Bacevich is Right!

In 1991 the United States government was perfectly willing to stand by while the Shiite Arabs and Kurds rebelled, toppled Saddam Hussein, and formed whatever government they deemed appropriate. In 1991, no one in Washington thought a U.S. military occupation was either necessary or advisable to “oversee” the installation of a new Iraqi government. It is tragic, indeed, that the U.S. government did not reach the same conclusion in 2003.

The twelve years of containment, the 2003 combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the misguided attempt to establish a secular, Western-style democratic state in a region where it has no chance of surviving, and the Sunni Arab rebellion against the U.S. military presence cost the American people 36,000 battle casualties and a trillion dollars. The number of Muslim Arabs killed as a result of the U.S. military occupation is anyone’s guess. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs have been wounded, killed, or incarcerated. At least two million Iraqi Arabs now live in refugee camps in neighboring Jordan and Syria. Two million more are refugees inside Iraq. When U.S. forces leave Iraq, more fighting is expected as the various parties inside Iraq struggle to consolidate their respective political and economic power. Only Iran benefits from these conditions.

In the end, the US must "abandon Iraq to its fate." It has no other choice. Whether the US stays another 3 months, 18 months, or 18 years, the country will either become a Shi'ite Islamist dictatorship supported by Iran and, perhaps with Turkish Troops in Kurdistan, or it will break apart into ethno-religious warfare and become the natural battleground between Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and the Gulf Arabs, each backing one or more of the warring factions. Think of a larger, potentially oil-rich Lebanon and you have the future Iraq.

Now, please explain how sacrificing a 1,000 additional American lives to consolidate Maliki's grip on Baghdad plus paying the Sunni Arab rebels 25+million a month in hard cash can be termed a triumph in counter-insurgency? It is very hard to swallow the Neocon/Petraeus narrative that American military power has achieved anything of strategic value for the United States and the West in Iraq.

In fact, if we continue to stay and meddle inside Iraq, we will see our casualties rise again as Colonel Reese has warned; especially since we are no long paying the usual tribute to the Sunni leaders. Right now, Odierno is debating whether to restart the payments because the Maliki government has no intention of paying the Sunnis anything and there is real concern that if we do not, we will find new IEDs wherever we go.

Now to Afghanistan and the future of counter-insurgency in the land that time forgot.

According to the self-appointed experts on CoIn, the key to success in CoIn/SASO operations is learning/knowing the terrain, including "human terrain," and that is hard to do when only in country 6-9 months. Historically, such operations require long-term presence by people who really become comfortable living among the population, learning their culture & social structures, and at least some of their language. In this sense, Afghanistan is the worst of all COIN worlds.

If we use advanced technology to eliminate the few genuine terrorists with any ties to Islamists who want to attack the United States, we will inevitably kill the so-called non-combatants who are their logistics, intelligence, and general support personnel. If there are any survivors, they are great at sanitizing the victims and making even terrorists look like innocent non-combatants. If we go in close to positively and painstakingly identify individual insurgent/terrorists and kill them with small arms or, even better, capture them for interrogation, we will increase our own loss rates (because we've gone down to fight them at their level of warfare and on their turf) and, if we take prisoners, there are whole new opportunities to create "atrocities" (both real ones and propaganda ones).

The principle problem in Afghanistan is not AQ or the Taliban. It’s the disgruntled and backward Pashtun Tribes or about 43 million people who live in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are fed up with the corrupt regimes in Kabul and Islamabad. They don’t like us and they don’t like the AQ Arabs either, but they really hate Karzai and the Paki government. In fact, the drone strikes on Pakistan would not bother them in the least if we actually killed the AQ Arabs. Unfortunately, we don’t usually manage that.

More important, in a Soviet Army report prepared two years after the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan, the Soviet General Staff formulated a requirement for 600,000 troops just to control the Afghan-Pakistan border region. Then, they urged withdrawal instead saying that 600,000 troops would not permanently change anything in the country. Unfortunately, the Politburo wasted years reaching the same conclusion.

What we in the West have done in Iraq and Afghanistan is unknowingly illuminate the clash between modernity and antiquity. In Afghanistan it is more acute than Iraq, but it’s true for both places. We revel in moral principle when justifying our actions but in actuality we wreak nothing but havoc and destruction on a world we do not understand and have come to hate.

Our soldiers learn to detest and look down upon the native Muslim populations as inferior, while we impose our will in terms of government, and laws in the hopes of educating the ignorant and caring for the sick. In reality our efforts are always compromised by the resistance to our impositions, as well as our instinctive hatred for the backwardness of the Muslim peoples.

In this sense, Bacevich is absolutely right. There is nothing to win. All we in the West do is lose time, money, blood and resources. Meanwhile the backward culture subsists on persecution and its life is extended. We change nothing. In fact, we make strategic conditions for ourselves worse as we have in Iraq.

Bottom Line: Counterinsurgency practiced by Western Forces in Islamic and other Non-European regions is a dangerous and destructive illusion that provides comfort to confused Westerners obsessed with the “White Man’s Burden” and those who equate the deaths of Muslims anywhere with a good outcome.

Better we secure our borders, get control of immigration into the US – legal and illegal – save our money and limit our military operations in these regions to securing our trade and to punitive military expeditions when absolutely necessary. But we must stop wasting lives and money on these culturally dysfunctional societies. We cannot drag them through the renaissance, the reformation, the enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. They will have to do these things themselves.

Thanks, Doug Macgregor


Commonweal
Volume CXXXVI, Number 14

The War We Can’t Win

Afghanistan & the Limits of American Power

Andrew J. Bacevich

History deals rudely with the pretensions of those who presume to determine its course. In an American context, this describes the fate of those falling prey to the Wilsonian Conceit. Yet the damage done by that conceit outlives its perpetrators.

From time to time, in some moment of peril or anxiety, a statesman appears on the scene promising to eliminate tyranny, ensure the triumph of liberty, and achieve permanent peace. For a moment, the statesman achieves the status of prophet, one who in his own person seemingly embodies the essence of the American purpose. Then reality intrudes, exposing the promises as costly fantasies. The prophet’s followers abandon him. Mocked and reviled, he is eventually banished—perhaps to some gated community in Dallas.

Yet however brief his ascendancy, the discredited prophet leaves behind a legacy. Most obvious are the problems created and left unresolved, commitments made and left unfulfilled, debts accrued and left unpaid. Less obvious, but for that reason more important, are the changes in perception.

The prophet recasts our image of reality. Long after his departure, remnants of that image linger and retain their capacity to beguile: consider how the Wilsonian vision of the United States as crusader state called upon to redeem the world in World War I has periodically resurfaced despite Woodrow Wilson’s own manifest failure to make good on that expectation. The prophet declaims and departs. Yet traces of his testimony, however at odds with the facts, remain lodged in our consciousness.

So it is today with Afghanistan, the conflict that George W. Bush began, then ignored, and finally bequeathed to his successor. Barack Obama has embraced that conflict as “the war we must win.” Those who celebrated Bush’s militancy back in the intoxicating days when he was promising to rid the world of evil see Obama’s enthusiasm for pressing on in Afghanistan as a vindication of sorts. They are right to do so.

The misguided and mismanaged global war on terror reduced Bush’s presidency to ruin. The candidate whose run for high office derived its energy from an implicit promise to repudiate all that Bush had wrought now seems intent on salvaging something useful from that failed enterprise—even if that means putting his own presidency at risk. When it comes to Afghanistan, Obama may be singing in a different key, but to anyone with an ear for music—especially for military marches—the melody remains intact.

Candidate Obama once derided the notion that the United States is called upon to determine the fate of Iraq. President Obama expresses a willingness to expend untold billions—not to mention who knows how many lives—in order to determine the fate of Afghanistan. Liberals may have interpreted Obama’s campaign pledge to ramp up the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan as calculated to insulate himself from the charge of being a national-security wimp. Events have exposed that interpretation as incorrect. It turns out—apparently—that the president genuinely views this remote, landlocked, primitive Central Asian country as a vital U.S. national-security interest.

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Tune in to the Sunday talk shows or consult the op-ed pages and you might conclude otherwise. Those who profess to be in the know insist that the fight in Afghanistan is essential to keeping America safe. The events of September 11, 2001, ostensibly occurred because we ignored Afghanistan. Preventing the recurrence of those events, therefore, requires that we fix the place.

Yet this widely accepted line of reasoning overlooks the primary reason why the 9/11 conspiracy succeeded: federal, state, and local agencies responsible for basic security fell down on the job, failing to install even minimally adequate security measures in the nation’s airports. The national-security apparatus wasn’t paying attention—indeed, it ignored or downplayed all sorts of warning signs, not least of all Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States. Consumed with its ABC agenda—“anything but Clinton” was the Bush administration’s watchword in those days—the people at the top didn’t have their eye on the ball. So we let ourselves get sucker-punched. Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semipermanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan. Rather, it requires that the United States erect and maintain robust defenses.

Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Of course, Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how Brits, Russians, or other foreigners have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until just recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.

Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around.

Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in late 2006 when President Bush announced his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy. Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues.

Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.

Six-plus years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than forty-three hundred American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for an-other five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.

Given the embarrassing yet indisputable fact that this was an utterly needless war—no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set in motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad—to describe Iraq as a success, and as a model for application elsewhere, is nothing short of obscene. The great unacknowledged lesson of Iraq is the one that the writer Norman Mailer identified decades ago: “Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.”

For those who, despite all this, still hanker to have a go at nation building, why start with Afghanistan? Why not first fix, say, Mexico? In terms of its importance to the United States, our southern neighbor—a major supplier of oil and drugs among other commodities deemed vital to the American way of life—out-ranks Afghanistan by several orders of magnitude.

If one believes that moral considerations rather than self-interest should inform foreign policy, Mexico still qualifies for priority attention. Consider the theft of California. Or consider more recently how the American appetite for illicit drugs and our liberal gun laws have corroded Mexican institutions and produced an epidemic of violence afflicting ordinary Mexicans. We owe these people, big-time.

Yet any politician calling for the commitment of sixty thousand U.S. troops to Mexico to secure those interests or acquit those moral obligations would be laughed out of Washington—and rightly so. Any pundit proposing that the United States assume responsibility for eliminating the corruption that is endemic in Mexican politics while establishing in Mexico City effective mechanisms of governance would have his license to pontificate revoked. Anyone suggesting that the United States possesses the wisdom and the wherewithal to solve the problem of Mexican drug trafficking, to endow Mexico with competent security forces, and to reform the Mexican school system (while protecting the rights of Mexican women) would be dismissed as a lunatic. Meanwhile, those who promote such programs for Afghanistan, ignoring questions of cost and ignoring as well the corruption and ineffectiveness that pervade our own institutions, are treated like sages.

The contrast between Washington’s preoccupation with Afghanistan and its relative indifference to Mexico testifies to the distortion of U.S. national security priorities induced by George W. Bush in his post-9/11 prophetic mode—distortions now being endorsed by Bush’s successor. It also testifies to a vast failure of imagination to which our governing classes have succumbed.

This failure of imagination makes it literally impossible for those who possess either authority or influence in Washington to consider the possibility (a) that the solution to America’s problems is to be found not out there—where “there” in this case is Central Asia-but here at home; (b) that the people out there, rather than requiring our ministrations, may well be capable of managing their own affairs relying on their own methods; and (c) that to disregard (a) and (b) is to open the door to great mischief and in all likelihood to perpetrate no small amount of evil. Needless to say, when mischief or evil does occur—when a stray American bomb kills a few dozen Afghan civilians, for instance—the costs of this failure of imagination are not borne by the people who inhabit the leafy neighborhoods of northwest Washington, who lunch at the Palm or the Metropolitan Club, and school their kids at Sidwell Friends.

So the answer to the question of the hour—What should the United States do about Afghanistan?—comes down to this: A sense of realism and a sense of proportion should oblige us to take a minimalist approach. As with Uruguay or Fiji or Estonia or other countries where U.S. interests are limited, the United States should undertake to secure those interests at the lowest cost possible.

What might this mean in practice? General Petraeus, now commanding United States Central Command, recently commented that “the mission is to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and other transnational extremists,” in effect “to deny them safe havens in which they can plan and train for such attacks.”

The mission statement is a sound one. The current approach to accomplishing the mission is not sound and, indeed, qualifies as counterproductive. Note that denying Al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan hasn’t required U.S. forces to occupy the frontier regions of that country. Similarly, denying Al Qaeda safe havens in Afghanistan shouldn’t require military occupation by the United States and its allies.

It would be much better to let local authorities do the heavy lifting. Provided appropriate incentives, the tribal chiefs who actually run Afghanistan are best positioned to prevent terrorist networks from establishing a large-scale presence. As a backup, intensive surveillance complemented with precision punitive strikes (assuming we can manage to kill the right people) will suffice to disrupt Al Qaeda’s plans. Certainly, that approach offers a cheaper and more efficient alter-native to establishing a large-scale and long-term U.S. ground presence—which, as the U.S. campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, has the unintended effect of handing jihadists a recruiting tool that they are quick to exploit.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, all the talk—much of it emanating from neoconservative quarters—was about achieving a “decisive victory” over terror. The reality is that we can’t eliminate every last armed militant harboring a grudge against the West. Nor do we need to. As long as we maintain adequate defenses, Al Qaeda operatives, hunkered down in their caves, pose no more than a modest threat. As for the Taliban, unless they manage to establish enclaves in places like New Jersey or Miami, the danger they pose to the United States falls several notches below the threat posed by Cuba, which is no threat at all.

As for the putatively existential challenge posed by Islamic radicalism, that project will prove ultimately to be a self-defeating one. What violent Islamists have on offer-a rejection of modernity that aims to restore the caliphate and unify the ummah [community]—doesn’t sell. In this regard, Iran—its nuclear aspirations the subject of much hand-wringing—offers considerable cause for hope. Much like the Castro revolution that once elicited so much angst in Washington, the Islamic revolution launched in 1979 has failed resoundingly. Observers once feared that the revolution inspired and led by the Ayatollah Khomeini would sweep across the Persian Gulf. In fact, it has accomplished precious little. Within Iran itself, the Islamic republic no longer represents the hopes and aspirations of the Iranian people, as the tens of thousands of protesters who recently filled the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities made evident. Here we see foretold the fate awaiting the revolutionary cause that Osama bin Laden purports to promote.

In short, time is on our side, not on the side of those who proclaim their intention of turning back the clock to the fifteenth century. The ethos of consumption and individual autonomy, privileging the here and now over the eternal, will conquer the Muslim world as surely as it is conquering East Asia and as surely as it has already conquered what was once known as Christendom. It’s the wreckage left in the wake of that conquest that demands our attention. If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: “Come home, America.” The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”

Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking—in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.