Getting Out of Afghanistan and The Defense Problem

With our President prepared to send 40,000 more soldiers into Afghanistan a serious discussion has arisen about the future of our commitment there. I have written before about the time and material required for nation building. Back then i was much more willing to devote what was needed to the long struggle of fixing Afghanistan. The nature of the mission has changed and so has my support for sending more resources, more men and women, to that country. Unfortunately the United States has a real problem with our orientation towards the military.

Matt Yglesias posted today on the personnel expenditures for the US armed forces. By his estimates it came to about $300 Billion. The fact that people related expenses make up about 50% of the money that the United States spends on defense has implications related not only to the idea of balancing the budget but our foriegn policy itself. Has Yglesias notes

In policy terms, Arkedis makes the point that this means you can’t make any really large reductions in the defense budget purely by going after the interests of the contractors who make weapons systems. The soldiers themselves are the military’s most important weapons, and also the most expensive ones. And the only way to reduce these costs is to either have fewer soldiers, or else to over time accept a lower quality of recruits. And that in turn would mean giving them either fewer missions, less ambitious missions, or some combination of the two.

This is worth thinking about not only in terms of Afghanistan, but also in broader strategic terms. Over time as technology advances and wages and health care costs rise, most organizations seek to do their work in a less labor-intensive manner. But the rise of counterinsurgency doctrine in the military implies a shift in the direction of a more labor-intensive strategic concept. There are some good reasons for this turn, but it has a lot of underdiscussed and underdebated budgetary implications.

The cost of supporting the soldiers in the military is going to be higher as the congress appropriates more money for mental health services and greater veterans benefits. President Obama has discussed increasing the size of the military. From all appearances our military spending is going to increase in the future and not decrease. A shift to counter insurgency wars would guarantee the increase.

The United States seems to have locked itself into a position where we depend on our military strength. Much our power seems to revolve around the strength of our military and our ability to provide a defense guarantee to our allies. This is a powerful if inflexible tool. This means that our allies are free to defy us and our interests without a real fear that we will pull back our defense umbrella on anything but the most essential of issues. Our military has assumed a position of paramount importance.

At the same time some in the senate, such as Evan Bayh, have become deficit obsessed. They are pushing for a commission that would reduce the structural deficit. What this ultimately is is a means of gutting any liberal agenda and gutting social security and Medicare. There is no chance that at this point in time with a shift towards counter insurgency, increased commitment to Afghanistan, the central importance of American military power, and the structure of military expenses that the Congress would touch defense expenditures.

President Obama's decision to escalate in Afghanistan rather than wind down the adventure means that the chances for eliminating the deficit with anything other than cuts in the social safety net are far fetched. It increases the role of the military and foreign adventure in American society. Given the economic problems that we currently suffer from it makes much more sense to pull back from foriegn adventures to fix our domestic problems. This is not what we are doing.

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McKiernan the new Petraeus

The situation in Afghanistan is a complicated one. Not made less by the fact that the democrats view Afghanistan as the good war. Afghanistan has become the democrats war the way Iraq is the Republicans war. In a way this makes sense as Afghanistan provides Dems with a way to demonstrate they are not pacifists or unwilling to fight a war. Afghanistan has been a good tool. As our presence and long term commitment to Iraq has been winding down more focus has shifted to Afghanistan. The picture there is not a pretty one. It reflects Iraq in many ways and this has led to a focus on the man in charge just as iraq became a focus on the man in charge. That man is David D. McKiernan and he is the new Petraeus.

Some background on Gen. McKiernan,

McKiernan graduated from The College of William & Mary in 1972 where he received an ROTC commission; McKiernan then entered the Army. He holds an MPA from Shippensburg University and an honorary doctorate in Public Service from his alma mater, the College of William and Mary.

McKiernan gained experience in the Balkans as a staff officer in the 1990s. In July 1996, General McKiernan joined the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), serving as the Deputy Chief of Staff G-2/G-3 forward deployed in both Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rheindahlen (Mönchengladbach), Germany. From August 1998 until September 1999, he served as Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations, Headquarters, United States Army, Europe and Seventh Army during a period of simultaneous operations in Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo.

In 2001, he was assigned as G-3 (Operations), Headquarters, Department of the Army. Following that posting, in September 2002, General McKiernan assumed command of the Third U.S. Army and U.S. Army Forces Central Command (ARCENT), and became the Coalition Forces Land Component Commander for U.S. Central Command in preparation for Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. In March 2003, General McKiernan led all coalition and U.S. conventional ground forces that attacked Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Following his assignment as ground forces commander, McKiernan was assigned as Deputy Commanding General/Chief of Staff for United States Army Forces Command, the largest major command in the United States Army which is responsible for the readiness and deployment of Army forces based in the U.S. He assumed command of 7th Army/U.S. Army Europe. He assumed command of ISAF on June 3, 2008 and assumed command of both ISAF and USFOR-A on October 6, 2008.

McKiernan also appears to have had an interesting role in the debate over prewar troop levels and the importance of the paramilitary forces employed by saddam. McKiernan plays an important if understated role in the invasion and conquest of Iraq. According to a NYT article from 2006

Even before the war, Mr. Rumsfeld saw the deployment of United States forces more in terms of what was needed to win the war than to secure the peace.

With the tide in the United States' favor, he began to raise the issue of canceling the deployment of the First Cavalry Division — some 16,000 soldiers. General Franks eventually went along. Though the general insisted he was not pressured to agree, he later acknowledged that the defense secretary had put the issue on the table. "Don Rumsfeld did in fact make the decision to off-ramp the First Cavalry Division," General Franks said in an earlier interview with The New York Times.

General McKiernan, the senior United States general in Iraq at the time, was not happy about the decision but did not protest.
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General McKiernan concluded that the United States faced two "centers of gravity": the Republican Guard, concentrated near Baghdad, and the paramilitary Fedayeen. He decided to suspend the march to the capital for several days while continuing airstrikes and engaging the Fedayeen. Only then, he figured, would conditions be right for the final assault into Baghdad to remove Mr. Hussein from power. To provide more support, General McKiernan freed up his only reserve, troops from the 82nd Airborne Division.

With the limited information i found on McKiernon he certainly seems to be a competent commander and strategist. He recognized the need to control the paramilitary forces that eventually evolved into the insurgency. He was cautious and considerate in his approach to the war making sure he was accounting for those paramilitary forces and not rushing simply to depose Saddam.

Fast forward to today when the attention of the American public, driven in part by obama, is looking at the situation in Afghanistan and not finding it particularly pretty. The question has now become what to do about it. The Republicans have tried to simply transfer their iraq war terminology and say it will work in Iraq. However, they have no credibility after the disaster that they made Iraq. The Republican strategy became to use the military figure in command of the area as the guiding light. This is how Petraeus became the commander in chief. According to GOP rhetoric anything he says is absolutely true and the right idea. After all he is the Petraeus.

To apply their thought process in its application to Afghanistan Barack Obama and Joe Biden have tried to use McKiernan and his comments to bolster their argument about the Afghanistan. The dynamic that takes shape is one where the field commander is making all the decisions and the civilians back home are just giving them whatever they need. I cant say whether this makes things more or less effective. I do know that it is somewhat of an abdication of civilian control of the military.

The GOP of course does not particularly care about what the good general actually said. They will still try to use him as a prop, a legitimizing authority for their rhetoric. Example, Sarah Palin in the debate who was in such a hurry to show she could use the surge rhetoric in regards to Afghanistan she called McKiernan, McClellan. McKiernan of course is talking about something completely different than what Palin claimed,

"Afghanistan is not Iraq," said Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led ground forces during the 2003 Iraq invasion and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.

Speaking in Washington yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as "a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq." The country's mountainous terrain, rural population, poverty, illiteracy, 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.

"The word I don't use for Afghanistan is 'surge,' " McKiernan stressed, saying that what is required is a "sustained commitment" to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.

This is similar in many respects to what John McCain has done with Petraeus. McCain likes to attack Obama on the issue of preconditions yet Petraeus is on a different path,

Citing his Iraq experience, Petraeus said, “You have to talk to enemies.” He added that it was necessary to have a particular goal for discussion and to perform advance work to understand the motivations of his interlocutors.

The military commander is only omniscient when he validates McCain's views. To a limited extent this seems to be true of Obama.

I have had trouble sorting out the Obama Afghanistan plan in relation to conditions on the ground. The plan is available here in pdf and again slightly different here. Here is the Plan Obama has for Aghanistan,

Redeploy American Troops to Afghanistan. Barack Obama will deploy at least an additional two brigades (7,000 personnel) of rested, trained American troops to Afghanistan to reinforce our counter-terrorism operations and support NATO’s efforts to fight the Taliban.

Strengthen NATO’s Hand in Afghanistan: NATO currently has about 41,000 troops in Afghanistan. However, the force is short-staffed and some countries contributing forces are imposing restrictions on where their troops can operate, tying the hands of commanders on the ground. As president, Obama will work with European allies to end these burdensome restrictions and strengthen NATO as a fighting force.

Train and Equip the Afghan Army and Police: Barack Obama will strengthen the training and equipping of the Afghan army and police and increase Afghan participation in U.S. and NATO missions, so that there is more of an Afghan face on security.

Increase Non-Military Aid to Afghanistan by $1 billion: To prevent the country’s backsliding into chaos, Barack Obama would increase U.S. non-military aid to Afghanistan to $3 billion. This aid would fund reconstruction, police and army training, embassy operations, and local projects including efforts to impact the lives of ordinary Afghans and to give farmers alternatives to growing opium poppies. The aid would also be tied to better performance by the Afghan national government, including anti-corruption initiatives and efforts to extend the rule of law across the country.

Strike Al Qaeda: Last summer, Barack Obama was criticized for challenging conventional thinking and saying that as president, if he had actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan--and the Pakistanis cannot or will not act--then he will use highly targeted force to do so. At the time, Senator Clinton said Obama’s statement was a “very big mistake.” Over the last few months, the wisdom behind Clinton’s assertion was called into question as the Central Intelligence Agency successfully took out senior al Qaeda leader Abu Laith al Libi, in North Waziristan, Pakistan, in January.

Obama later updated that last part to edit out Sen Clinton and to just talk about Musharraf, and now i believe it is simply if the Pakistan government refuses to act.

In any event i would really like to have more detailed planning about what Obama intends to do in Afghanistan. McKiernan has said that what is required is a "sustained commitment". Obama certainly seems to be on the right track discussing increased aid. His reasoning for sending troops also seems to be fine. He wants more troops so that we have better capability to direct air strikes thus lessening the number of innocent people we kill with missed strikes. More troops for a surge like security crackdown seem to be the last thing needed. Not to mention that the terrain of afghanistan is terrible and that the tribes who live there are much more adept at fighting on it than we will be as juan cole points out,

The major critique I have is that Obama keeps talking about intensifying the search and destroy missions being carried out by US troops in the Pushtun areas of southern Afghanistan. As we should have learned from Vietnam, search and destroy missions only alienate the local population and drive it into the arms of the insurgency.
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Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai's army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there.

The air strikes make it especially tough to involve the american military in any efforts to rebuild the country. McKiernon is on record as noting the solution must come from the afghan government. This is a government that has serious credibility issues. Ending the corruption and establishing a political system that allows for local level input would appear to be a required condition for aid and Obama has mentioned that.

McKiernon has become the front man for the war in Afghanistan. He occupies the position in that war that Petraeus occupied for Iraq. Look to see his name become well known and not just because of Palin's poor reference. Obama has made winning in Afghanistan one of his central themes along with catching bin laden and now fixing the economy. The Afghanistan of 2008 is vastly different and in many ways more hostile than that of 2002. Dont be surprised if we find ourselves in a similar situation as we are in Iraq complete with highly decorated military officer as the media focus.

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Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Never herd of them? That is not surprising as their existence is probably something that the Bush administration would rather not talk about. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is the Al Queda linked insurgent group that is operating in northern Africa. Their story is an important one because it addresses the apparent trend in intentional terrorism of franchising. John McCain would like people to believe that Iraq is the central front on a battle against the terrorists. This is becoming an even more dangerous belief to hold as evidence mounts that "the fly paper theory" he espouses is hopelessly flawed. Instead Iraq acts as a training and testing ground. Want to test something against a traditional military? Spend some time in Iraq testing and then go home to carry it out.

Think of Al Qeda as the parent corporation. Instead of profits their goal is asserting their brand of Islam over any one they can. To do this they crate franchises much like McDonalds or KFC might. They lend their name and their knowledge to local insurgent operators who wish to carry out attacks against government or American targets. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is one of those franchises. Their story was covered in a July edition of the NYT.

Their nationalist battle against the Algerian military was faltering. “We didn’t have enough weapons,” recalled a former militant lieutenant, Mourad Khettab, 34. “The people didn’t want to join. And money, we didn’t have enough money.”

Then the leader of the group, a university mathematics graduate named Abdelmalek Droukdal, sent a secret message to Iraq in the fall of 2004. The recipient was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the two men on opposite ends of the Arab world engaged in what one firsthand observer describes as a corporate merger.

Today, as Islamist violence wanes in some parts of the world, the Algerian militants — renamed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — have grown into one of the most potent Osama bin Laden affiliates, reinvigorated with fresh recruits and a zeal for Western targets.

Just from this three paragraph quote several things are made clear. The first is that clearly fighting in Iraq did not reduce the potential for terrorists it increased it. AQI did not exist prior to our invasion and so it would not have been there in 2004 to help revive the nationalist insurgency in Algeria.

The Times makes clear that this insurgency was dying. There were a number of factors that were working against it including a lack of legitimacy among the Muslim clerics in Algeria. The government had almost defeated them. It was AQI who rescued them enabling them to recruit and to raise money. Now they are in a much stronger position,

Their gunfights with Algerian forces have evolved into suicide truck bombings of iconic sites like the United Nations offices in Algiers. They have kidnapped and killed European tourists as their reach expands throughout northern Africa.

Last month, they capped a string of attacks with an operation that evoked the horrors of Iraq: a pair of bombs outside a train station east of Algiers, the second one timed to hit emergency responders. A French engineer and his driver were killed by the first bomb; the second one failed to explode.

What is also apparent is that although these groups carry the name and the blessing of Al Queda they are much more autonomous. Killing the number three man under Bin Laden will do nothing to affect these groups. Body counts are not the way to measure these battles. Killing one person does nothing if you are not fighting the underlying causes of recruitment. This is apparent in the Algerian battle with AQIM.

The Algerian government killed or captured an estimated 1,100 militants last year — nearly double the number in 2006, according to the State Department. But the group has begun using sophisticated recruitment videos to replenish its ranks with a new generation of youth that the State Department says is “more hard-line.”

The AQ franchising is also occuring because of the way that the US conducts its war on terror. We have been lumping different terrorist and insurgent groups together. Part of the political strategy to gain support at home was to make it seem like they were all part of the same organization. This has apparently been a self fulfilling prophecy. As other groups felt the pressure there was a bandwagoning effect.

In his comments to The Times, Mr. Droukdal confirmed that Mr. Zarqawi played a “pivotal role” in the merger, along with other intermediaries. Mr. Droukdal explained his wrath toward the United States, saying: “We found ourselves on the blacklist of the U.S. administration, tagged with terrorism. Then we found America building military bases in the south of our country, and conducting military exercises, and plundering our oil and planning to get our gas.”

In the US versus THEM strategy where distinctions are erased between insurgents, nationalists, islamacists, and terrorists those groups are going to be pushed together to combat the US. We have homogenized them.

The other thing to understand about this group is that they are not unique. Their story is important because they are representative of the way AQ works now. The franchises are taking the tactics learned from the fighting in Iraq and are applying them elsewhere.

Led by Mr. Droukdal, 38, an explosives expert who joined the insurgency 12 years ago, the group has shifted to tactics “successfully employed by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to the State Department.

In adopting these Qaeda-style tactics, it staged at least eight suicide bombings with vehicles last year, including two sets of attacks in central Algiers on the 11th of April and December, dates that now fill Algerians with dread. It dispatched the country’s first individual suicide bomber, who singled out President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria.

The group has also stepped up its use of remote-controlled roadside bombs, and there are increasingly deadly clashes with militias armed by the government to fight the militants.

The most recent evidence of this was just the other day with the embassy bombings in Yemen.

The use of two vehicle bombs — one to breach the perimeter of a compound, a second to drive inside and explode — is a tactic used by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. [...]

He said a new, less-compromising generation of al-Qaeda leaders emerged, many of them moving into action after escaping from a Yemeni prison that year, he said.[...]

The Yemen bombings were just the latest high profile attack by a group trained and tested in Iraq. We have seen similar groups of Iraq trained fighters linked to AQ in Morocco, Jordan, Somalia and Afghanistan.

So what we have now really is a global war on terror and it is of our own making. Had we simply stayed in Afghanistan and finished the job there we would not have seen this Iraq blow back. Iraq is the central training ground for insurgents. The entire idea that we can gather all the terrorists in one place and kill them all was stupid. Terrorists can be trained and recruited and there numbers are not fixed.

While it is possible for the terrorists to cause a backlash and to turn the indigenous population against them i would not count on this being a frequent occurrence after the lesson learned in Iraq. We are seeing in Afghanistan that the neo-Taliban is able to shift the blame for the deaths of civilians onto the US by getting us to retaliate while they slipped away. It is like any sport, the second person is always called for the foul.

As a result of our actions in Iraq we have seen an evolution and increased sophistication in the way AQ works. They have become a bad infection that survived the first course of treatment and came out resistant. To combat it we need a new comprehensive strategy run by people not beholden to neocon ideas about the world. I doubt this will come from McCain. Ask yourself, given all this does the surge vindicate McCain's decision to launch the war?

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Afghanistan as the next Iraq

What is going on in Afghanistan has been slowly generating attention. As the debate over the surge and immediate withdrawal has declined, people have noticed that Afghanistan is not going so well for us right now. Afghanistan has always been the foil to the Iraq war. Where Iraq was illegitimate and unnecessary, Afghanistan was just and required for American safety. Iraq has been a dismal failure on almost every front but Afghanistan was being judged a success. Now as the gains that were maid in Afghanistan have apparently slipped into the either questions are arising over whether or not America and the West should stay in Afghanistan. Perhaps surprisingly the answer is becoming a tentative no.

Violence in Afghanistan has been increasing over the last several years as the Taliban has regained strength and American interest and resources have been diverted to Iraq. As of Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2008, at least 496 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. Last year there was a total of 401 deaths. The NGO’s operating in the area report a 50% increase in terrorist attacks this year extending into areas that where once considered safe. ACBAR, a group that represents 64 international aid groups with projects inside the warring country, including Oxfam, Mercy Corps and Save the Children, as well as 36 Afghan charities issued a report that states,

"So far this year, the number of insurgent attacks, bombings and other violent incidents is up by approximately 50 per cent on the same period last year. The number of insurgent attacks for each of the months of May (463), June (569) and July is greater than the number of such attacks in any other month since the end of major hostilities following the international intervention in 2001."

The increase in violence has prompted increase scrutiny of the situation. Kevin Drum at Washingtonweekly.com highlighted to pieces on the situation in Afghanistan. First is Rory Stewart, who runs an NGO in Kabul called the Turquoise Mountain, writing in Time, second is Robert Kaplan, writing in the Atlantic. The conclusion reached by all three writers is that we do not want to perform massive increases in troop deployments in Afghanistan. A “surge” for Afghanistan is not likely to be productive for numerous reasons they highlight.

Stewart-

the West should not increase troop numbers. In time, NATO allies, such as Germany and Holland, will probably want to draw down their numbers, and they should be allowed to do so. We face pressing challenges elsewhere. If we are worried about terrorism, Pakistan is more important than Afghanistan; if we are worried about regional stability, then Egypt, Iran or even Lebanon is more important; if we are worried about poverty, Africa is more important. A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining. The Taliban, which was a largely discredited and backward movement, gains support by portraying itself as fighting for Islam and Afghanistan against a foreign military occupation.

Kaplan-

In the midst of all this, both Bush and Barack Obama talk simplistically about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. The India-Pakistan rivalry is just one of several political problems in the region that negate the benefit of more troops. As in the past in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we are in danger of conceiving of war in narrow military terms alone, and thus getting the politics wrong.

For its part, the Pentagon is attempting to tamp down on fears that the situation is deteriorating

But Morrell cast media reports of Afghan violence as "overwriting" that gave the false impression that "the sky is falling."

"I don't think that the (defense) secretary (Robert Gates) believes that is the case,"..."That is the war which we have focused on. That is the war we are now winning," Morrell said.

But he declined to make the same positive assessment for Afghanistan.

"The only thing I have heard about a judgment about whether we are winning or losing in Afghanistan is that we are not losing there," Morrell said.

With the exception of the Pentagon every one seems to think that Afghanistan is in trouble. The next question is what to do about it. The proposed solutions coming from the candidates highlight one of the problems in dealing with Afghanistan. Barack Obama has talked about increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. He was asked about this recently and here is what he said,

Q: Afghanistan is something you've spoken a lot about...Take us to the next level, why, as you've said, and how, we need to put more U.S. forces into Afghanistan. To the Soviets it became a quagmire. How do you avoid that? How do you measure success? If you could give us a little more detail about what you think you'd like to do.

A: I'm not here to lay out a comprehensive military strategy. That's the job of our commanders on the ground. I can tell you what our strategic goals should be. They should be relatively modest. We shouldn't want to take over the country. We should want to get out of there as quickly as we can and help the Afghans govern themselves and provide for their own security. Our critical goal should be to make sure that the Taliban and al Qaida are routed and that they cannot project threats against us from that region. And to do that I think we need more troops. I also think that we need to deal with the situation in Pakistan and the fact that terrorists are able to operate with relative freedom of movement there right now.

The Obama position on Afghanistan is one of the positions that is inconsistent with many experts on the situation. Hearing that Obama is picturing a moderate goal for Afghanistan is slightly heartening. Obama is still advocating addition troops for the country, one of the unpopular ideas. His plan calls for up to two additional brigades to be moved into the country. Juan Cole has a detailed piece on Obama’s rhetoric on Afghanistan and what he thinks the US needs to do, get out.

The major critique I have is that Obama keeps talking about intensifying the search and destroy missions being carried out by US troops in the Pushtun areas of southern Afghanistan. As we should have learned from Vietnam, search and destroy missions only alienate the local population and drive it into the arms of the insurgency.

Snip

I don't know whether Senator Obama really wants to try to militarily occupy Afghanistan even more than is now being attempted. I wish he would talk to some old Russian officers who were there in the 1980s first. Of course, it may be that this announced strategy is political and for the purposes of having something to say when McCain accuses him of surrendering in Iraq.

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don't think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.

Snip

Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai's army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. "Al-Qaeda" was always Bin Laden's hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

As a political tool, Afghanistan has been very useful. McCain cannot accuse Obama of being an appeaser or afraid to use the military because of his Iraq position without Obama using a potential refocus on Afghanistan to bludgeon him. Afghanistan still enjoys support among the population at large for several reasons one of which is their general ignorance of what goes on there. As Cole points out, though using Afghanistan in this way puts Obama into a very tight position where he will have to follow through on his promise of turning Afghanistan around. The conditions on the ground there seem to make that a long shot, at least through a military lens.
As early as last June there began to appear questions about our future in Afghanistan. For example an article in the Hill entitled Out-of-Afghanistan rumblings on the Hill,

A few congressional Democrats go so far as suggesting that the Pentagon should pull out of Afghanistan now, while others say that troop withdrawal will be addressed after the military is out of Iraq.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a senior defense authorizer, wants the U.S. out of Afghanistan immediately, calling operations there “futile” in trying to effect political change in a country with a tangled history.

The problem will come for a President Obama and Congressional Democrats that what it takes to do the job in Afghanistan is more than they, or the American people, want to commit. I recently wrote a diary on the America’s relationship with nation building. Our only success stories are situations were we remained in country for multiple decades to help establish a state. Afghanistan presents a situation that would definitely require the United States to occupy the country for multiple decades.

Many authors have noted that the Taliban completely eradicated the intelligentsia of Afghanistan to the point where education is being done by those barely or unqualified. The people needed to run the government and the institutions are just not available in the numbers required. In addition to the shortage of the qualified, there is a real issue with corruption in the country. The central government extends around Kabul and not much farther. The state is actively protecting the drug industry. They do this for several reasons the best explanation of the Afghan drug problem can be found in a report by Barnett R. Rubin. Rubin posts frequently on informedcomment.com and is very good reading for those interested in learning about Afghanistan. The central government lacks the ability to root out the corruption.

Actually Sabit did try to arrest a corrupt official one time, General Din Muhammad Jurat, one of the most powerful Northern Alliance commanders in the Ministry of the Interior. The upshot was that Jurat detained Sabit and disarmed and beat his men. This was not in a remote area on the Pakistan border but less than an hour's drive north of Kabul in an area considered to be under "government" control. What does that mean? It means that Jurat and people like him are the government. There is no state that operates independently of power holders like Jurat. The project is to build such a state, not assume its existence and use it based on that false assumption.

The absence of a state after six years of sacrifice is not a good starting point. Our military actions in Afghanistan are not increasing our popularity. This is a big negative when our military is seen as propping up the government it only adds to the bad feelings much of the population now feels about the Karzai government.

It appears that what we are going to be left with is a President who has committed us to increasing troop strength to cause where the experts recognize that troops are not the answer. In addition, when Iraq is over I doubt the American people are going to be happy about the casualty rates in Afghanistan and very reluctant to endure a prolonged presence. Just as support for the withdrawal from Iraq was a slowly building force the call for a reduced military commitment to Afghanistan. Afghanistan is shaping up to be another failure for American regime change abroad.

I wrote this to highlight the subtle building of the calls for withdrawal from Afghanistan and how it is at odds with the policy positions of our candidate Barack Obama. It will be an interesting political situation that develops assuming that the calls for the US to get out of Afghanistan continue to build. Obama has never been hesitant to say that he does not oppose wars, only dumb wars. It looks like Afghanistan might be becoming one of those dumb wars.

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Will the US Nation Build again after Iraq?

The US experience in Iraq has been a horrific one. 4119 dead US soldiers with over 30435 wounded. We have gained nothing and lost so much. The war and occupation of Iraq is in many ways the culmination of post-Cold War thought. While greatly emphasis for the justification of the conflict was placed on the threat of WMD we cannot overlook the humanitarian element that accompanied the WMD case. There was always that statement that followed after talk of WMDs, “Yeah and Saddam is a really bad guy. The world would be better off without him.” Still high on the apparently quick success of Afghanistan the US wanted to continue to rid the world of its perceived Evil and Saddam made an easy target. This humanitarian impulse has led to disaster after disaster in Iraq. The question will inevitably arise whether the American people will have the will or desire to participate in future nation building or peacekeeping missions after Iraq.

The current dark mood of the American people regarding our foreign entanglements seems almost like the precursor for a return to isolationism. It would not be that surprising to see the American people demand that we pull back from the current worldwide spread of our military to lick our wounds and rebuild our treasury. I doubt we will see a return to the isolationism of the 20’s and 30’s since the post war culture and economy make it hard for a country to retreat inside its borders. Our policy of world wide assertiveness has been so ingrained that it is hard to imagine the US functioning any other way but if there is an event that could trigger a pull back Iraq is it.

Senator Obama talks about how the war in Iraq has made us lose focus on the important, read justified, conflict in Afghanistan. I am not particularly confident that the public will to fight that conflict on the scale of Iraq but that might not be needed. The conflict in Afghanistan provides an opportunity if the US chooses to take it. Afghanistan provides the opportunity to return to the right track in the minds of Americans. The reason we entered Afghanistan is clear and well understood. Due to the incompetence or inattention of the Bush administration a symbol of that cause, Osama bin Laden is still at large. Obama with his leadership skills proposes to lead the country out of the darkness that is Iraq and back to a war that is still supported by the American people. It is a simple way of putting Iraq behind us.

When I speak of nation building and Peace Keeping, I have a definite idea about what that entails. My definition of nation building is: A military intercession into a state for the purpose of democratizing that state. I view Peace Keeping as a specific subfield of nation building. Peace Keeping is a more hands off form of nation building where the military force does not actively build the institutions of the host country but holds down violence so native groups may build those institutions. The nation building that the US has attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan is far more than that. In those two countries the US has designed the Institutions, imprinting itself on the country to a degree not found in strict Peace Keeping missions.

“is there no nation wise enough, brave enough, and strong enough to restore peace in this blood smitten land?” James Creelman- New York World, May 17th 1896

The US has a long history of attempting to nation build. It should probably be something we are more recognized for, as nation building is almost a hallmark of our national identity at this point. Beginning with the Spanish American War the United States embarked on more than a century of nation building activity. The American Empire is unique because it evolves around the idea of Democratizing the world instead of the acquisition of physical territory. We prefer an ideological empire. For instance, the United States was the first imperial power in history to freely relinquish a possession when we released the Philippines in 1946. The Philippines may be considered our first great success in nation building, the result of 50 years worth of effort.

It should not come as a surprise that because of early experiences in nation building the US army actually devised a field manual entitled FM 27-5, Military Government in 1940. The establishment of The School of Military Government at the University of Virginia in April 1942 quickly followed this manual. The Army later established the Civil Affairs Training Program to train junior officers in military government. As a result, a doctrine was established for what the military would do to set up government in occupied territories.

Their first order of business was to post proclamations and ordinances which announced the occupation and established rules for the civilian population. Next, they located the Buergermeister (mayor) in order to establish a link with the population. If the Buergermeister was a Nazi, the military government team would appoint someone else. Orders were issued to surrender all prohibited items, such as weapons, ammunition and communication devices. This was followed by a house to house search for these items. Curfews were established as well as movement and assembly restrictions. In order to enforce these restrictions, all adult citizens were registered. Other typical civil affair duties included arranging for burial of the dead, establishing a police force, and, if possible, reestablishing water, electricity and other local administrative activities.- Colonel Jayne A. Carson, United States Army -Nation Building the American Way pg 11

The United States experienced success when building states in the Philippines, Japan, and Germany. This was not the case in the sates that followed the cold war. Following the Cold War the United States was dealing with failed states more in the mold of the Philippines than Germany. However, the United States had forgotten the lessons of the Philippines where it took 50 years and many lives to build a state. Instead, the US became caught up in our role as the lone Super Power left. We committed to our first post cold war nation state building exercise in the state of Somalia in December of 1992.

The experience in Somalia was a total failure. The mission for US forces in Somalia evolved to include establishing political institutions and civil administration after starting with a simple goal of establishing safe food delivery conditions. The need for military intervention in the Somali civil war was deemed a necessary part of this mission. It was the militaries attempt to capture Aidid on October 3-4 1993 that ultimately led to the withdrawal of US forces. The failed raid is dramatically portrayed in the film Black Hawk Down. The result was 18 soldiers killed and 76 wounded, two Blackhawk helicopters shot down and their crews were killed or wounded, one pilot taken prisoner. We were in the Philippines for 50 years and stayed in Somalia for less than three.

The United States followed the failure in Somalia with a relative success in Haiti. We then committed to Bosnia and then to Kosovo. In each case, the commitments were made under the expressed idea that we would be there for a shot time only. In reality, these types of missions make no sense on such a short time frame. As President Clinton pointed out when the mission in Bosnia ran longer than he originally stated it would,

“Quite frankly, rebuilding the fabric of Bosnia’s economic and political life is taking longer than anticipated.”

Nation building in failed states takes time, it takes resources, and it takes blood. None of those things are going to be very available after our exit from Iraq. Though history shows that even when we are not particularly interested in committing the resources that the mission needs we do it anyway. That “army you have, rather than army you need” attitude is a recipe for disaster that may finally be understood after Iraq.

The United States has been building nations around the world since 1898. After Iraq, that behavior may diminish. There is also the question of not only whether we will continue to nation build but also whether we should. The US needs to make a fundamental decision about the value of humanitarian intervention and nation building. To properly build a nation takes decades of military presence and sacrifice and though the American people would love to bring Democracy to all the cost always seems to be too high. Given the unwillingness to commit what is required to build a fully functioning state I do not think the US should commit to such missions in the future.

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