployment.
And for those just entering the job market, they have minimum-wage jobs that don't pay enough per month, after taxes, to cover rent on a 1-bedroom apartment, much less food, utilities, transportation, healthcare, etc.
Posted by: Kat | July 10, 2009 at 11:17 PM
Kat
The lack of a draft is still important-a bad economy does not make that many people sucidal.
Posted by: Ron Beasley | July 11, 2009 at 12:42 AM