On stage, it would be farce. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s bound to play out as tragedy.
In March 2010 Barack Obama flew into Afghanistan for six hours, essentially to read the riot act to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whom his ambassador had only months before termed “not an adequate strategic partner.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs admiral Mike Mullen followed within a day to deliver his own “stern message.” While still on Air Force One, National Security Adviser James Jones offered reporters a version of the tough talk Obama was bringing with him. Karzai would later see one of Jones’s comments and find it insulting. Brought to his attention as well would be a newspaper article that quoted an anonymous senior U.S. military official as saying of his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputedly corrupt power broker in the southern city of Kandahar: “I’d like him out of there…. But there’s nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency, then we can put him on the [target list] and capture and kill him.” This was tough talk indeed. (As it turned out, in July 2011 Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated at his home in Kandahar by a former bodyguard.)
At the time, the media repeatedly pointed out that President Obama, unlike his predecessor, had consciously developed a standoffish relationship with Karzai. Meanwhile, both named and anonymous officials regularly castigated the Afghan president in the press for stealing an election and running a hopelessly corrupt, inefficient government that had little power outside Kabul, the capital. A previously planned Karzai visit to Washington was put on hold to emphasize the toughness of the new approach.
The administration was clearly intent on fighting a better version of the Afghan War with a new commander, a new plan of action, and a tamed Afghan president, a client head of state who would finally accept his lesser place in the greater scheme of things. A little blunt talk, some necessary threats, and the big stick of American power and money were sure to do the trick.
Meanwhile, across the border in Pakistan, the administration was in an all-carrots mood when it came to the local military and civilian leadership—billions of dollars of carrots, in fact. Our top military and civilian officials had all but taken up residence in Islamabad. By March 2010, for instance, Admiral Mullen had already visited the country fifteen times and U.S. dollars (and promises of more) were flowing in. Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations forces were arriving in the country’s wild borderlands to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps and the skies were filling with CIA-directed unmanned aerial vehicles pounding those same borderlands, where the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other insurgent groups involved in the Afghan War were located. In Pakistan, it was said, a crucial “strategic relationship” was being carefully cultivated.
Skip ahead to mid-May 2010 and somehow, like so many stealthy insurgents, the carrots and sticks had crossed the poorly marked, porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan heading in opposite directions. On May 12, Karzai was in Washington being given “the red carpet treatment” as part of what was termed an Obama administration “charm offensive” and a “four-day love fest.” The president set aside a rare stretch of hours to entertain Karzai and the planeload of ministers he brought with him.
At a joint news conference, Obama insisted that “perceived tensions” between the two men had been “overstated.” Specific orders went out from the White House to curb public criticism of the Afghan president and give him “more public respect” as “the chief U.S. partner in the war effort.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured Karzai of Washington’s long-term “commitment” to his country, as did Obama and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal. Praise was the order of the day.
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, interrupted a financial reform debate to invite Karzai onto the Senate floor (an honor not bestowed on a head of state since 1967), where he was mobbed by senators eager to shake his hand. He was once again our man in Kabul. It was a stunning turnaround: a president almost without power in his own country had somehow tamed the commander in chief of the globe’s lone superpower.
Meanwhile, Clinton, who had shepherded the Afghan president on a walk through a “private enclave” in Georgetown and hosted a “glittering reception” for him, appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to flay Pakistan. In the wake of an inept failed car bombing in New York City’s Times Square, she had this stern message to send to the Pakistani leadership: “We want more, we expect more…. We’ve made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.” Such consequences would evidently include a halt to the flow of U.S. aid to a country in economically disastrous shape. So much for the carrots.
According to the Washington Post, General McChrystal delivered a “similar message” to the chief of staff of the Pakistani army. To back up Clinton’s public threats and McChrystal’s private ones, hordes of anonymous American military and civilian officials were ready to pepper reporters with leaks about the tough love that might now be in store for Pakistan. The same Post story, for instance, spoke of “some officials… weighing in favor of a far more muscular and unilateral U.S. policy. It would include a geographically expanded use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan and pressure for a stronger U.S. military presence there.”
According to similar accounts, “more pointed” messages were heading for key Pakistanis and “new and stiff warnings” were being issued. Americans were said to be pushing for expanded special operations training programs in the Pakistani tribal areas, while insisting that the Pakistani military launch a major campaign in North Waziristan, the heartland of various resistance groups including possibly al-Qaeda. “The element of threat” was now in the air, according to Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador, while in press reports you could hear rumblings about an “internal debate” in Washington that might result in more American “boots on the ground.”
In other words, in the space of two months the Obama administration had flip-flopped when it came to who exactly was to be pressured and who reassured. A typically anonymous “former U.S. official who advises the administration on Afghan policy” caught the moment well in a comment to the Wall Street Journal. “This whole bending over backwards to show Karzai the red carpet,” he told journalist Peter Spiegel, “is a result of not having had a concerted strategy for how to grapple with him.”
On a larger scale, the flip-flop seemed to reflect tactical and strategic incoherence—and not just in relation to Karzai. To all appearances, when it comes to the administration’s two South Asian wars, one open, one more hidden, Obama and his top officials were flailing around. For all the policy reviews and shuttling officials, the surging troops, extra private contractors, and new bases, Obama’s wars were worsening. Lacking was any coherent regional policy or semblance of real strategy—counterinsurgency being only a method of fighting and a set of tactics for doing so. In place of strategic coherence there was just one knee-jerk response: escalation. As unexpected events gripped the Obama administration by the throat, its officials increasingly acted as if further escalation were their only choice, their fated choice.
This response was eerily familiar. It permeated Washington’s mentality in the Vietnam War years. In fact, one of the strangest aspects of that war was the way America’s leaders—including President Lyndon Johnson—felt increasingly helpless and hopeless even as they committed themselves to further steps up the ladder of escalation.
We don’t know what the main actors in Obama’s war have been feeling. We don’t have their private documents or their secret taped conversations. Nonetheless, it should ring a bell when, as wars devolve, the only response Washington can imagine is further escalation.
One thing can be said about the Bush administration: it had a grand strategic vision to go with its wars. Its top officials were convinced that the American military, a force they saw as unparalleled on planet Earth, would be capable of unilaterally shock-and-awing America’s enemies in the oil heartlands of the planet. Its two wars would bring not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Iran and Syria to their knees, leaving Washington to impose a Pax Americana on the Middle East and Central Asia (in the process of which groups like Hamas and Hezbollah would be subdued and anti-American jihadism ended).
They couldn’t, of course, have been more wrong, something quite apparent to the Obama team. Now, however, we have a crew in Washington that seems to have no vision, great or small, when it comes to American foreign or imperial policy, and that seems, in fact, to lack any sense of strategy at all. What they have is a set of increasingly discredited tactics and an approach that might pass for good old American see-what-works “pragmatism.”
The vision may be long gone, but the wars live on with their own inexorable momentum. Add into the mix American domestic politics, which could discourage any president from changing course and de-escalating a war, and you have what looks like a fatal—and fatally expensive—brew.
We’ve moved from Bush’s visionary disasters to Obama’s flailing wars, while the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq continue to pay the price. If only we could close the curtain on this strange mix of farce and tragedy, but evidently we’re still stuck in act four of a five-act nightmare.
All of this leaves the massive American investment of its most precious resources, including lives, in Afghanistan an ongoing mystery that is never addressed. Somewhere in that country’s vast stretches of poppy fields or in the halls of Washington’s national security bureaucracy, lurks a great unasked question. It’s a question asked almost half a century ago regarding the war in Vietnam, the lost war to which David Petraeus turned in 2006 to produce the army counterinsurgency manual that became the basis for his surge strategy.
The question then was: Why are we in Vietnam? It even became the title of a Norman Mailer novel. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration produced a government propaganda film solely in response to that question, which was already threatening to drive down his polling figures and upend his Great Society at home. The film was called Why Viet-Nam. While it had no question mark after the title, the question of whether to add one was actually argued out in the most literal way inside the administration. The film began with the president quoting a letter he had received from a mother “in the Midwest” whose son was stationed in Vietnam. You hear the president, in his homey twang, pick up that woman’s question as if it were his own. “Why Viet-Nam?” he repeats three times as the title appears on the screen, after which, official or not, a question mark seems to hover over every scene, as it did over the war itself.
In a sense, the same question mark appeared both before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it has never been associated with Afghanistan. Because of 9/11, Afghanistan remained for years the (relatively) good (and largely forgotten) war, until visible failure visibly tarnished it.
It’s far past time to ask that question, even as the Obama administration repeats the al-Qaeda mantra of the Bush years almost word for word and lets any explanation go at that. Why are we in Afghanistan? Why is our treasure being wasted there when it’s needed here?
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19, 2010, and was headlined, “U.S. Military Criticized for Purchase of Russian Copters for Afghan Air Corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan War and nation-building project is by now in the many hundreds of billions of dollars. And, of course, those dollars have to go somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the United States, state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police—and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force—little used in the Taliban era—was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the “Afghan air force” (with about fifty helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.
Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan’s fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.” So various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.
But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands—and in Washington.
1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t: There are some 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there’s a problem. There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English—“the official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari.)
Thanks to this language barrier, the U.S. military can train endlessly and next to nothing is guaranteed to happen. “So far,” reports Whitlock, “only one Afghan pilot has graduated from flight school in the United States, although dozens are in the pipeline. That has forced the air corps to rely on pilots who learned to fly Mi-17s during the days of Soviet and Taliban rule.” In other words, despite the impressive Soviet performance in the 1980s, the training of the Afghan Air Force has been re-imagined by Americans as a Sisyphean undertaking.
And this offers but a hint of how bizarre U.S. training programs for the Afghan military and police have proven to be. In fact, sometimes it seems as if exactly the same scathing report, detailing the same training problems and setbacks, has been recycled yearly without anyone who mattered finding it particularly odd—or being surprised that the response to each successive piece of bad news is to decide to pour yet more money and trainers into the project. For example, in 2005, at a time when Washington had already spent $3.3 billion training and mentoring the Afghan army and police, the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report indicating that “efforts to fully equip the increasing number of [Afghan] combat troops have fallen behind, and efforts to establish sustaining institutions, such as a logistics command, needed to support these troops have not kept pace.” Worse yet, the report fretted, it might take “up to $7.2 billion to complete [the training project] and about $600 million annually to sustain [it].”
In 2006, according to the New York Times, “a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department… found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.” At best, stated the report, fewer than half of the officially announced number of police were “trained and equipped to carry out their police functions.”
In 2008, by which time $16.5 billion had been spent on army and police training programs, the GAO chimed in again, indicating that only two of 105 army units were “assessed as being fully capable of conducting their primary mission,” while “no police unit is fully capable.” In 2009, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction reported that “only 24 of 559 Afghan police units are considered ready to operate without international help.”
Such reports, as well as repeated (and repetitive) news investigations and stories on the subject, invariably are accompanied by a litany of complaints about corruption, indiscipline, illiteracy, drug use, staggering desertion rates, Taliban infiltration, ghost soldiers, and a host of other problems. In 2009, however, the solution remained as expectable as the problems: “The report called for more U.S. trainers and more money.”
In June 2010, a U.S. government audit, again from the Special Inspector General, reported that “the standards used to appraise the Afghan forces since 2005 were woefully inadequate, inflating their abilities.” The usual litany of training woes followed. Yet, according to Reuters, President Obama was asking for another $14.2 billion for the training project “for this year and next.” And on July 22, 2010, the Wall Street Journal’s Julian Barnes reported that war commander General David Petraeus was planning to “retool” U.S. strategy to include “a greater focus on how Afghanistan’s security forces are being trained.”
When it comes to U.S. training programs then, you might conclude that Afghanistan has proved to be the land where time stood still—and so, evidently, has the Washington national security establishment’s collective brain. For Washington, there seems to be no learning curve in Afghanistan, not when it comes to “training” Afghans anyway.
And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven’t had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven’t had years of advice from the best U.S. and NATO advisers money can buy; they haven’t had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting. They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up-to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified U.S. military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters, and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.
It appears then, as a modern miracle in reverse that the United States has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their martial traditions. Similarly, it’s abidingly curious that the United States has so far failed to train a modest-sized air force, even flying refurbished Italian light transport planes from the 1980s and those Russian helicopters, when the Soviet Union, the last imperial power to try this, proved up to creating an Afghan force able to pilot aircraft ranging from helicopters to fighter planes.
2. Non-Exit strategies: Now, let’s wade a little deeper into the strangeness of what Whitlock reported by taking up the question of when we’re actually planning to leave Afghanistan. Consider this passage from the Whitlock piece: “U.S. military officials have estimated that the Afghan air force won’t be able to operate independently until 2016, five years after President Obama has said he intends to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But [U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael R.] Boera said that date could slip by at least two years if Congress forces the Afghans to fly U.S. choppers.” In other words, while Americans argue over what the president’s drawdown date really means, and while Afghan president Hamid Karzai suggests that Afghan forces will take over the country’s security duties by 2014, Whitlock’s anonymous “U.S. military officials” are clearly operating on a different clock, on, in fact, Pentagon time, and so are planning for a 2016–2018 target date for that force simply to “operate independently” (which by no means indicates “without U.S. support”).
If you were of a conspiratorial mind-set, you might almost think that the Pentagon preferred not to create an effective Afghan air force and instead wanted to remain the substitute Afghan air force forever and a day—as has also been the case in Iraq, a country that once had the world’s sixth largest air force and now, after years of U.S. mentoring, has next to nothing.
3. Who Are the Russians Now?: Okay, let’s move even deeper into American strangeness with a passage that makes up most of the twentieth and twenty-first paragraphs of Whitlock’s twenty-five-paragraph piece: “In addition,” he reports, “the U.S. Special Operations Command would like to buy a few Mi-17s of its own, so that special forces carrying out clandestine missions could cloak the fact that they are American. ‘We would like to have some to blend in and do things,’ said a senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the clandestine program.” No explanation follows on just how—or where—those Russian helicopters will help “cloak” American Special Operations missions, or what they are to “blend” into, or the “things” they are to do. There’s no further discussion of the subject at all. In other words, the special op urge to Russianize its air transport has officially been reported, and as far as I know, not a single congressional representative has made a fuss over it, no mainstream pundit has written a curious or angry editorial challenging its appropriateness, and no reporter has followed up.
As just another little factoid of no great import buried deep in an article focused on other matters, undoubtedly no one has given it a thought. But it’s worth stopping a moment and considering just how odd this tiny bit of news-that-won’t-ever-rise-to-the-level-of-news actually is. One way to do this is to play the sort of opposites game that never quite works on this still one-way planet of ours.
Just imagine a similar news item coming out of another country.
Hot off the wires from Tehran: Iranian special forces teams are scouring the planet for old American Chinook helicopters so they can be well “cloaked” in planned future forays into Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.
That might be a little hard to imagine right now, but I guarantee you one thing: had some foreign news source reported such a plan, or had Craig Whitlock somehow uncovered it and included it in a piece—no matter how obscurely nestled—there would have been pandemonium in Washington. Congress would have held hearings. Pundits would have opined on the infamy of Iranian operatives masking themselves in our choppers. The company or companies that sold the helicopters would have been investigated. And you can imagine what Fox News commentators would have had to say.
When we do such things, however, and a country like Pakistan reacts with what’s usually described as “anti-Americanism,” we wonder at the nationalistic hair-trigger they’re on. We comment on their over-emotionalism, we highlight their touchy “sensibilities,” and our reporters and pundits then write empathetically about the difficulties American military and civilian officials have dealing with such edgy natives. In July 2010, for instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were expanding their role in the Pakistani tribal borderlands by more regularly “venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops.” The Pakistani government has not been eager to have American boots visibly on the ground in these areas, and so Journal reporter Julian Barnes wrote, “Because of Pakistan’s sensitivities, the U.S. role has developed slowly.”
Imagine how sensitive they might prove to be if those same forces began to land Russian helicopters in Pakistan as a way to “cloak” their operations and blend in? Or just what sort of hair-trigger the natives of Montana might be on if Pakistani special operations types were roaming Glacier National Park and landing old American helicopters outside Butte. Then consider the sensitivities of Pakistanis on learning that the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service turned out to be a man of “impeccable credentials” (so said then-CIA director Leon Panetta). Among those credentials were his stint as the CIA station chief in Pakistan until sometime in 2009, his involvement in the exceedingly unpopular drone war in that country’s tribal borderlands, and the way, as Panetta put it a tad vaguely, he “guided complex operations under some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.”
Here’s the truth of the matter, as Whitlock’s piece makes clear: we carry on in the most bizarre ways in far-off lands and think nothing of it. Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm. For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers. If we can’t imagine the surpassing strangeness of our arrangements for making war in lands thousands of miles from the United States, then we can’t begin to imagine how the world sees us, which means that we’re blind to our own madness.
Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On September 27, 2010, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s latest book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the commander in chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting called to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it—Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that was meant to represent the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they moved toward a theoretical goal of 400,000—an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success was a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.
The eye-catching detail, however, was the date on the chart. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below the 68,000 level. In other words, two to five years from that September, if all went as planned—a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far—the United States might be back to the force levels of early 2009, before the president’s second surge was launched.
And when would those troops dwindle to near zero? 2019? 2025? The chart makers were far too politic to include anything beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing what they were thinking. But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, was dreaming of and most forcefully recommending to the president a forever war, one which the Office of Management and Budget estimated would cost almost $900 billion?
Of course, as we now know, the military “lost” this battle. Instead of the 40,000 troops they desired, they “only” got 30,000 from a frustrated president, plus a few thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and don’t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a price, couldn’t say no—all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the 10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders.
When, on December 1, 2009, Barack Obama addressed the cadets of West Point and, through them, the rest of us to announce the second Afghan surge of his presidency, he was at least able to slip in a date to begin the drawdown of U.S. forces. (“But taken together, 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.”) Hardly a nanosecond passed before—first “on background” and soon enough in public—administration spokespeople rushed to reassure the rest of Washington that such a transfer would be “conditions based.” Given conditions there since 2001, not exactly a reassuring statement.
Let’s keep two things in mind here: just how narrow the options the president considered were, and just how large the surge he reluctantly launched was. By the end of fall 2009, it was common knowledge in Washington that the administration’s fiercely debated Afghan War “review” never considered a “less” option, only ones involving “more.” Thanks to Woodward, we can put definitive numbers to those options. The least of the “more” options was Vice President Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy, focused on more trainers for the Afghan military and police plus more drone attacks and Special Forces operations. It involved a surge of 20,000 U.S. troops. According to Woodward, the military commanders, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the secretary of defense more or less instantly ruled this out.
The military’s chosen option was for those 40,000 troops and an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Between them lay a barely distinguishable 30,000 to 35,000 option. The only other option mentioned during the review process involved a surge of 85,000, and it, too, was ruled out by the military because troops in that quantity simply weren’t available. This, then, was the full “range” of debate in Washington about the Afghan War. No wonder the president, according to Woodward, exclaimed in anger, “So what’s my option? You have given me one option.”
It’s also important to remember that this round of surgification involved a lot more than those 30,000 troops and various add-ons. Thanks to Woodward’s book, for instance, we now know that, in 2002, the Bush administration allowed the CIA to organize a secret Afghan “paramilitary army,” modeled after the U.S. Special Forces and divided into “counterterrorist pursuit teams.” Three thousand in all, these irregulars have been operating as proxy fighters and assassins in Afghanistan. And, in the Obama era, they have evidently also been venturing into the Pakistani tribal borderlands where CIA drone attacks are already part of everyday life. U.S. helicopters upped the ante in the first of two such incidents by venturing across the same border to attack retreating Taliban fighters in what U.S. military spokespeople termed “self-defense,” but was known in the Vietnam era as “hot pursuit.”
In addition, U.S. military commanders, the New York Times reports, have threatened worse. (“As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan… issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.”)
All of this is part of the unspoken Pentagon doctrine of forever war. And lest you think that the 2016 date for an Afghan drawdown was a one-of-a-kind bit of planning, consider this line from a New York Times report by Michael Gordon and John Burns on Pentagon anxiety over the British government’s desire to cut defense spending by up to 20 percent: “American and British officials said that they did not expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the next five years.” Let that sink in for a moment: “over the next five years.” It obviously reflects the thinking of anonymous officials of some significance and, if you do the modest math, you once again find yourself more or less at January 1, 2016. In a just released Rolling Stone interview, even the president can be found saying, vaguely but ominously, of the Afghan War: “[I]t’s going to take us several years to work through this issue.”
Does this sound like a military getting ready to leave town any time soon?
And don’t forget the $1.3 billion in funds pending in Congress that Pincus tells us the Pentagon has requested “for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan.” We’re obviously talking 2012 to 2015 here, too. Or how about the $6.2 billion a year that the Pentagon is projected to spend on the training of Afghan forces from 2012 through 2016? Or what about the Pentagon contract TomDispatch.com’s Nick Turse dug up that was awarded to private contractor SOS International primarily for translators with an estimated completion date of September 2014? Or how about the gigantic embassy-cum-command-center-cum-citadel (modeled on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, at present the largest in the world) which the Obama administration has decided to build in Islamabad, Pakistan?
And let’s not leave out the army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, “Operating Concept, 2016–2028,” overseen by Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, a senior adviser to General Petraeus. It ditches the “Buck Rogers” visions of futuristic war, and instead describes counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as “wars of exhaustion,” in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.
Like an alcoholic on a bender, the present Pentagon and military cast of characters can’t stop themselves. Forever war is in their blood, so much so that they’re ready to face down the commander in chief, if necessary, to make it continue. This is really the definition of an addiction—not to victory, but to the state of war itself. Don’t expect them to discipline themselves. They won’t.
You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it? Not ever.
For me, that moment came when the Associated Press covered U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry’s announcement that a $511 million contract had been awarded to Caddell Construction, one of America’s “largest construction and engineering groups,” for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul. According to the ambassador, that embassy is already “the largest… in the world with more than 1,100 brave and dedicated civilians… from 16 agencies and working next to their military counterparts in 30 provinces,” and yet it seems it’s still not large enough.
A few other things in his announcement caught my eye. Construction of the new “permanent offices and housing” for embassy personnel is not to be completed until sometime in 2014, and that $511 million is part of a $790 million bill to U.S. taxpayers that will include expansion work on consular facilities in the Afghan cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat.
If the ambassador’s announcement was meant to fly below the media radar screen in the United States, it was clearly supposed to be noticed in Afghanistan. After all, Eikenberry publicly insisted that the awarding of the contract should be considered “an indication… an action, a deed that you can take as a long-term commitment of the United States government to the government of Afghanistan.”
Jo Comerford and the number-crunchers at the National Priorities Project have placed that $790 million outlay into an American context: “$790 million is more than ten times the money the federal government allotted for the State Energy Program in FY2011. It’s nearly five times the total amount allocated for the National Endowment for the Arts… If that sum were applied instead to job creation in the United States, in new hires it would yield more than 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers, and employ more than 13,000 in the burgeoning clean energy industry.”
Still, to understand just why, among a flood of similar war reports, this one got under my skin, you need a bit of backstory.
One night in May 2007, I was nattering on at the dinner table about reports of a monstrous new U.S. embassy being constructed in Baghdad, so big that it put former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s grandiose Disneyesque palaces to shame. On 104 acres of land in the heart of the Iraqi capital (always referred to in news reports as almost the size of Vatican City), it was slated to cost $590 million. (Predictable cost overruns and delays would, in the end, bring that figure to at least $740 million, while the cost of running the place yearly is estimated at $1.5 billion.) Back then, more than half a billion dollars was impressive enough, even for a compound that was to have its own self-contained electricity-generation, water-purification, and sewage systems in a city lacking most of those things, not to speak of its own antimissile defense systems and twenty all-new blast-resistant buildings including restaurants, a recreation center, and other amenities. It was to be by far the largest, most heavily fortified embassy on the planet with a “diplomatic” staff of a thousand (a number that has only grown since).
My wife listened to my description of this future colossus, which bore no relation to anything ever previously called an “embassy,” and then, out of the blue, said, “I wonder who the architect is?” Strangely, I hadn’t even considered that such a mega-citadel might actually have an architect. So imagine my surprise on discovering that there was indeed a Kansas architect, BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri. Better yet, BDY was so proud to have been taken on as architect to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our era that it posted sketches at its website of what the future embassy, its “pool house,” its tennis court, PX, retail and shopping areas, and other highlights were going to look like.
Somewhere between horrified and grimly amused, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch, entitled “The Mother Ship Lands in Baghdad” and, via a link to the BDY drawings, offered readers a little “blast-resistant spin” through Bush’s colossus. From the beginning, I grasped that this wasn’t an embassy in any normal sense and I understood as well something of what it was. Here’s the way I put it at the time: “As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet’s sole ‘hyperpower,’ dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington’s dream and Kansas City’s idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul—or a khan.”
In other words, a U.S. control center at the heart of what Bush administration officials then liked to call “the Greater Middle East.” To my surprise, the piece began racing around the Internet and other sites—TomDispatch did not then have the capacity to post images—started putting up BDY’s crude drawings. The next thing I knew, the State Department had panicked, declared this a “security breach,” and forced BDY to take down its site and remove the drawings. I was amazed, but—and here we come to the failure of my own imagination—I never doubted that BDY’s bizarre imperial mother ship being prepared for landing in Baghdad was the singular spawn of the Bush administration. I saw it as essentially a vanity production sired by a particular set of fantasies about imposing a Pax Americana abroad and a Pax Republicana at home. It never crossed my mind that there would be two such “embassies.”
So, on this, call me delusional. By May 2009, with Barack Obama in the White House, I knew as much. That was when two McClatchy reporters broke a story about a similar project for a new “embassy” in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, at the projected cost of $736 million.
Now, with the news in from Kabul, we know that there are going to be three mother ships. All gigantic beyond belief. All (after the usual cost overruns) undoubtedly in the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar to billion-dollar range. All meant not to house modest numbers of diplomats acting as the face of the United States in a foreign land, but thousands of diplomats, spies, civilian personnel, military officials, agents, and operatives hunkering down long term for war and skullduggery.
Connect two points and you have a straight line. Connect three points and you have a pattern—in this case, simple and striking. The visionaries and fundamentalists of the Bush years may be gone and visionless managers of the tattered American imperium now directing the show. Nonetheless, they and the U.S. military in the region remain remarkably devoted to the control of the Greater Middle East. Even without a vision, there is still the war momentum and the money to support it.
While Americans fight bitterly over whether the stimulus package for the domestic economy was too large or too small, few in the United States even notice that the American stimulus package in Kabul, Islamabad, Baghdad, and elsewhere in our embattled Raj is going great guns. Embassies the size of pyramids are still being built, military bases to stagger the imagination continue to be constructed, and nowhere, not even in Iraq, is it clear that Washington is committed to packing up its tents, abandoning its billion-dollar monuments, and coming home.
In the United States, it’s going to be paralysis and stagnation all the way, but in Peshawar and Mazar-i-sharif, not to speak of the greater Persian Gulf region, we remain the spendthrifts of war, perfectly willing, for instance, to ship fuel across staggering distances and unimaginably long supply lines to Afghanistan at $400 a gallon to further crank up an energy-heavy conflict. At home, it’s peace all the way to the unemployment line, because peace, in our American world, increasingly seems to mean economic disaster. In the Greater Middle East, it’s war to the horizon, all war all the time, and creeping escalation all the way around.
The folks who started us down this precipitous path and over an economic cliff are now in retirement and heading onto the memoir circuit. Our former president is chatting it up with Matt Lauer and Oprah. His vice president is nursing his heart while assumedly writing about “his service in four presidential administrations.” His national security adviser, then secretary of state (for whom Chevron once named a double-hulled oil tanker) is already heading into her second and third memoir. But while they scribble and yak, their policy ghosts haunt us, as does their greatest edifice, that embassy in Baghdad, now being cloned elsewhere. Even without them or the neocons who pounded the drums for them, the U.S. military still pushes doggedly toward 2014 and beyond in Afghanistan, while officials “tweak” their drawdown non-schedules, narrow the president’s non-options, and step in to fund and build yet more command-and-control centers in the Greater Middle East.
It looks and feels like the never-ending story, and yet, of course, the imperium is visibly fraying, while the burden of distant wars grows ever heavier. Those “embassies” are being built for the long haul, but a decade or two down the line, I wouldn’t want to put my money on what exactly they will represent, or what they could possibly hope to control.
“Going, going, gone!” You can almost hear the announcer’s voice throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.
Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over is: just this side of never. If you take the word of our Afghan War commander, the secretary of defense, and top officials of the Obama administration and NATO, we’re not leaving anytime soon. As with any clever time traveler, every date that’s set always contains a verbal escape hatch into the future.
In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man, about a fellow who passed through a radioactive cloud in the Pacific Ocean and soon noticed that his suits were too big for him. Next thing you knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off his pet cat, and fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster. Finally, he disappeared entirely, leaving behind only a sonorous voice to tell us that he had entered a universe where “the unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.”
The date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point and is now threatening to disappear “over the horizon” (a place where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once they have finally transferred their duties to the Afghan forces they are training). If you remember, back in December 2009, President Obama spoke of July 2011 as a firm date to “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan,” the moment assumedly when the beginning of the end of the war would come into sight. In July 2010, Afghan president Hamid Karzai spoke of 2014 as the date when Afghan security forces “will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country.” Administration officials, anxious about the effect that the 2011 date was having on an American public grown weary of an unpopular war and on an enemy waiting for us to depart, grabbed Karzai’s date and ran with it (leaving many of his caveats about the war the Americans were fighting, particularly his desire to reduce the American presence, in the dust). Now, 2014 is the new 2011.
It has, in fact, been widely reported that Obama officials have been working in concert to “play down” the president’s 2011 date, while refocusing attention on 2014. Top administration officials have been little short of voluble on the subject. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (“We’re not getting out. We’re talking about probably a years-long process.”), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs admiral Mike Mullen, attending a security conference in Australia, all “cited 2014… as the key date for handing over the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves.” The New York Times headlined its report on the change in timing this way: “U.S. Tweaks Message on Troops in Afghanistan.” Quite a tweak. Added Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, “The message shift is effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops perceived to be leaving shortly.”
Barely had 2014 risen into the headlines before that date, too, began its vanishing act. As a start, it turned out that American planners weren’t talking about just any old day in 2014, but its last one. As Lieutenant General William Caldwell, head of the NATO training program for Afghan security forces, put it while holding a Q&A with a group of bloggers, “They’re talking about December 31st, 2014. It’s the end of December in 2014… that [Afghan] President Karzai has said they want Afghan security forces in the lead.”
No one, officials rushed to say, was talking about 2014 as a date for all American troops to head for the exits, just combat troops—and maybe not even all of them. Possibly tens of thousands of trainers and other so-called noncombat forces would stay on to help with the “transition process.” This follows the Iraq pattern where fifty thousand American troops remained after the departure of U.S. “combat” forces to great media fanfare.
In November 2010, behind “closed doors” at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Afghan War commander Petraeus presented European leaders with a “phased four-year plan” to “wind down American and allied fighting in Afghanistan.” Not surprisingly, it had the end of 2014 in its sights and the president quickly confirmed that “transition” date, even while opening plenty of post-2014 wiggle room. By then, as he described it, “our footprint” would only be “significantly reduced.” (He also claimed that, post-2014, the United States would be maintaining a “counterterrorism capability” in Afghanistan—and Iraq—for which “platforms to… execute… counterterrorism operations,” assumedly bases, would be needed.) Meanwhile, unnamed “senior U.S. officials” in Lisbon were clearly buttonholing reporters to “cast doubt on whether the United States, the dominant power in the 28-nation alliance, would end its own combat mission before 2015.” As always, the usual qualifying phrases were profusely in evidence.
The “tweaking”—that is, the further chipping away at 2014 as a hard and fast date for anything—has only continued. Mark Sedwill, NATO’s civilian counterpart to Petraeus, insisted that 2014 was nothing more than “an inflection point” in an ever more drawn-out drawdown process. That process would likely extend to “2015 and beyond,” which, of course, put 2016 officially into play. And keep in mind that this is only for combat troops, not those assigned to “train and support” or keep “a strategic over watch” on Afghan forces. On the eve of NATO’s Lisbon meeting, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declared 2014 nothing more than an “aspirational goal,” rather than an actual deadline. As the conference began, NATO’s secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that the alliance would be committed in Afghanistan “as long as it takes.” And British Chief of the Defense Staff General Sir David Richards suggested that, given the difficulty of ever defeating the Taliban (or al-Qaeda) militarily, NATO should be preparing plans to maintain a role for its troops for the next thirty to forty years.
Up to now, only one of General Petraeus’s two campaigns has been under discussion here: the one fought out not in Afghanistan, but in Washington and NATO capitals, over how to schedule a war. Think of it as the war for a free hand in determining how long the Afghan War is to be fought. It has been run from General Petraeus’s headquarters in Kabul, the giant five-sided military headquarters on the Potomac presided over by Secretary of Defense Gates, and various think tanks filled with America’s militarized intelligentsia scattered around Washington—and it has proven to be a classically successful “clear, hold, build” counterinsurgency operation. Pacification in Washington and a number of European capitals has occurred with remarkably few casualties. (Former Afghan War commander general Stanley McChrystal, axed by the president for insubordination, has been the exception, not the rule.)
With the ratification in Lisbon of that 2014 date “and beyond,” the political clocks—an image General Petraeus loves—in Washington, European capitals, and American Kabul are now ticking more or less in unison.
Two other “clocks” are, however, ticking more like time bombs. If counterinsurgency is a hearts-and-minds campaign, then another target of General Petraeus’s first COIN (counterinsurgency) campaign has been the restive hearts and minds of the American and European publics. In February 2010, the Dutch government fell over popular opposition to Afghanistan and, even as NATO met that weekend in November 2010, thousands of antiwar protestors were marching in London and Lisbon. Europeans generally want out and their governments know it, but (as has been true since 1945) the continent’s leaders have no idea how to say no to Washington. In the United States, too, the Afghan War grows ever more unpopular, and while it was forgotten during the election season, no politician should count on that phenomenon lasting forever.
And then, of course, there’s the other ticking bomb, the actual war in Afghanistan. In that campaign, despite a drumbeat of American/NATO publicity about “progress,” the news has been grim. American and NATO casualties have been higher from 2010 to 2011 than at any other moment in the war. The Taliban seems, if anything, more entrenched in more parts of the country; the Afghan public, puzzled and unhappy with foreign troops and contractors traipsing across the land. And President Hamid Karzai, sensing a situation gone truly sour, has been regularly challenging the way General Petraeus is fighting the war in his country. (The nerve!)
No less unsettling, General Petraeus himself has seemed unnerved. He was reportedly “irked” by Karzai’s comments and was said to have warned Afghan officials that their president’s criticism might be making his “own position ‘untenable,’” which was taken as a resignation threat. Meanwhile, the COIN-meister was in the process of imposing a new battle plan on Afghanistan that left counterinsurgency (at least as usually described) in a roadside ditch. No more was the byword “protect the people,” but smash, kill, destroy. The war commander has loosed American firepower in a major way in the Taliban strongholds of southern Afghanistan.
In early 2010, then-commander McChrystal had significantly cut back on U.S. air strikes as a COIN-ish measure meant to lessen civilian casualties. In a striking reversal, air power was called in massively. In October 2010, U.S. planes launched missiles or bombs on a thousand separate Afghan missions, numbers seldom seen since the 2001 invasion. The army similarly loosed its massively powerful High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in the area around the southern city of Kandahar. Civilian deaths rose rapidly. Dreaded special operations night raids on Afghan homes by “capture/kill” teams tripled. With them, the body count also arrived. American officials eagerly began boasting to reporters about their efficiency in taking out midlevel Taliban leaders (“368 insurgent leaders killed or captured, and 968 lower-level insurgents killed and 2,477 captured, according to NATO statistics”).
In the districts around Kandahar, a reported American tactic was simply to raze individual houses or even whole villages believed to be booby-trapped by the Taliban, as well as tree lines “where insurgents could hide.” American troops were “blow[ing] up outbuildings, flatten[ing] agricultural walls, and carv[ing] new ‘military roads,’ because existing ones are so heavily mined… right through farms and compounds.” The marines, reported Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, were also sending the first contingent of M1 Abrams tanks (with a “main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away”) into the south. Such tanks, previously held back for fear of reminding Afghans of their Russian occupiers, were, according to an unnamed U.S. officer he quotes, bringing “awe, shock, and firepower” to the south. None of this had anything to do with winning hearts and minds, just obliterating them. Not surprisingly, such tactics also generated villagers fleeing embattled farmlands, often for “squalid” refugee camps in overcrowded cities.
Suddenly, this war for which General Petraeus had won his counterinsurgency warriors at least a four- to six-year extension was being fought as if there were no tomorrow. Here, for instance, is a brief description from a Guardian reporter in Kandahar of the night war from a distance: “After the sun sets, the air becomes noisy with jets dropping bombs that bleach the dark out of the sky in their sudden eruptions; with the ripping sound of the miniguns of the Kiowa helicopter gunships and A-10 Warthogs hunting in the nearby desert. The night is also lit up by brilliant flares that fall as slow as floating snowflakes, a visible sign of the commando raids into the villages beyond. It is a conflict heard, but not often witnessed.”
None of this qualifies as counterinsurgency, at least as described by the general and his followers. It does, however, resemble where counterinsurgencies have usually headed—directly into the charnel house of history.
Chandrasekaran quoted a civilian adviser to the NATO command in Kabul this way: “Because Petraeus is the author of the COIN [counterinsurgency] manual, he can do whatever he wants. He can manage the optics better than McChrystal could. If he wants to turn it up to 11, he feels he has the moral authority to do it.” So Petraeus flipped a COIN and took a gamble. One thing is certain, however: Afghans will once again pay with their homes, farms, livelihoods, and lives, while Americans, Europeans, and Canadians will pay with lives and foot the bill for a war that couldn’t be more bizarre, a war with no end in sight.