The team McChrystal assembled to lead his operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan tells you what you really need to know. It’s filled with special
operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work. At the same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox News, an extra thousand special operations troops are being “quietly” dispatched to Afghanistan, bringing the total number there to about five thousand. The special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.
Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into Afghanistan twenty-one thousand troops and advisers (as well as those special ops forces), ever more civilian diplomats and advisers, and ever larger infusions of money, there is now to be a command surge as well. General McChrystal, according to the
New York Times
,
has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many special operations veterans.…
[He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside special operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like the new mega-embassy in Pakistan, this figure tells us a great deal about the top-heavy manner in which the planet’s super-garrison state fights its wars.
That team of Spartans, according to the
New York Times
, is being formed with, minimally, a three-year time horizon (though the actual Spartans needed only three hundred warriors in total at the battle of Thermopylae). This in itself is striking. After all, the Afghan War started in November 2001. So when the shortest possible Afghan tour of duty of the four hundred is over, the war will have been going on for more than ten and a half years—and no one dares to predict that, three years from now, the war will actually be at an end. If we are more honest, the figure cited should be not one decade, but three. After all, our Afghan adventure really began in 1980, when, in the jihad against the Soviets, we were supporting some of the very same fundamentalist figures now allied with the Taliban and fighting against us in Afghanistan—just as, once upon a
time, we looked positively upon the Taliban; just as, once, we looked positively upon Saddam Hussein, who was for a while seen as our potential bulwark in the Middle East against the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran. (Remarkably enough, only Iran has steadily retained its position as our regional enemy over these decades.)
What a record, then, of blood and war, of great power politics and imperial hubris, of support for the heinous (including various fundamentalist groups and grim, authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes who remain our allies to this day). What a tale of imperial power frittered away and treasure squandered. Truly, Rudyard Kipling would have been able to do something with this.
As for me, I find myself in awe of these decades of folly. I’m no Kipling, but I am aware that this sorry tale has taken up almost half of my lifetime with no end in sight.
In the meantime, our new president has loosed the manhunters.
His
manhunters. This is where charisma disappears into the charnel house of history.
A War That No Longer Needs a Justification
The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003 with a force of approximately 130,000 troops. Top White House and Pentagon officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were convinced that, by August, those troops, welcomed with open arms by the oppressed Iraqis, would be drawn down to 30,000 or 40,000 and housed in newly built, permanent military bases largely away from the country’s urban areas. This was to be part of what now is called a “strategic partnership” in the Middle East. Almost five and a half years later, the United States still has approximately 130,000 troops in Iraq. Top administration officials are now talking about “modestly accelerated” rates of troop withdrawal, if all goes well. This is what passes for progress in Iraq today.
To understand the real prospects for withdrawal, we would do well to consider some interlocking histories in Iraq.
A history of the bicycle in Iraq
: In imagistic terms, the Bush administration biked into Iraq. Top Washington officials loved the idea that they
were training the eager Iraqi kid in how to ride the bike of democracy. President George W. Bush talked regularly about the moment when we might take the “training wheels” off the Iraqi bike and let the little fella ride into the democratic sunset on his own. His secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, spoke about the difficult moment when a parent has to decide whether to take that steadying hand off the bike seat and let the tyke pedal on his own. “You’re running down the street,” as he put it in 2004, “holding onto the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off, they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you’re just barely touching it.”
Some years later, after kid and parent had made it around one of those “corners” they were always turning—on the way to various “tipping points”—and found themselves instead at the “precipice,” after Rumsfeld had, in fact, been asked to resign by his president, he wrote a final memo to the White House, the last of his famed “snowflakes,” on “new options” in Iraq. In it, he suggested, “Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start ‘taking our hand off the bicycle seat’), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.”
Rumsfeld’s tenure could qualify as the longest biking lesson in history and still, it seemed, the Iraqis couldn’t do without that hand on the seat. Even when his president followed him two years later, their imagery of choice remained behind. In March 2009, for instance, the chief American military spokesperson in Iraq, Major General David G. Perkins, discussing a possible drawdown of American forces, said, “We need to take our hands off the handlebars, or the training wheels, at some point.”
Colonel Timothy R. Reese, an American adviser to the Iraqi military’s Baghdad command, created a stir in summer 2009 in a memorandum leaked to the
New York Times
in which he also used the metaphor. While the official Obama-era target for an American withdrawal remained then (as in the last months of the Bush era) the end of 2011, Reese urged that all U.S. forces be pulled out on an expedited schedule by August 2010. In this, he resurrected a Vietnam-era suggestion of Vermont Republican senator George Aiken by headlining his memo: “It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home.”
And there, in the midst of a generally scathing assessment of the deficiencies of the Iraqi military (and the Iraqi government), was that bicycle again:
The SA [Bush-era Security Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq] outlines a series of gradual steps towards military withdrawal, analogous to a father teaching his kid to ride a bike without training wheels.… We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race. And in fact they probably do know how to ride, at least well enough for the road they are on against their current competitors. Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment. We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground.
It just goes to show. Under the pressure of war, images that won’t go away, like people, have the capacity to change. The Iraqi child with the training wheels was now, according to Reese, old enough to enter an actual bike race.
Who exactly will bike out of Iraq under the Obama withdrawal plan, however, still remains to be defined. After all, at the end of his memo, the most urgent call for withdrawal from Iraq yet to emerge from the higher levels of the U.S. military, Colonel Reese offered his version of a full-scale American withdrawal. “During the withdrawal period,” he wrote, “the USG [United States government] and GOI [government of Iraq] should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations. But it should not include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise.” Moreover, his proposal was, with rare exceptions, rejected out of hand by all and sundry, in and out of the military high command and in Washington. In other words, even the most Xtreme American biker of this moment still imagines us in Iraq forever and a day.
A history of experts on Iraq
: Once upon a time, the playing field, the stadium, and sports events were regularly compared to war, even considered suitable preparation for actual battle. Ever since the First Gulf War, this has been reversed. Now, war—or at least its coverage—is based on sports. And just as, sooner or later, the smoothest players and savviest
coaches depart the “field of battle” for the press box and the TV spotlight, for pre-game, game, and post-game commentary, so the commanders of the last war now leave the battlefield for the TV booth and offer us their expertise on the next war. As former Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy has been paid to discuss the decisions of his brother Stan, coach of the Orlando Magic, in ESPN playoff commentary, so the commanders of our previous wars cover our next wars and their commanders, possibly even officers once under their own command.
We now live with the ESPN version of war, including slo-mo replays, and the logos, interactive charts, and fabulous graphics of the sports world. And once anointed as experts, our John Maddens of war, like their sports counterparts, never go away. In April 2008, for instance,
New York Times
journalist David Barstow wrote a front-page exposé focused on the many retired military officers who had been hired as media consultants for the Iraq War. As a group, they made up, he suggested, a “kind of media Trojan horse,” because most of them were marching to a carefully organized Pentagon campaign of disinformation on the war. In addition, most of them had ties, not acknowledged on the air, “to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess.”
Barstow’s piece concluded:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post- Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
Barstow named names and made connections. Those names included, for example, retired air force general and Fox News senior military analyst Thomas G. McInerney, retired army general and NBC/MSNBC military analyst Montgomery Meigs, and retired army general and NBC/MSNBC military analyst Barry R. McCaffrey. After the exposé appeared, though, they seem to have just carried right on with their media duties.
Much of the print media has similarly adhered to the principle of once-an-expert-always-an-expert. For instance, on the fifth anniversary of Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, the
New York Times
decided to ask a range of “experts on military and foreign affairs” to look back on that fiasco—and then rounded up the usual suspects. Of the nine experts it came up with, six were intimately involved in that catastrophe either as drumbeaters for the invasion, instigators of it, or facilitators of the occupation that followed—Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka, and Frederick Kagan (enthusiasts all), Richard Perle (aka “the prince of darkness”), L. Paul Bremer (the administration’s first viceroy in Baghdad), and General Paul D. Eaton (who trained Iraqi troops in the early years of the occupation). Notably absent was anyone who had seriously opposed the invasion. The closest was Anne-Marie Slaughter, a “liberal hawk” who wrote a supportive
New York Times
op-ed on March 18, 2003, two days before the invasion began, headlined, “Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.”
The
Times
anniversary spread appeared in March 2008. Jump ahead a year-plus and the
Times
once again launched what undoubtedly was a mighty search for experts who might consider Colonel Reese’s suggestion that we take our hand off that Iraqi bike—and came up with a typical crew of seven: One, retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, was an adviser to General David Petraeus, former top U.S. commander in Iraq, now Centcom commander overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A second, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, was also an adviser to Petraeus and had most recently been on the “team” that advised General Stanley A. McChrystal in his review of Afghan War strategy. A third, Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was on the same McChrystal team. A fourth, Thomas Ricks, former
Washington Post
military reporter and now senior fellow at Nagl’s center, was the author of the bestselling book
The Gamble
, a highly complimentary account of Petraeus’s role in Iraq in which Nagl is, of course, a figure. (Ricks, by the way, has long made it clear that he believes we will be in that country for years to come.) A fifth, Kori Schake, now at the Hoover Institution, was a former national security adviser on defense issues to President George W. Bush. A sixth, Jonathan
Morgenstein, was a senior national security policy fellow at Third Way, another Washington think tank, and “was a military transition team adviser to the Iraqi Army.” Not surprisingly, all six of these experts, with the most modest of caveats, dismissed Reese’s suggestion out of hand, agreeing that it was in no one’s interest to expedite an American departure. (“The pace of progress in Iraq will be slow, but we can’t throw up our hands and walk away,” as one of them commented.) Only a seventh expert, author and retired colonel Douglas Macgregor, agreed with Reese.