Airless in Washington
Not that Washington, which obviously feels it has much to impart to the Afghan people about good governance and how to deal with corruption, has particularly firm ground to stand on. After all, in 2008, the United States completed its first billion-dollar presidential election in a $5 billion election season, and two administrations just propped up some of the worst financial scofflaws in the history of the world and got nothing back in return. Meanwhile, the money flowing into Washington political coffers from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care industries, real estate, legal firms, and the like might be thought of as a kind of drug in itself. At the same time, according to
USA Today
, at least 158 retired generals and admirals, many already pulling in military pensions in the range of $100,000 to $200,000, have been hired as “senior mentors” by the Pentagon “to offer advice under an unusual arrangement”: they also work for companies seeking Defense Department contracts.
In Congress, a rare Senate maneuver—needing a sixty-vote super-majority to pass anything of significance—has, almost without comment, become a commonplace for the passage of just about anything. This means Congress is eternally in a state of gridlock. And that’s just for starters when it comes to ways in which the U.S. government, so ready to surge its military and its civilian employees into Afghanistan in the name of good governance, is in need of repair, if not nation-building, itself.
It’s nonetheless the wisdom of this Washington and of this military that Obama has not found wanting, at least when it comes to Afghanistan. So why did he listen to them? Stop for a moment and consider the cast of characters who offered the president the full range of advice available in Washington, all of it, as far as we can tell, from Joe Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy to McChrystal’s COIN and beyond, escalatory in
nature. Just a cursory glance at the Obama team’s collective record should at least make you wonder:
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now said to be the official with the best ties to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and therefore the one in charge of “coaxing” him into a round of reasonable nation-building, of making “a new compact” with the Afghan people by “improving governance and cracking down on corruption.” Yet, in the early 1990s, in her single significant nation-building experience at home, she botched the possibility of getting a universal health-care bill through Congress. She also had the “wisdom” to vote in 2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
• Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reputedly deeply trusted by the president and in charge of planning out our military future in Afghanistan, was in the 1980s a supposed expert on the Soviet Union, as well as deputy CIA director and later deputy to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Yet, in those years, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the Soviets were done for, even as that empire was disappearing from the face of the earth. In the words of former National Security Council official Roger Morris, Gates “waged a final battle against the Soviets, denying at every turn that the old enemy was actually dying.” Former CIA official Melvin Goodman writes: “Gates was wrong about every key intelligence question of the 1980s.… A Kremlinologist by training, Gates was one of the last American hardliners to comprehend the changes taking place in the Soviet Union. He was wrong about Mikhail Gorbachev, wrong about the importance of reform, wrong about Moscow’s pursuit of arms control and détente with the United States. He was wrong about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
• Vice President Joe Biden, described by James Traub in the
New York Times
as potentially “the second-most powerful
vice president in history,” as well as “the president’s all-purpose adviser and sage” on foreign policy, was during the Bush years a believer in nation-building in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and later promoted the idea—like Caesar with Gaul—of dividing that country into three parts (without, of course, bothering to ask the Iraqis), while leaving 25,000 to 30,000 American troops based there in perpetuity.
• General Stanley McChrystal, our war commander in Afghanistan and now the poster boy for counterinsurgency warfare, had his skills honed purely in the field of counterterrorism. The man who is now to “protect” the Afghan people previously won his spurs as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• General David Petraeus, who has practically been deified in the U.S. media, is perhaps the savviest and most accomplished of this crew. His greatest skill, however, has been in fostering the career of David Petraeus. He is undoubtedly an adviser with an agenda and in his wake come a whole crew of military and think-tank experts, with almost unblemished records of being wrong in the Bush years, but to whom the surge in Iraq gave new legitimacy.
• Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador to Kabul, in his previous career in the U.S. military served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and as the commander of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan was the general responsible for building up the Afghan army and “reforming” that country’s police force. We know how effective those attempts proved.
• And then there are key figures with well-padded Washington CVs like Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, or James Jones, present national security adviser and former commandant of the Marine Corps, as well as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, as well as a close
friend of Senator John McCain, and a former revolving-door board member of Chevron and Boeing. Remind me just what sticks in your mind about their accomplishments?
So, when you think about Barack Obama’s Afghan decisions, remember first that the man considered the smartest, most thoughtful president of our era chose to surround himself with these people. He chose, that is, not fresh air, or fresh thought in the field of foreign and war policy, but the airless precincts where the combined wisdom of Washington and the Pentagon now exists, and the remarkable lack of accomplishment that goes with it. In short, these are people whose credentials largely consist of not having been right about much over the years.
Admittedly, this administration has called in practically every Afghan expert in sight. Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn’t in Afghanistan; it’s in Washington where knowledge is slim, egos large, and conventional national security wisdom deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down. The president campaigned on the slogan, “Change we can believe in.” He then chose as advisers—in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error, narrow and unimaginative thinking, and overidentification with the powerful could easily be compiled—a crew who had never seen a significant change or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with.
As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guantánamo remains open, black sites are still operating in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s budget has grown yet larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for yet more money to pay for George W. Bush’s wars will, despite promises, continue.
Obama has ensured that Afghanistan, the first of Bush’s disastrous wars, is now truly his war, as well.
The Nine Surges of Obama’s War
In his West Point speech, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of
the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the “surge” is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media’s focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those thirty thousand new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually under way.
In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it’s scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together. What follows, then, is my attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the Unites States has been surging as part of Obama’s widening war.
1.
The troop surge
: Let’s start with those “30,000” new troops the president announced. First of all, they represent phase two of Obama’s surge. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were “just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan” when he took office in January 2009. In March 2009, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. By December 2009, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. However, if you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 dispatched after the March announcement, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the
Washington Post
, 11,000 of those were “authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year,” bringing the figure to between 64,000
and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan “surge” was already under way when Obama arrived. It also seems that at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door without notice or comment. Similarly, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the [30,000] number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.” That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed “senior military official” told DeYoung that “the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.”
Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.
2.
The contractor surge
: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many formerly military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases.
There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. They certainly went unmentioned in Obama’s West Point speech. Yet a modest-sized article by August Cole in the
Wall Street Journal
the day after gave us the basics, if you went looking for them. Headlined “U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace,” Cole’s article reported: “The Defense Department’s latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40 percent between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5 percent in the same
period.… Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total.” In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.
Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corporation, the website TPM Muckraker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 “third country nationals” among the contractors, and among those 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that DynCorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan, “which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years.”
3.
The militia surge
: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a minisurge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to create a movement along the lines of Iraq’s Sunni Awakening movement that, many believe, ensured the “success” of George W. Bush’s 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we’ll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of cash.
This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense Initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of
USA Today,
will “funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize ‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with security.” Think of this as a “bribe” surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy “friendship.”
4.
The civilian surge
: The State Department now claims to be “on track” to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by early 2010. Of course, that means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government, including “diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and
to provincial reconstruction teams across the country.” A similar civilian surge is evidently under way in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for that humongous new, nearly billion-dollar embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.