"After this we'll clone some troops to fill the gap for an escalation in Afghanistan."
The last few hours have been a flurry of news reports on the President’s supposed decision on troop levels for Afghanistan. First, CBS News reported that the president planned to send roughly 40,000 troops to Afghanistan for about four years. Then, CNN reported that the White House angrily denied CBS News’ assertions, with two unnamed “senior administration officials” accusing Pentagon sources of leaking the story to set expectations and box the president into executing what’s essentially McChrystal’s preferred plan. Now, ABC News reports that, while the president has apparently not made a final decision, all five of the options now on the table would send more troops to Afghanistan.
There are a few explanations for the mixed signals. The first could be that some staff flunkie at the Pentagon wanted to impress a reporter and phoned in a tip before they knew what they were talking about, prompting an angry response from a White House still settling on options, all of which involve more troops. The second is slightly more sinister: elements in the Pentagon could be attempting to force the president’s hand, which would be a very subversive move and an assault on civilian control of the military. The third explanation is even darker: that the administration is more unified than it appears, and that it’s using leaks about high-end troop level estimates to desensitize the public and position the president’s inevitable, smaller troop increase as the more reasonable option. None of these explanations provide much comfort.
The simple truth is that even if one grants all the administration’s other assumptions about war and international politics (which I certainly do not), the troops are just not available for anything remotely approaching McChrystal’s preferred way forward, and certainly not within the critical period mentioned by his strategy paper. Spencer Ackerman:
The thing is, can we actually get 34,000 new troops into Afghanistan before summer of 2010? Remember that in the McChrystal strategy review, completed in late August, the commanding general talks about a window of about 12-18 month wherein he’ll know if he can arrest Taliban momentum. (That’s different, notice, than rolling back Taliban gains.)
Ackerman points to Politics Daily, which notes:
Maintaining one brigade combat team in the field requires two others on standby. So, for every unit in combat, planners keep a second one in training and a third one in “reset” after a long combat deployment – time when the Army can send its soldiers off for advanced schooling, absorb new replacements, receive new gear. Thus, a total of three BCTs are tied up.
Just to maintain the 16 current brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan is, let’s see, three times 16 is 48 and – oops! We’re already out of BCTs! And here’s the White House blithely batting around numbers like 40,000 more troops. That’s roughly eight BCTs, which do not exist.
"So this guy pulls me straight out of the cloning vats and says, 'Congratulations, we're sending you to Afghanistan!' Guess what my first word was!"
One of the only ways available to provide the levels of troops needed for anything remotely approaching a McChrystal plan would be to shorten dwell time at home for troops. That would be, in short, a mental health disaster. As PD notes,
Tragically, and despite an all-out prevention effort, the Army is experiencing another record-setting year for suicides. From January through September this year there were 117 reported suicides among active duty soldiers, up from 108 reported during the same period in 2008.
This is why, as Robert Naiman notes, the Joint Chiefs are begging the president not to do anything to shorten dwell times at home. Shorter dwell times means more mental health problems, period. The fact that troops “volunteered” (which is a rather flexible term in many situations) does not give the government the right to use them up until they break their brains. See how long your beloved “all-volunteer force” lasts when future recruits see that you’re shoving them into overseas hell holes over and over with shorter recovery periods between nightmares. At some point basic human dignity demands we end this farce.
I have to admit a certain level of exhaustion as a member of the anti-war movement focused on Afghanistan, especially when the debate moves into a place where our opponents start sputtering, “Well what’s your alternative?!” as if the options they push are reasonable and moored to the real resources available. The simple fact is that a person pushing for anything resembling a McChrystal strategy either a) has no clue as to the manpower restraints on the U.S. military or b) doesn’t give a damn about the mental health of the people they want to throw into combat. In fact, they don’t even understand fully McChrystal’s reasoning because key sections of his report were redacted for public consumption. A person asking me what my alternative is to troop increases in Afghanistan might as well be asking what my alternative is to firing the Death Star at Kandahar.
I don’t have to know how to construct a working safety belt to demand the recall of a car with a defective safety belt. I don’t have to know how to fashion a health reform bill to know that the health care system is broken and to demand that my elected representatives do something other than endorse the status quo. And I sure don’t have to be able to plot out the detailed exit strategy for our forces in Afghanistan to be able to say with integrity that we shouldn’t have our military tramping around someone else’s country killing people.
What I do know is this: every single person I’ve heard the president cite as a moral and philosophical guiding light, from Jesus of Nazareth, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Cesar Chavez, to Reinhold Niebuhr, would reject the idea that the U.S. should be dropping bombs on people in Afghanistan in the pursuit of U.S. national security. Every single one. The president probably knows this too, and only the most cynical politician would continue to drop these names at campaign stops and press conferences while ordering more and more troops to fight and die and kill in Asia.
That’s enough now, Mr. President. Stop this war.
This has been a great week. From Thursday – Sunday, I co-facilitated a Creating a Culture of Peace nonviolence training for four participants at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas. It was a wonderful experience, and I hope to repeat it again very soon. The attendees worked hard and made it through a difficult schedule (6 – 9 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. on Saturday, and 1 – 6 p.m. on Sunday), with some of them driving around 80 miles round-trip every day to be there. Although the group was small, my co-facilitator and I could not have asked for a better set of participants.
If you’re interested in nonviolence training for personal and social change, visit the CCP website’s calendar section, or contact CCP’s national office.
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.
Talks between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah broke down today, according to CNN, meaning there will be no power-sharing arrangement to head off a highly problematic runoff vote.
That would be bad enough in itself, since the administration recognized the difficulties posed by getting a legitimate poll done before winter sets in and had hoped a power-sharing deal would provide legitimacy while dodging the dicey balloting. But, things actually get much worse:
According to the source, Abdullah will likely announce this weekend that he will boycott the runoff presidential election slated for November 7, a runoff that had been scheduled after intense diplomatic arm twisting by the United States. [emphasis mine]
One hopes a CNN reporter simply failed to choose his/her words carefully and meant instead “drop out of” the race, because if Abdullah is going so far as to boycott the race, Afghanistan could become a much more dangerous place than it is already. Recall that earlier this year, Abdullah supporters were promising protests “with Kalashnakovs” if he simply lost in a fair vote, and, as if to prove their point, reports indicated a frightening flow of weapons toward Abdullah’s political base. Now we’re potentially talking about him urging people not to participate and declaring the entire runoff process illegitimate.
This has already been a terrible week for the U.S. as President Obama wraps up his sixth review of Afghanistan policy with a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff today. Earlier this week, IED attacks pushed the U.S. death toll to its highest monthly level since the U.S. invasion. Yesterday, we learned that Hamid Karzai’s drug-trafficking, electioneering mafioso of a brother was on the CIA payroll. If the CNN report is accurate, things may be about to get much worse.
This morning I had the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Earhart’s class at Anderson High School in Austin, Texas, about Afghanistan. I thought I’d post some helpful links, offer some expanded answers and share my presentation file in case anyone wanted it for future reference.
First, here’s the presentation in PDF format.
A question was asked regarding whether our presence in Afghanistan increased the risk of terrorism. Here’s a video clip from Rethink Afghanistan that features former CIA agents discussing that question.
Here’s the link to the information about the ICOS maps that was requested.
And, here’s a link to the methodology information for the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International.
IED Deaths Make October Deadliest Month for U.S. Forces Since Beginning of War in Afghanistan
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.
Yesterday, October officially became the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the war began. The death toll was pushed over that grim marker by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the single deadliest weapon used against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. IED deaths have increased alongside U.S. troop increases every year since the U.S. invaded.
Paraphrasing Joint IED Defeat Organization Director Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, Stars and Stripes reported today that:
IED attacks in Afghanistan have gone up along with the rising troop levels and likely will continue to increase if more U.S. forces are sent there…
That’s a real problem for the measure of success set out by General Stanley McChrystal for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan:
American success in Afghanistan should be measured by “the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” not the number of enemy fighters killed, he said.
What’s the connection? Well, it turns out IEDs are also the single greatest conflict-related killer of civilians. The fact that the use of IEDs increases along with U.S. troop deployments explains the similarity between these two graphs:
Military officials have warned that sending more troops to Afghanistan will likely result in a “tough fight” (read: rising U.S. casualty rates). If President Obama adds more troops in Afghanistan, especially in densely populated areas, get ready to see another major spike in civilian deaths as well.
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.
My previous post intentionally left out mentions of Senator John Kerry’s defense of Ahmed Wali Karzai–the drug-dealing, election stealing, possibly Taliban-connected brother of the Afghan president–in an attempt to keep the piece to a manageable length. Boy, am I sorry I did that…today’s New York Times contains an article by Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti, James Risen and Helene Cooper that shows AWK is a CIA asset.
According to Andrew Exum (a.k.a., Abu Muqwama, h/t Steve Hynd), AWK is no run-of-the-mill petty criminal:
[N]umerous military officials in southern Afghanistan with whom I have spoken identify AWK and his activities as the biggest problem they face — bigger than the lack of government services or even the Taliban. …[Y]ou can be darn sure that if we think that AWK is the CIA’s guy, the Afghans most certainly believe that to be the case.
CIA’s certainly not earning any new friends in the intel sandbox. Military intelligence officials, for example, seem blindsided (or are feigning shock in the passive-aggressive manner typical of rival government agencies). From the NYT piece:
“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.
…“The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone,” General Flynn said.
Tut, tut, general. You might want to check with your superiors before you run with that line of argument. Your “population-centric counterinsurgency” is propping up a whole government full of thugs like Mohaqiq, Fahim and Khalili (the latter two being Hamid Karzai’s vice-presidential nominees in the ongoing election!), not to mention General Abdul Rashid Dostum, all of whom got amnesty for their war crimes thanks to a measure Mohaqiq rammed through the Afghan parliament in the early days of the government. Next time, try to get outraged before we spend billions training a security apparatus at the thugs’ disposal, k?
Feigned pearl-clutch! faint! routines aside, this is a horrifying development for any attempt by the U.S. government to earn consent for the U.S.-backed Kabul cartel from the Pashtuns through a counterinsurgency campaign. AWK allegedly ran an operation that delivered huge numbers of fraudulent votes for his brother in the Pashtun heartland, and the locals knew it. Does anyone in Washington understand what a setback we’ll suffer when the population we’re trying to win over from the Taliban realizes that the person who stole their votes was on the CIA payroll?
The revelation about AWK’s CIA ties shows just how lost in the Afghan labyrinth American policymakers are. It’s a labyrinth of glittering generalities, wishful thinking, India/Pakistan gamesmanship, corruption, inter-agency competition and policies working at cross-purposes with one another. It’s no wonder it’s taken six policy reviews and 10 months for some of the smartest people on the planet to form the basic outlines of even a misguided path forward. Funny thing about the labyrinth in Greek mythology: it’s not designed to keep you out. It’s designed to keep you in.
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.
Senator John Kerry came back from Afghanistan calling President Hamid Karzai a “patriot” and supportive of a plan “closer to McChrystal than to Biden,” meaning he loves him some counterinsurgency, just not in the doses prescribed by Gen. McChrystal. Kerry’s Monday speech to the Council on Foreign Relations shows that in sipping the COIN Kool-Aid, he’s beginning to display the worst habits of internal contradiction prevalent among the counterinsurgency glitterati.
Kerry proceeds from a nonsensical definition of success:
I define success as the ability to empower and transfer responsibility to Afghans as rapidly as possible and achieve a sufficient level of stability to ensure that we can leave behind an Afghanistan that is not controlled by Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Having the “ability” to do something is not success. Saying you’re going to do something “as rapidly as possible” tells you nothing about how quickly you will do it. What, you think there’s a plausible future where the president tells the American people that he screwed around a bit instead of getting Afghanistan done as “rapidly as possible?” Sloppy definitions make poor policy, and that’s what we get from the rest of the speech. For example, take this goofy piece of self-contradiction:
Second, we simply don’t have enough troops or resources to launch a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency campaign. But importantly, nor do we need to.
We all see the appeal of a limited counterterrorism mission— and no doubt it is part of the endgame. But I don’t think we’re there yet. A narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban could lead to civil war and put Pakistan at risk.
What a mess. We don’t have enough troop “for a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency,” but we can’t cede “half the country to the Taliban” without risking civil war. Following his warning about the dangers of ceding “half the country,” Kerry calls for “narrowly focused” counterinsurgency operations in less than 40 percent of the country.
Candidate Obama stuck his nose in the wringer when he deflected criticism of his vote against the surge in Iraq by saying it took vital assets away from the effort in Afghanistan, the “war of necessity.” That may turn out to be the tragic flaw of his presidency. The war in Afghanistan is no more necessary than most other American wars have been. None of the 9/11 attackers came from Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda isn’t there any more. As best we can tell, what remains of al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, and very little remains of it.
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.
“It is a blasphemy to say non-violence can be practiced only by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals.” –M.K. Gandhi
On September 8, 2009, President Obama sat with a group of students to answer their questions. A student named Lilly asked him who he would have dinner with if he could have any guest, dead or alive. Here’s the full transcript of the exchange. From the Boston Globe:
STUDENT: Hi. I’m Lilly. And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be? (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Dinner with anyone dead or alive? Well, you know, dead or alive, that’s a pretty big list. (Laughter.) You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine. Now, it would probably be a really small meal because — (laughter) — he didn’t eat a lot. But he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King, so if it hadn’t been for the non-violent movement in India, you might not have seen the same non-violent movement for civil rights here in the United States. He inspired César Chávez, and he — and what was interesting was that he ended up doing so much and changing the world just by the power of his ethics, by his ability to change how people saw each other and saw themselves — and help people who thought they had no power realize that they had power, and then help people who had a lot of power realize that if all they’re doing is oppressing people, then that’s not a really good exercise of power.
So I’m always interested in people who are able to bring about change, not through violence, not through money, but through the force of their personality and their ethical and moral stances. And that’s somebody that I’d love to sit down and talk to.
The same day the president opined about his admiration for nonviolent luminaries Gandhi, King and Chavez, Afghan insurgents in Kunar Province killed Petty Officer 3rd Class James R. Layton, Gunnery Sergeant Edwin Wayne Johnson, Jr., 1st Lieutenant Michael E. Johnson and Staff Sergeant Aaron M. Kenefick. At least 253 U.S. soldiers died so far in 2009 in Afghanistan, and between January and August of this year, U.S forces and their opponents killed 1561 civilians. We don’t have estimates of how many “Taliban” the U.S. and allies killed. Before President Obama answered Lilly’s question, he’d increased U.S. force levels in Afghanistan from 30,100 to 50,700, and as he answered he was considering up to 80,000 more.
In that context, it really takes some nerve to pontificate to school children about the importance of Gandhi and nonviolence. It’s a little like being lectured about vegetarianism by the local butcher. If you line his words up next to his actions as president, the implicit message is, “Sure, nonviolence is great, but c’mon–this is the real world.”
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.
Bruce Riedel, the chair of one of the many Obama policy reviews on Afghanistan, is ridiculous.
Here he is discussing pre-election optimism in Afghanistan:
However, this is likely the last time we will have the benefits of a fresh start;
Here he is five days after the election:
Here, I agree with what I think both Kim, Mike and Tony said, that this really is the last chance. We’ve had three chances to get it right in Afghanistan. We’ve blown the previous two in the 1990s and after 2001. You only get three chances in baseball, and, in Afghanistan, I don’t think you can expect a fourth chance either.
NATO cannot succeed without an Afghan partner who has Afghan support and can led the majority of Afghans who reject the Taliban. Senator Kerry has given President Obama and NATO a second chance to get this right.
It’s always a new, fresh, second, last chance with this guy.
