Afghan Issues
August kicks off with three U.S. deaths. Washington Post. July was the deadliest month to date in Afghanistan with 43 slain Americans, 75 NATO total, approaching Iraq numbers. One of them was a local boy:
BOURNE – The death of Marine Cpl. Nicholas Xiarhos was a bitter lesson in the realities of war, a fellow Marine and childhood friend said as he eulogized the fallen Yarmouth man yesterday.
“I felt sick to my stomach, I still do,” Marine Cpl. Andrew Colville said of the moment he learned that Xiarhos had been killed. The two were serving together in Afghanistan when Xiarhos was killed.
“How could this have happened to Nick? I thought we were invincible,” said Colville, who had also served with him in Iraq and flew back from Afghanistan to help bury his friend.
Xiarhos, 21, a graduate of Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School, died July 23 after being mortally injured in a roadside bomb blast in southern Afghanistan that killed another Marine and cost another his legs.
They were part of 2/8 Marines’ surge into Helmand.
It isn’t “deeply unpopular” yet, to steal some boilerplate from the coverage of everything George Bush ever did, but it’s beginning to look like, just because Obama got elected, war doesn’t get any easier. It’s an odd problem. He campaigned on Aghanistan as the real war involving the real threat, the war all the resources and troops should have been devoted to, but he is deeply unenthused about devoting more troops and resources to it. Maybe because, for lefty political cultural reasons, he’s afraid of escalation’s potential to make him a Johnson or a Bush. Given how the poll numbers are going on the Obama feel-good initiatives that he thought would make everyone happy, you can see why he’s skittish and irked about the potential for trouble on this matter of vital national and international concern he never wanted anything to do with. War really isn’t part of the image, after all, and he wants it dispensed with. Fast, by someone else.
Now someone else is signalling he is going to want more troops. Times of London:
The top US commander in Afghanistan is on a collision course with the White House after it emerged that he plans to ask for more American troops to bolster dangerously under-resourced operations there.
General Stanley McChrystal was brought in as the Nato commander in Afghanistan after the unprecedented dismissal of his predecessor, General David McKiernan, who had successfully pressured the Administration to deploy 21,000 extra troops in the current Afghan “surge”.
General McChrystal was appointed in the belief that he would bring more unconventional thinking to the Afghan battlefield — in particular, that he would not ask for more troops, preferring to stick with a “lighter footprint” model of counter-insurgency operations.
But advisers who worked with him on a 60-day strategic review of Afghan operations, the first drafts of which emerged this week, say that General McChrystal concluded that more US troops would be needed to support a vast parallel surge in the number of Afghan security forces fighting the Taleban.
Yeah, well, unconventional thinking doesn’t mean you don’t need the troops to get the job done. Anyway, the Obama admin decided to go with a counter-terrorism/counter-insurgency hybrid for the lighter footprint, while a full-on counterinsurgency at the time of that debate last January and February was rejected because it came with a heavier commitment and a big fat footprint.
But back to the relevant matter, which isn’t how you win this war as much as it is how you maintain the boss’ image, and calm his fears of being turned into a Johnson or a Bush. The combined lesson there, which he apparently hasn’t quite grasped, is that it isn’t how many troops you send, it’s how you use them. So far Obama has shown a weird desire to avoid being a wartime president, or at least being perceived as one, rather than to fight and win the war we are actually engaged in. Theoretically Obama, having inherited a good war, with the bad war neatly contained, should be immune from deep unpopularism of the Busho-Johnsonian variety. But the reaction of his lefty base to his decision to continue fighting the GWOT with a Bush-lite strategy — or in some cases lack of decision that had the same effect — suggests he may have something to fear from acting rationally in Afghanistan.
It’s a bizarre conundrum he’s created for himself. As we’ve seen in wartime from the Vietnam era to the present day, popular opinion makes a crappy general. Not a good idea to allow it to dictate strategy and tactics. Taking counsel of your fears of popular opinion that hasn’t even gone south yet is worse. Fortunately, in Iraq, Bush was able to adjust and prevail despite all the deep unpopularity and the obstruction of a blessedly weak-willed Democratic Congress. Bush’s determination spared Iraq a genocide and the United States a dangerous humiliation, continued to build rather than abandon a new democracy that has served as a beacon in the Middle East. The surge also had the effect of keeping Iran hemmed in, and is on track to free up troops and resources for the other theater of this long, evolving war.
Meanwhile, some grumbling from our staunchest ally, the one Obama has been thumbing his nose at, as a House of Commons report slams U.S. Afghan strategy, or the lack thereof. AFP:
The international military mission in Afghanistan has delivered “much less than it promised” due to the lack of a realistic strategy, an influential committee of lawmakers said Sunday.
In a report, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said without a clear strategy stabilising Afghanistan had become “considerably more difficult than might otherwise have been the case.”
Lawmakers criticised US policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan and warned the “considerable cultural insensitivity” of some coalition troops had caused serious damage to Afghans’ perceptions that will be “difficult to undo”.
“We conclude that the international effort in Afghanistan since 2001 has delivered much less than it promised and that its impact has been significantly diluted by the absence of a unified vision and strategy grounded in the realities of Afghanistan’s history, culture and politics,” the report said.
“Although Afghanistan’s current situation is not solely the legacy of the West’s failures since 2001, avoidable mistakes, including knee-jerk responses, policy fragmentation and overlap, now make the task of stabilising the country considerably more difficult than might otherwise have been the case.”
As for Britain’s roughly 9,000 troops in Afghanistan — who in July suffered their worst month since the 2001 invasion with 22 deaths — the members of parliament (MPs) said their role has seen “significant mission creep”.
Despite the bad report, Brown’s FM says they’re committed: VOA. Maguire notes the actual report signals commitment as well. Hard to tell how much of that report is political CYA, how relevant it is current conditions and strategy, and the extent to which it is driven by whatever the Brit equivalent of Johnson/Bush fears is. Or whether Gordon Brown has some weakening resolve to shore up, as Tony Blair did re Iraq.
Whatever it is, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Churchill bust, the DVD collection or the iPod, but it looks like Obama has some deep thinking on where he’s going with this and some work to do to keep everyone on side. And to avoid becoming a Johnson. Go mull it for a while at Camp David. Becoming a Bush might not look so bad.
We’ll go out with something from Small Wars Journal, where I always go when feeling the need of some hope and clarity in this dark world of war. Going Tribal: Enlisting Afghanistan’s Tribes looks at the United States military’s ongoing efforts to adapt, to make sense, to win, with whatever resources the president of the United States eventually gives them to do the job.
Topics: Afghanistan,Obama
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:38 am Comments (2) on Sunday, August 2, 2009
2 Responses to “Afghan Issues”
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August 2nd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
J.C. “while a full-on counterinsurgency at the time of that debate last January and February was rejected because it came with a heavier commitment and a big fat footprint.”
So it can be safely said that al-’Bama is now channeling Rumsfeld in addition to Bush? The man is a Napoleonic genius!
August 4th, 2009 at 10:15 am
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