Obama To Troops: “WTF?”
The news out of Afghanistan yesterday was bookended by a couple of Washington Post reports.
Bob Woodward on the ground at Camp Leatherneck reported this morning in an article ridiculously headlined, Preventing Another Iraq/US Says Key to Success in Afghanistan: Economic, Not Military, that the Obama admin considers it a “new era.”
The headline is not Woodward’s fault, except to the extent he buried and obfuscated his lede. He reports after the jump that National Security Advisor James L. Jones briefed commanders on the ground that there won’t be more troops, that requests for more troops will prompt a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” response in the Oval Office.
That’s your lede, Bob. There’s your hed, Washington Post copy desk. Obama to Troops: “WTF?”
We can dicker if you like about whether he actually said that or not. But the president’s national security advisor only voiced in military slang what the president himself more formally enunciated with the unveiling of his Afghan strategy some months ago, when he indicated he didn’t want to be a wartime president. He liked the idea of running some counterterrorism ops and buying his way out of this one instead. Put another way, ”WTF?”
Here’s the exchange. Every time I read it, it’s more astonishing, as Woodward describes a briefing in Camp Leatherneck:
During the briefing, (Brig. Gen. Lawrence) Nicholson had told Jones that he was “a little light,” more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. “We don’t have enough force to go everywhere,” Nicholson said.
But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. “At a table much like this,” Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, “the president’s principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan.” The principals — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair — made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson’s Marines.
Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, “oops,” we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.
“They then said, ‘If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,’ ” Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.
Now suppose you’re the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?
Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.
Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF — which in the military and elsewhere means “What the [expletive]?”
Nicholson and his colonels — all or nearly all veterans of Iraq — seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.
Woodward goes on to repeat the strategic mantra, ”security, economic development and reconstruction.” The mission statement: ”Killing the enemy is secondary.” The generals may think they need up to 32,000 more troops in addition to the 68,000 already authorized, but … WTF? Jones tells jarhead commanders in Afghanistan: “The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development.”
That may be… none of that is actually news … but before any of it happens, the United States Marine Corps has its own business to conduct. Just a few hours after most people read that article, as it happens, a day or so after that briefing.
WPost’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran, also at Camp Leatherneck, was put in a position of making Jones, Woodward and the president look like assholes, as we say in the business, with his big uneconomic-sounding major military operation news that bumped Woodward’s story like a big fat non-sequitor late yesterday afternoon:
Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
The operation will involve about 4,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was dispatched to Afghanistan earlier this year by President Obama to combat a growing Taliban insurgency in Helmand and other southern provinces. The Marines, along with an Army brigade that is scheduled to arrive later this summer, plan to push into pockets of the country where NATO forces have not had a presence. In many of those areas, the Taliban have evicted local police and government officials, and taken power.
Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban, and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.
“We’re doing this very differently,” Nicholson said to his senior officers a few hours before the mission began. “We’re going to be with the people. We’re not going to drive to work. We’re going to walk to work.”
Good counter-insurgency quote, we’ve heard it before. Folksy, and about as benign-sounding as 4,000 heavily armed Marines heading into notoriously hostile territory could possibly be made to sound. Still doesn’t sound very economic, though. The operation’s codename, Khanjar, “Strike of the Sword,” doesn’t sound like something a committee of number-crunching accountants or widget-hawking marketing whizzes came up with, either.
(I know the president probably doesn’t think Rajiv just made him look like an asshole. And Jones knew when he took the job it would involve smiling through a lot of shit sandwiches. Shit sandwiches like telling other Marines, going into combat, “Sorry boys, you don’t get what you need. Not because we can’t give it to you. But because President Nancypants won’t give it to you. Doesn’t like the way war looks on him and he’ll go all Whiskey Tango Foxtrot if you try to foist it on him. So suck it up.” But do you think Woodward, who also must have known the op was coming, in retrospect feels like maybe he shouldn’t have buried his lede? His article seems to want to say the president and the national security advisor are full of it, and certainly indicates that the warfighters think so. But Woodward’s article never quite gets there. It wanders around the Afghan countryside a bit instead, and goes out the way it came in. With high-level Beltway platitudes from Jones.)
As Gen. David Petraeus has predicted, much like in Iraq, this operation and others to come in Afghanistan will result in an increase in American casualties. It gets worse before it gets better. That walk to work for some time to come is very likely going to be challenged, no matter how unhappy the military hopes the locals may be about the Taliban.
Of course economic development, co-opting the Taliban’s fighting force, and creating a functioning somewhat modern society with jobs, is key. It is also, in mountainous, aggressively backward Afghanistan, a very tall order. The notion, the misconception, that anything happens without a significant military component … possibly significantly more than President Obama would currently care to commit … is as ridiculous as it was in Iraq when the pols and the reporters kept trying to get the generals to say all that war needed was a political solution. As if political or economic solutions simply require the right degree of earnestness and an attitude adjustment.
Chandrasekaran’s article describes an operation that will in fact require a lot of earnestness and a new attitude. No one knows that better than the military men who have been tasked with it, because it has been the world most of them have lived in for several years before Obama had any say in the matter. Chandrasekaran quotes Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, addressing officer of 2/8 Marines:
“We’re not going to measure your success by the number of times your ammunition is resupplied. . . . Our success in this environment will be very much predicated on restraint,” he told a group of officers from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines on Sunday. “You’re going to drink lots of tea. You’re going to eat lots of goat. Get to know the people. That’s the reason why we’re here.”
It will be a demanding, delicate and quite likely a bloody job. It may also require a great deal more flexibility with regard to combat forces than the administration apparently cares to contemplate. Woodward quoted Nicholson earlier say he doesn’t need from American troops, he needs more Afghan troops, which while perhaps true and the right thing to say, sounds like a subtle, diplomatic general’s way of acknowledging that he’s screwed. No one wants to give him the former, nor can he expect the latter any time soon. So he and his 4,000 Marines in Helmand, and the thousands of combat troops deployed in other tough territory, will make do with what they have.
Too bad. It’s something American troops have dealt with before and will most earnestly endeavor to deal with now. Maybe they can pull it off. The United States military, after all, has proven remarkably resourceful, resilient and adaptive not just in these wars but in all the wars it has fought. It would be helpful this time, going into this difficult task, if the Commander in Chief’s attitude toward the expertise of the men who will to the heavy lifting was something other than “What the fuck?”
Big roundup at Small Wars Journal, your go-to place if you want to know WTF is going on.
Captain’s Journal with more on Khanjar.
More from Maguire on the “Walk to work” program.
Ed at HotAir re WTFism with a little more on the nature of the enemy: Taliban buying children for suicide bombings.
Gateway on a soldier seized in eastern Afghanistan.
Topics: Afghanistan, Obama, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:10 am Comments (7) on Thursday, July 2, 2009
7 Responses to “Obama To Troops: “WTF?””
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July 2nd, 2009 at 7:06 am
Certainly Marxist “economic development” will solve all problems around the globe. Right?
(Thanks for letting me post)
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:19 am
[...] Crittenden writes on the apparent disconnect between this operation, The Obama administration and the military, all centered round Bob [...]
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:52 pm
As Gen. David Petraeus has predicted, much like in Iraq, this operation and others to come in Afghanistan will result in an increase in American casualties.
Which will make President Barrack “Nancypants” Obama freak out even more….and likely withhold even more support. Potentially, Afghanistan could be Obama’s Vietnam. Obama, not Bush.
We sure dodged a bullet not electing McCain as President, huh?
Say…..anyone care to place a bet on the revival of the Clinton era policy of forbidding photographs of caskets with the remains of American service members at Dover AFB?
July 2nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
How would the President feel if his commanders tell him they need more troops? WTF? LIke virtually everything else, even war is all about Obama. Which means Obama, the not-Bush, won’t be listening to his commanders on the ground? We’ll be hitting some grim milestones, we just won’t hear about them, will we? Where is the formerly high profile Petraeus in all this, BTW?
Maybe John McCain could make himself useful. Find that “senior military officer” who says we need 100,000 troops to implement the “Obama strategy,” and arrange for him to go Shinseki at the upcoming Congresssional “presentation.”
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I wonder what President Nancypants would think had President Lincoln told his Union commanders: “WTF”? Or do you think he’s capable of that much imagination at all?
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:58 am
Utterly hamstrung by a military neophyte. Militarised community organisation?
Good luck, Marines.
July 4th, 2009 at 10:56 am
“this operation and others to come in Afghanistan will result in an increase in American casualties. It gets worse before it gets better. ”
I’d suggest that this is exactly what O and “his troops” are hoping for. An uptick in sacrifices to cover the bugout. “Hey, we tried. We really, really tried, but are these Afghans really worth these dead marines? Nope. We’re outta here. Not because O has no spine but because you, the American people, asked for it.”