Mindful of the saying that a bitching soldier is a happy soldier, I'm hard-pressed to join in the oft hysterical condemnation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for said bitching by him and his staff in the Rolling Stone article. Many on what passes for the "left" today, having seen that President Obama is neither Lincoln nor FDR, now want him to be Harry Truman and enjoy a MacArthur moment. They forget, or don't know, that Truman's dismissal of the five-star general from command in the Korean War helped make him the most unpopular modern president — before George W. Bush, that is. In addition, Truman had served as an artillery captain in World War I and had little use for top military brass, particularly one with MacArthur's temperament and the intolerable situation in which the general had placed Truman. MacArthur wasn't trash-talking Truman but disobeying direct orders. As Truman said, "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."
I even admire McChrystal on a certain level. Historically, America often had political senior officers in peacetime, ones good at keeping their civilian masters happy and maintaining the status quo — even if it meant, say, ignoring the meaning of air power or the tank. In wartime, which was not a continuous national endeavor at one time, the political officers were shunted aside for the fighting officers. McChrystal is plainly one of the latter. But what about the Tillman cover-up and the prisoner abuse that happened under his command? Worse, much worse, happened in World War II, the "good war." This is why William Tecumseh Sherman's full quotation should always be at our national shoulder: "I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell." These may seem like different times, when our forces are being asked to do impossible tasks driven by incoherent policies. But the brutality of the enterprise remains the same, and its coarsening effect on a democracy, as feared by Woodrow Wilson, is as potent as ever.Maybe McChrystal's self-immolation in the Stone was a subliminal desire to get the hell out of this chickenshit unit.
The most important aspects of the article never really made it past the assorted ramparts of our deadened national consciousness. I urge you to read it in full. But several things stood out. One is that the McChrystal counterinsurgency strategy can't succeed. America doesn't have the treasure or the will to occupy Afghanistan for the decades it would take to maybe, maybe, build a real nation in this tribal land. Moreover, any student of history can tell you that counterinsurgency measures usually fail (France in Algeria and Vietnam, America in Vietnam). Britain's success in Malaysia was unusual. Another is the toll the contradictory love-'em-and-kill-'em tactics have on the soldiers on the ground. Then there's the backbeat of the fiction of NATO involvement, carrying with it the question of whether the alliance should even exist now.
But the most devastating lesson of the article is the portrait of an administration that has no more clue of what it's doing than the Bush gang. Backing an unpopular and corrupt leader, without any clear exit strategy and stuck in a place where we are deeply hated, this is a new definition of quagmire. Yes, President Bush got us in this war, probably unwisely and then definitely prosecuting it with incompetence and too few resources. But President Obama is continuing it. (Even in Iraq, he's following the Bush withdrawal timetable, as the factions await our departure before they fall upon each other).
Neither Mr. Obama nor Vice-President Joe Biden served in the armed forces (Biden had multiple deferments during Vietnam). I'm suspicious of our newfound worship of all things military; this nation was once suspicious of standing armies. And military service isn't essential to being a good wartime president (e.g. FDR). But I also know that Eisenhower forced an end to the Korean War because he had seen war's toll and knew that continuing the bloody deadlock was not in our national interest. Similarly, William McKinley, who saw combat as an enlisted man in the Civil War, was very reluctant to enter the Spanish-American War. Theodore Roosevelt, bloodthirsty as a Rough Rider, oversaw a peaceful presidency.
The Obama administration seems as disconnected from the reality of war as the titans of finance are from the consequences of their predations, or as any of the elites of our society. You ask, what is our aim? The administration answers in platitudes that, were they given to me by an employee back in my department-head days, I would say, "these are dreams, not goals." And this hopeless struggle is mostly on the shoulders of a military that does not exist as a nation-building "Peace Corps with guns," and cannot sustain itself as a world petroleum/precious metals police force. There was good reason for the Powell Doctrine, that we would only commit the armed forces with overwhelming might in the service of vital national security objectives and having a clear exit strategy. Ironic that Gen. Powell himself torpedoed this sensible policy when he was Bush's Secretary of State. But the Obama administration carries on the folly.
Harry Truman never went to college but he was a student of the lost discipline that is indispensable to being the citizen of a self-governing nation: History. The Korean stalemate sank his presidency, but he did prevent the enslavement of South Korea (whose citizens wanted us there) and he did prevent a Third World War. What does the Obama administration intend to do in Afghanistan, which is barely a nation? Or Pakistan, which is being destabilized by our presence next door? We are neither safer as a nation — indeed, the overreach of the past nine years has made us less so — nor are we serving the cause of freedom against tyranny. The president can't even have a frank talk with the American people about oil, that our old "lifestyle" is ending, whether we wish it or not. Much less will we have a searching national conversation about the unsustainability of our military adventures and soft empire. Americans are not Victorian Britons, to say the least. We may well end up like post-World War II Britons, where our imperial and wartime exhaustion and bankruptcy force us to make a dramatic retrenchment.
Truman said, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." For America, and its rapidly diminishing young president, that's a very wide gap.
Citizens, politicians, journalists, and commentators have the freedom to publicly speak their minds; active military officers do not. We must require, respect, and even honor this discipline.
Posted by: Rate Crimes | June 24, 2010 at 05:27 AM
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are livin' the life on their adjoining estates out there at the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
We don't hear much about the Afghanistan decision being largely theirs, with Paul Wolfowitz as their delusional compadre. Has this trio acquired a set of Harry Potter's invisibility cloaks . . or have our memories grown painfully short?
Posted by: Jim Hamblin | June 24, 2010 at 12:58 PM
Although I agree with you about McChrystal, I'll disagree with TR and the success of counterinsurgency campaigns.
Roosevelt oversaw the subjugation of the Philipines, a successful counterinsurgency campaign. The endless campaigns against Native Americans all successful eventually (even the Seminoles, although never run out of the Florida swamps, were pushed far enough in to not be a bother again). Going back even farther, Julius Caesar in Gaul. Then there is the crushing of the Ukrainian anacharists during the Russian Civil War (1919-1921). More often than not, counterinsurgency campaigns are successful because 1) they are ruthlessly prosecuted (something that will not happen today) and 2) there is no opposing standing army. Insurgency works best when there is an army to back it up with a home base for supply and governance (the American Revolution, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Mao's Chinese Revolution immediately come to mind).
Truman may have save So. Korea from enslavement, but it was TR who enslaved all of Korea by acquiescing to Japanese demands in 1905.
Posted by: eclecticdog | June 25, 2010 at 11:20 AM
I see no indication that our appetite for endless war will end until, like the Soviet Union, we collapse economically because of it. And I see no hope for prevailing in Afghanistan through brute force. There's zero chance that we can be as ruthless as the Soviets were, and they didn't succeed.
Posted by: CDT | June 25, 2010 at 05:36 PM
We cannot rest until Kabul, Qandahar, Herat, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e Sharif all have a Wal-Mart.
Posted by: Rate Crimes | June 26, 2010 at 07:36 AM
Contrasting comments from eclectic dog and CDT were most interesting.
From "The Soviet Withdrawal From Afghanistan" (Amin Saikal, William Maley, Cambridge University Press, 1989):
"According to a Soviet spokeman, by mid-1988, 13,310 Soviet soldiers had died in Afghanistan, amply justifying General Secretary Gorbachev's February 1986 description of Afghanistan as a "bleeding wound" (krovotochashchaia rana).
"However, compared to the casualties in the vulnerable Afghan civilian population, this was a trivial figure: a detailed study in 1988 calculated that roughly 9 percent of the Afghan population, or 1.24 million people, had died as a result of aerial bombing raids, shootings, artillery shellings, antipersonnel mines, exhaustion, and other war-related conditions." (p. 13)
A section of the first chapter, headed The Turning Point (p.15), notes that:
(a) Only a quarter of the Soviet adult urban population approved of Soviet policy in Afghanistan or expressed confidence in the eventual success of Soviet policy;
(b) By early 1988, most of those who had been voting members of the Politburo at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan had either died or retired. (Don't forget, both the Afghan conflict and the East German regime ended under Gorbachev.)
(c) The puppet government in Kabul had neither popularity, legitimacy, or even internal coherence, and was propped up solely by the Soviet occupation forces (suggesting the need for indefinitely extended occupation, conflict, and attrition of Soviet forces).
(d) Soviet stragegy had relied on using helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers to attack the civilian population which the Mujajideen relied upon for support. In the second half of 1986 the rebels received Stinger anti-aircraft missiles from the United States, which were considerably more effective than the SAM-7 missiles they had previously had access to.
"According to one source the USSR lost 512 aircraft and helicopters between January and November 1987, and the Soviet response was not to escalate, but rather to revive diplomatic moves directed at procuring a settlement of the conflict."
http://books.google.com/books?id=KWsqVYSBTYIC&dq=why+soviets+withdraw+afghanistan&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=BlcmTPP5GdKDnQeNwbW9Bg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=12&ved=0CEkQ6AEwCw#v=onepage
Note also that by 1987 CIA covert funding of the rebels through Operation Cyclone amounted to $630 million a year, with a similar amount being supplied by Saudi Arabia.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | June 26, 2010 at 01:22 PM
P.S. I'm no expert (and eclecticdog can correct me if I'm wrong) but I'm not sure how much of a conventional army the Afghan insurgency possessed in its campaign against Soviet occupation. According to a Library of Congress Country Study of Afghanistan:
"Virtually all of its war was waged locally...Olivier Roy estimates that after four years of war there were at least 4,000 bases from which mujahidin units operated. Most of these were affiliated with the seven expatriate parties headquartered in Pakistan which served as sources of supply and varying degrees of supervision. Significant commanders typically led 300 or more men, controlled several bases and dominated a district or a sub-division of a province.
"Hierarchies of organization above the bases were attempted. Their operations varied greatly in scope, the most ambitious being achieved by Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Panjshir valley north of Kabul. He led at least 10,000 trained troops at the end of the Soviet war and had expanded his political control of Tajik dominated areas to Afghanistan's northeastern provinces under the Supervisory Council of the North.
"...In favorable circumstances such formations could quickly reach more than 10,000, as happened when large Soviet assaults were launched in the eastern provinces, or when the mujahidin besieged towns, such as Khost in Paktia Province. But in campaigns of the latter type the traditional explosions of manpower--customarily common immediately after the completion of harvest--proved obsolete when confronted by well dug-in defenders with modern weapons. Lashkar durability was notoriously short; few sieges succeeded."
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+af0101)
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | June 26, 2010 at 01:52 PM
P.S. Responding to the main point of Mr. Talton's essay, I've said it before but I'll say it again: I don't understand why the United States is still in Afghanistan. As I wrote in an earlier thread:
The conventional explanation is that we're there to deny a safe haven to Al Qaida. Thus far we can't even do that in Afghanistan itself; but even if we could, the premise is belied by the fact that Al Qaida already has "safe havens" in a number of other countries, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc., etc., which we either can't invade for political reasons, or can't invade because we simply don't have the money and manpower to attack, occupy, and subdue governments and guerilla fighters in all of these countries.
Al Qaida has long since gone international, and everyone knows it, so why this talk about denying a safe haven to them in Afghanistan, when that hasn't even been possible in that single country?
It isn't as though there is a sophisticated infrastructure for them in Afghanistan anyway. Afghanistan doesn't have nuclear missiles, it doesn't have anything to speak of except mountainous deserts. If by "safe haven" all we mean are a few caves or crude buildings, we'll never be able to "deny Al Qaida safe haven" on a worldwide basis.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | June 26, 2010 at 02:16 PM
I'll add a new gloss as well: I don't understand the concept of targeting geography when the enemy is an organization, not an army.
Al Qaida is not a military. Al Qaida is not a government. Al Qaida is a fairly loosely knit structure of individuals in numerous countries, drawing financial support from numerous countries and sources, with shared ideology and linked (but not hierarchically rigorous) leadership.
Terrorist attacks can be planned by individuals operating from any locality, funded by individuals from other localities, and carried out by individuals from still more localities, unconstrained by international borders.
This does not require political control of land. This does not require a headquarters building or conventional infrastructure such as military bases.
An international terrorist organization is not a government, a military, or even an insurgency. Al Qaida is a distributed network. It cannot be destroyed by military occupation. It has no troops and no centralized infrastructure TO destroy. You cannot attack such an enemy by occupying a single country, much less a country like Afghanistan.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | June 26, 2010 at 02:38 PM
Emil,
I'm no expert either. Your thoughts on Afghanistan are spot on, but let me elaborate on my thinking about it.
The Afghans don't have much of an army, but have great tribal traditions for leadership and war. Indeed, Afghanistan defies our crude attempts to make it fit our mental framework about governments, countries, militaries, economies, etc. It is a very primitive place, but humans from our past would have no problem recognizing the familiar patterns of tribe and family and immobility.
The inhospitability of the land and the closed nature of Afghan society is a huge plus for them. We cannot control the mountains and we don't get what Afghans want (evidently it is not the "American dream"). The Russian never figured it out, neither did the British, and the Indians thought it better to leave them alone. It could be they have a better democracy than we have as everything is at the local level. A leader that doesn't deliver won't last, justice (or at least punishment) is very swift or is resolved by a blood feud. Thus 4000 bases to operate against the Soviets from (and probably every other invader before and since), plus safe havens in tribal lands in Pakistan (kind of like Cambodia and Laos in another conflict, or Mexico during the Apache Wars).
Tribal leaders that show a knack for
war gain followers much like Native American warchiefs gathered warbands. Modern weaponry and the Afghan devotion to one's tribe, home, and family make them formidible citizen warriors. Ghengis Khan had such an army! The Taliban provides a conduit for money and weapons and something of a government. After reading your last post, Afghanistan is like Al Qaida, only it has an arbitary boundary drawn around it so everyone in the UN knows where it is.
To our (Western/US/modern) way of thinking this should be a cakewalk. No recognizable army, no recognizable government, no money, no jobs, no end to war and strife, unless they just accept our way of doing things. The Afghans have repeatedly told everyone to F*** off or else (because that's the way Afghans have always done it).
But no one in power listens. I wish we would leave too, but that would tarnish the rep of our citizen soldiers and their clueless leadership yet again.
Best Wishes and Peace!
Posted by: eclecticdog | June 26, 2010 at 08:39 PM
So, my question remains:
How do Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz manage to duck accountability for the wrongheaded decision-making process that got us into Afghanistan? This blog can lapse into scholarly dissertations for which I'm ill equipped; however we may be losing sight of the culprits that put us there.
Posted by: Jim Hamblin | June 26, 2010 at 09:57 PM
Jim,
They didn't do anything illegal, so how will we hold them accountable? Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et. al. might either be immoral sons of dogs or just poor misguided followers of Ayn Rand and Irving Krystal, but there's no prosecutable crime in that.
Posted by: eclecticdog | June 26, 2010 at 10:53 PM
Another good read:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/when-was-last-time-you-visited-iraq
Posted by: eclecticdog | June 26, 2010 at 11:02 PM
Some belated comments about Phoenix area bike trails/paths added here:
http://roguecolumnist.typepad.com/rogue_columnist/2010/06/rogue-the-users-guide.html#more
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | June 28, 2010 at 11:13 AM