Lost in Afghanistan
Published on December 1, 2009
American hubris gives us a knack for making tragic mistakes with our military. Welcome to the next one.
An assignment I recently took on was to make myself read “The Good Soldiers,” David Finkel’s emotionally powerful book about U.S. troops in Iraq, circa 2007. The book is hard enough. Absorbing it in the present historical context–when we are on the verge of sending tens of thousands more soldiers to Afghanistan–is even harder.
If I had the audacity and skills to crash a state dinner, I would like to hand President Obama my copy of this book, and ask him to read it before he sends another soldier on his or her way. Statistics tend to bounce off people because they’re too abstract. Finkel’s intimate portraits of the destroyed or horrifically damaged lives of young Americans don’t bounce off. At bottom they ask whether we really believe that the sacrifice we’ve asked of these men, women and their families is worth what we think we’re gaining by sending them into harm’s way.
I just can’t believe it is. I agree with former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin who
sees Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan as a reluctant act to avoid his own political suicide. Froomkin quotes Paul Pillar, the former lead CIA intelligence analyst for the Middle East, as acknowledging that the evidence is now clear enough that, at best, a ramped up U.S. military operation can only achieve short term success.
“If political realities were not a constraint, disengagement from Afghanistan would be the best course of action,” Pillar tells Froomkin. “But I accept the political reality that that is off the table. The president would get pilloried as being a softie and as not having the courage and determination supposedly to stand up for U.S. security. I don’t buy any of that criticism myself, but that would be the political reality he’s facing.”
That’s exactly it. Despite Joe Biden’s well-publicized push back, a blinding conventional wisdom prevails in the Obama White House even though public support for sending and keeping troops in Afghanistan has been steadily declining. In most ways, the political fear that prevents Obama from bringing the troops home reflects a triumph of political branding and messaging from the right wing fire breathers, beginning with the irrepressible Dick Cheney, our beloved former Vice President, who once flatly explained his student deferments from the Vietnam-era draft as his having “other priorities in the 60′s than military service.”
From the likes of Cheney, through the right wing chorus on talk radio and FOX News, the question always distills to whether or not we believe and support the American military, by which they mean supporting intervention. Their argument plays to a broad base of Americans who reflexively confuse militarism with patriotism and who embrace the notion that our national security depends on our being eager and able to impose our will on the world, preferably by force. If you don’t support the mission, then you don’t support our troops, and therefore you’re a scoundrel. It’s a simple and compelling construct, even if it’s wrong, and even if the missions we send our troops on are at least as likely to undermine our national security as enhance it. There is this notion, reinforced in our movies, that violence is a cleansing agent. It’s not.
As Obama speaks today, I’ll still be thinking of Finkel’s soldiers and what they believed they were giving themselves to. Vietnam was supposed to have taught us not to use young Americans this way, to prop up corrupt, unpopular regimes in places where we’re really fighting on behalf of our own craving to not appear as though we can be beaten.
In “The Good Soliders,” Finkel follows the “2-16″ (formally, the Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Infantry Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division) from Fort Riley, Kansas to their nightmarish assignment in Baghdad, and back. The book is graphic, in the way that every book about war should be. Among other things, we meet horribly burned and impossibly dismembered young soldiers (mostly survivors of roadside bomb attacks) who are somehow kept alive by modern medical intervention.
Finkel is not out to make a point about whether the Iraq war is justified or not, or whether the “surge” that the 2-16 was a part of has been worth it, or not. Instead, what this Pulitzer Prize winning reporter gives us is intimate access to the profound disconnection between what we, as Americans, are expected and told to think about the war, and what the soldiers (and their families) actually experience.
The all-volunteer soldiers of the 2-16 under the command of Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich are proudly gung-ho about winning a war when they leave Fort Riley. But almost as soon as they get to their posts in Baghdad, the empirical madness of their circumstances simply obliterates all the rhetoric, all the slogans, all the patriotic bravado about why Americans are fighting in Iraq. What remains is their loyalty to one another.
The “Good Soldiers” gets to the heart of an important, irreducible truth. The war as the soldiers experience it bears no resemblance to the war that American leaders from the President on down describe it as. It’s horrific, and all the more so when you recall how the American people were misled about the purpose of the war (the non-existent WMD, the bogus Al-Qaeda connection to the Iraqi regime) and how Donald Rumsfeld and his circle were so confident that American troops, post invasion, would be welcomed as liberators.
To be sure, Iraq is not Afghanistan. Of the two military campaigns, Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good war,” the one where the connection between the 9/11/2001 attacks, and the Al-Qaeda-friendly Taliban government in Afghanistan offered a clear rationale for invading. But, as Obama himself has repeatedly pointed out, the mission in Afghanistan was neglected for years because of the Bush Administration’s pre-occupation with Iraq.
No, Afghanistan is Afghanistan, a country roughly the size of Texas with a long history–including the recent failed takeover by the Soviet Union–of successfully resisting foreign occupation. Less than a third of the country is considered to be under control of the central government in Kabul. Not surprisingly, one thing that U.S. soldiers who’ve served in both Iraq and Afghanistan are beginning to tell journalists is that fighting a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan is even more difficult than the counterinsurgency war in Iraq.
In a development that was passed over far too quickly, Matthew Hoh, the U.S. State Department’s Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province resigned in September and did so with a lengthy letter explaining why he’d come to the conclusion that the continued U.S. military presence in the country “greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.”
“To put it simply, Hoh wrote, “I fail to see the value or worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war.”
As I write early Tuesday morning, Obama has reportedly decided to send an additional 34,000 troops to Afghanistan, with another 5,000 expected to come from coalition partners. But according to the counter-insurgency formulas that General David Petraeus has advanced, the ratio of counter-insurgent troops to residents is 20 to 25 per 1,000 people. As William Polk and others have noted, Afghanistan is a nation of 33 million and even if you were to count only the 15 million or so Afghan Pashtuns who are the main ethnic component of the Taliban, the Petraeus formula begs not for 35,000 or 40,000 additional troops, but upwards of a half million.
But to get to those kind of numbers–the hundreds of thousands of additional troops needed to wage an Afghanistan counter-insurgency according to Petraeus’s formula–we’d have to institute a draft and abandon the all-volunteer army. That would be another form of political suicide. So that’s not on the table either. Not yet.
The question confronting all of us, not just Obama, and not just the troops and their families is this one: Why are American soldiers still fighting and dying in Afghanistan?
“You’ve cleared Helmand three times,” Martin Smith says in an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan.
“Yeah,” McChrystal answers.
“Never hold it,” Smith notes.
“Yeah,” says McChrystal. “And once you clear something and don’t hold it, you probably did not really clear it. It has no staying power. In fact, I would argue that it’s worse because you create an expectation and then you dash it. And so I think that you’re almost better to have not gone there at all.”
I haven’t heard the President’s speech. It will come later today, at West Point. But I’m sure his argument for continuing and escalating the war will be an Obamaesque repackaging of the reasons for which “Operation Enduring Freedom” was launched in October 2001. Obama has already said he believes Afghanistan is a war of necessity; that we have a direct national security interest in preventing Afghanistan from sliding backwards into being a very large, failing country where extremist groups like Al Qaeda can recruit and train terrorists. There is also an understandable desire to disrupt a movement that is hostile to democracy, disempowers women and has contempt for human rights.
The flaw in these arguments is the reality of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the increasing weight of evidence that we can’t achieve our objectives by military means, even the supposedly lighter, more discriminate use of military force called for in counter-insurgency doctrine. It’s a homegrown fantasy, a creation of American hubris that we can’t afford to pay for. (In this morning’s Washington Post, Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs says “he did not have anything conclusive” to share as to how Obama plans to pay for the escalation and that this subject won’t be part of the speech.)
To date, the most compelling version of the counter-argument comes from Martin Smith’s bravely reported “Frontlines” episode, “Obama’s War,” which aired in mid-October.
“Shock and awe,” made for great television in Iraq. But the heart of Smith’s (and freelancer Danfung Dennis’s) reporting from the roads and treelines in southern Afghanistan is nothing like “shock and awe.” The combat is largely a cat & mouse game in which the American soldiers on foot or in patrolling vehicles make targets of themselves to try to force the insurgents to reveal their positions.
Still, the doctrine of counter-insurgency is about much more than these unconventional combat exercises. It’s about winning the hearts and minds and bravery of civilians to side with the counter-insurgent force (that would be us) against the bad guys, (i.e. the Taliban).
In one of the more poigant segments of “Obama’s War,” Smith juxtaposes his reporting from a major counterinsurgency conference in Washington, D.C. with the hearts and minds efforts of U.S. Marines in Helmand Province.
“The overriding mission of counterinsurgency has to be to secure the people,” General Petraeus says at the conference.
So, how’s that working in Helmand Province? Smith and Dennis show us, and in Dennis’s priceless footage you get to see Marines dealing with Afghan villagers who, among other things, have simply abandoned the local market next to the Marine’s new outpost. The outpost was put there in order to protect the merchants and people using the market. But the locals unexpectedly responded to the protection offered by the Marines by traveling to a distant market instead.
The Marines are agitated and, with Dennis coming along with his camera, they go out in search of answers.
The Taliban have delivered a message, explains one of the Afghans to a Marine sergeant’s translator: “If you go to bazaar we will kill all of you.”
The exasperated sergeant then starts arguing with the villagers and ends by lecturing them: “Listen to me right now, all right? You all are not cooperating.”
“You have planes, tanks and guns,” a villager replies after the sergeant asks why the villagers aren’t helping resist the Taliban. “What do we have? We’re simple people. We don’t have a sword.”
Just think for a moment about the stories you’ve read about how difficult it has been for U.S. police departments to run what amounts to domestic counter-insurgency efforts to try to break up gang influence in American urban neighborhoods. Now, add to this problem the effect of vast cultural and language obstacles, the near-medieval infrastructure of rural Afghanistan, and the vast expanses of mountainous terrain that the soldiers have to traverse.
But the complications are just beginning.
“You’ve cleared Helmand three times,” Smith says in an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan.
“Yeah,” McChrystal answers.
“Never hold it,” Smith notes.
“Yeah,” says McChrystal. “And once you clear something and don’t hold it, you probably did not really clear it. It has no staying power. In fact, I would argue that it’s worse because you create an expectation and then you dash it. And so I think that you’re almost better to have not gone there at all.”
Keep McChrystal’s words in mind as Obama and others try to assure Americans that he and the generals have an exit strategy. Because as Petraeus and McChrystal both acknowledge, the counter-insurgency strategy relies on providing confidence to the Afghan people that we will protect them from the Taliban if they give us their loyalty. That’s not a small contradiction.
Here are the other big problems that Smith and Frontlines reported on.
*The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. The United States has just reaffirmed its support for Karzai even though it’s clear his re-election earlier this year was the result of massive vote fraud, and that the new run-off election to fix the fraudulent election was moot because his opponent withdrew in anticipation of another corrupted election.
“Afghanistan,” opined The Guardian newspaper in a November 4th editorial, “is a political failure, a fact over which the international community continue to be in denial.”
“Just consider Karzai’s running mates,” Smith reports, as he shows a recent video clip of the Afghan President. “On the right is Karim Khalili, on a cleader of a militia with a reputation for brutality and torture. On the left is warlord Mohammed Fahim. While never convicted, he is widely reputed to be involved in heroin trafficking.”
*While we’re on the subject of drugs and Afghanistan’s leading cash crop, opium, here is how a Marine captain explained how he deals with the conundrum of whether to destroy opium fields that his soldiers regularly come upon. (According to Smith, the Taliban derive about $100 million a year from the Afghanistan opium trade.)
“Drugs happens to be something that produced a lot of money, but my mission coming down here was not specifically against drugs,” the Captain says, explaining why they leave the fields alone. “Like, I was asked point blank by some of the locals that are farmers, ‘Hey, what are you going to do about my drugs? Because that’s the way I make my money. That’s the way I make a living. That’s the way I feed my family. What are you going to do about it?’”
*Then there is the issue of nuclear-armed Pakistan, a country that is supposed to be an important ally in the war on Islamic extremists who, outside of Afghanistan, congregate in tribal lands in Pakistan. The Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, has for many years supported the Taliban as a proxy force, primarily to check the influence of its geo-political arch-rival, India. Nevertheless, the U.S. continues to send billions of dollars in military and civilian assistance to Pakistan.
“Does it give you pause to hand them billions of dollars?” Smith asks Lt. Col. John Nagl, a former advisor to General Petraeus.
“I absolutely have to hold my nose when I work with the Pakistani government,” Nagl replies. “But I don’t have a better alternative than continuing to work with this Pakistani government and continuing to nudge it forward toward taking more effective action against the Taliban.”
“This could not be a more complicated war,” author Steve Coll explains to Frontlines. “If you think about it, the United States is essentially waging a war against its own ally. The Taliban are a proxy of the government of Pakistan. We are an ally of the government of Pakistan. We are fighting the Taliban. In the end, the Taliban will be defeated strategically when the government of Pakistan makes a strategic decision that its future does not lie in partnership with Islamic extremists.”
From there the Frontlines documentary does a good job of going back and forth between top government officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as they blame the other for the problems with the insurgents that flow back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It’s actually General McChrystal who candidly lays out the course that President Obama has reluctantly endorsed.
“It is ambitious, but it’s also important,” McChrystal tells Smith. “And it’s one step at a time. It’s a big job and it’s enormously complex, and there will be as many frustrations as there are times when you think you got it right. But I think there’s no alternative.” (emphasis added).
Where does that lead? After listening to former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Ward worry that nation-building in Afghanistan is a “terribly vague” goal in which “counterinsurgency is a recipe for presence in perpetuity,” Smith hears from retired U.S. Army Colonel and author Andrew Bacevich:
“The nation-building project, it seems to me, tends to assume that that (sic) political culture can be changed. I think it’s spectacularly ambitious. I guess the piece that bothers me is that, as a people, having accepted the proposition of open-ended war. I mean the so-called long war, now eight years old, has become the longest war in our history. And there’s no end in sight.”
Some of the numbers are staggering, and some deeply sobering in terms of the mounting toll in lives and the increasing strains on the families of soldiers subject to continued deployments.
*According to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, the cost to send each soldier to Afghanistan is $1 million per year. Thus, just adding the 34,000 troops Obama will announce today, will add $34 billion. On average each soldier requires 22 gallons of fuel per day, and by the time fuel reaches its destination in Afghanistan it costs a staggering $45 per gallon.
*The costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, together, have risen each year since 2001. According to the Congressional Research Service the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will reach $864 billion by the end of fiscal year 2009.
*To date, more than 5,000 U.S. military men and women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Injuries among the current 68,000 service members in Afghanistan have risen sharply in recent months and now average about 350 a month.
*Among the more than 1.6 million U.S. troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, a 2008 RAND Corporation study found evidence “that the psychological toll” of the deployments “may be disproportionally high compared with the physical injuries of combat.” In March of this year USA Today reported on a Pentagon estimate that as many as 360,000 veterans of the two conflicts may have suffered traumatic brain injuries, including 45,000 to 90,000 with persisting symptoms requiring special care.
If I had the audacity and skills to crash a state dinner, I would like to hand President Obama my copy of “The Good Soldiers,” and ask him to read it before he sends another soldier on his or her way.
With Obama’s announcement later today, he will squarely own the course of this unfolding tragedy. Of course, he will take the time to stress his exit strategy which, according to the Post’s story, will involve setting military and political benchmarks for Afghanistan “so that its security forces can begin taking control of their own country.”
I’m sure we’ll be told, in a stern tone, that missed milestones will result in Americans withholding money and troops. Sorry to be sarcastic, but we know how this benchmark game works, and it doesn’t persuade anybody to say we really mean it this time. With what we’ve seen from the Karzai government it’s only reasonable to assume that six months from now the same arguments will be heard again, but with hundreds of more deaths and life-shattering injuries sustained by our troops. To what end? That was Matthew Hoh’s question in September, in his resignation letter. To what end?
As Obama speaks today, I’ll still be thinking of Finkel’s soldiers and what they believed they were giving themselves to. Vietnam was supposed to have taught us not to use young Americans this way, to prop up corrupt, unpopular regimes in places where we’re really fighting on behalf of our own craving to not appear as though we can be beaten. So sad that we have to learn it again, so soon.
–Tim Connor