Soft Landing or Going Soft in Afghanistan?
The pending announcement of precisely how quickly the United States plans to begin unraveling the 2009 “surge” in Afghanistan is being billed as a watershed by the media in spite of the fact that President Obama telegraphed this move two years ago. As a reminder, let’s go back (queue the wobbly, kaleidoscopic music) to December of 2009, when the newly elected president announced a surge of some 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to shore up what was looking like an American defeat in the making. Along with that quite unpopular announcement (among his party, especially) Obama said: ”these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.” He made it clear, too, that his goal was to hand the whole unholy mess to the Afghan government in 2014.
The United States position in Afghanistan today is immeasurably improved over the steeply declining prospects it faced at the end of 2009 — and not merely because we managed to top Osama bin Laden last month. Over the past 18 months, a genuinely sustained effort to stabilize and hold the most difficult parts of the country has succeeded in proving several important points, all of which really were prerequisites to a true withdrawal from the country:
1) The U.S. military remains remarkably resilient and capable of quick adaptation even after a meat-grinder of a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. As such, there’s no shame in leaving a less-intense but still active insurgency to the Afghan government.
2) An aggressive U.S./NATO war fighting strategy against the Taliban and its disjointed Al-Qaida allies can create a level of attrition that seriously hurts the enemy and, given time, might have forced them to the negotiating table. This disproved some nay-saying conventional wisdom about counter-insurgency tactics.
3) The political will among all coalition countries to continue the current pace of operations is gone; Democrats have used bin Laden’s death as an excuse to demand a quick withdrawal, and the GOP is profoundly split between old-line hawks inclined (with Obama) to push on to 2014, and neo-isolationist Tea Partiers who would have let Hitler overrun Britain as long as it saved taxpayers money. Bottom line here: PEW reports today that 56 percent of Americans favor bringing troops home asap – an all-time high on that question. The exit door is open.
Throughout the current administration, clear thinking on these and many other issues has come from Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Neither a chicken hawk nor a cheap skate, Gates appears to understand both the potential negatives of a “cut-and-run” approach (he is, after all, old enough to remember Vietnam), but also the reality that the “hyperpower” of the Bush years was actually more “hyper” than powerful. Sustainability, in the fiscal, is an issue.
On his final visit as defense chief to Afghanistan earlier this month, Gates told troops that the ”success of the mission should override everything else because the most costly thing of all would be to fail. Now that does not preclude adjustments in the mission or in the strategy. But ultimately the objective has to be success.” A week later, he told NATO it was failing as a partnership, largely due to a lack of defense capabilities and spending among its European members. That, he said, has resulted in a backlash in America. “The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress … to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
Amen, Mr. Secretary. But if Obama’s policies toward Afghanistan have arrested the slide toward defeat, they have not truly defined what anyone in Washington means by “success” in Afghanistan. Obama’s announcement on Wednesday may try to do this — hopefully, avoiding promises that Afghanistan will be an advanced democracy any time soon. But Obama’s words will first be put through the nonsensical filter of the American election cycle by Washington’s warring tribes before anyone bothers to consider the implications on the actual Southwest Asian battlefield. That’s a pity. But let’s look at the two dominant definitions of success inside the Beltway.
On one side, the strange bedfellows of liberals and Tea Party no-nothings would define success as ending the war as soon as possible, albeit for different reasons. While Democrats will cite morality, in both cases these factions really are focused on the costs involved: For Dems, a penny saved on the battlefield is a penny not conceded in deficit reduction talks, while for the Tea Party, spending money on wars in lands they can’t identify on maps is simply not a good use of taxpayer funds (if there is such a thing).
On the other side, an almost as odd collection of old-line conservatives and Obama supporters, including Obama’s 2008 GOP rival Sen. John McCain, want a slow withdrawal that doesn’t cause a stampede for the exit by Britain and other NATO coalition members and that gives the Afghan government time to train up a few more brigades of competent infantry. This may or may not be possible, but 2014 is this camp’s goal for making it happen.
Obama has proven himself happy to punt when it comes to taking controversial decisions on domestic policy, allowing Congress to hash out the details of health care, financial reform and climate policy, to name just a few. But on foreign policy, he’s acted far more forcefully. As such, he’s likely to stick to his guns, announcing the start of a drawdown of the surge — perhaps 5K-to-10K troops, and being extremely vague on the pace of future withdrawals. Already, he’s couched the 2014 “handover” goal in conditional “facts on the ground” measurements. He may also be quite satisfied to watch the GOP fight among itself over these policies since the splits in the legislative caucus are mirrored among the band of blowhards currently vying for the party’s nomination.
And on the war front? Happily, there is a good deal of evidence that a smaller U.S. footprint at this point may serve both aims. Major Mike Few, editor of Small Wars Journal and an Army officer who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan repeatedly, writes that less often means more in such conflicts, particularly at late stages. ”Sometimes with more, we merely attack the symptoms creating short-term visible gains rather than attacking the root problems,” Few writes. But “when the intervention force is constrained by force size and resources ….the commanders are forced to adapt, and the result is often a period of deep-reflection, ingenuity, and creativity.”
Let’s hope he’s right – because whatever faction wins the spinning contest tomorrow, doing more with less looks like the plan for Afghanistan.
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