All the focus on the Rolling Stone article seems to be focused on the disparaging comments of Stanley McChrystal and his senior staff. Clearly, McChrystal has set himself up to get cashiered. He’ll meet the president tomorrow to attempt to explain himself. But the real meat of the article is that we’re wasting our time in Afghanistan and that McChrystal’s COIN strategy has no chance of working in the alloted time, or, probably, ever.
“There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years – in education, in health care and economic development,” the president says. “As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed – lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier.”
It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. “It was one of our first impressions,” one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. “So many lights shining brightly.” So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned – talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked. “They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable,” says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. “That’s the game we’re in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn’t get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future.”
But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn’t begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular,” a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn’t prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. “There’s a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here,” a senior military official in Kabul tells me.
It’s appalling that we’re asking soldiers to risk their lives for no more strategic reason than avoiding the perception that we were run off.
I know Obama chose to give the COIN strategy a chance as a middle ground between continuing a failed strategy and abandoning Afghanistan altogether. I realize, because the effort in Afghanistan involves our NATO partners, that we have some complicated equities to consider in terms of state-to-state relations. Yet, what Obama should be looking for is an excuse to get out. They’ve been delegitimizing Karzai for a while, which I consider a precursor to justifying a bug-out. Maybe McChrystal’s actions can provide another justification. If his own staff thinks the war should be more unpopular than it is then maybe it’s time to sack the commanding general and replace him with one with instructions to wind this thing down on an accelerated timetable.
No one is really being fooled.
