American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  On the other hand, peering down the path of de-escalation, all we can see is darkness. Nothing like this has been tried before in Washington. But I firmly believe that this, too, is deeply in the American grain. American immigrants, as well as slaves, traveled to this country as if into the darkness of the unknown. Americans have long braved the unknown in all sorts of ways.

  To present this more formulaically, if we sent the troops and trainers to Afghanistan, if we increased air strikes and tried to strengthen the Afghan Army, we basically know how things are likely to work out: not well. The war is likely to spread. The insurgents, despite many losses, are likely to grow in strength. Hatred of Americans is likely to increase. Pakistan is likely to become more destabilized.

  If, however, we don’t take such steps and proceed down that other path, we do not know how things will work out in Afghanistan, or how well.

  We do not know how things will work out in Pakistan, or how well.

  That is hardly surprising, since we do not know what it means to end such a war now.

  But we must not be scared. America will not—of this, as your president, I am convinced—be a safer nation if it spends many hundreds of billions of dollars over many years, essentially bankrupting itself and exhausting its military on what looks increasingly like an unwinnable war. This is not the way to safety, but to national penury—and I am unwilling to preside over an America heading in that direction.

  Let me say again that the unknown path, the path into the wilderness, couldn’t be more American. We have always been willing to strike out for ourselves where others would not go. That, too, is in the best American tradition.

  It is, of course, a perilous thing to predict the future, but in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, war has visibly only spread war. The beginning of a negotiated peace may have a similarly powerful effect, but in the opposite direction. It may actually take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It may actually encourage forces in both countries with which we might be more comfortable to step to the fore.

  Certainly, we will do our best to lead the way with any aid or advice we can offer toward a future peaceful Afghanistan and a future peaceful Pakistan. In the meantime, I plan to ask Congress to take some of the savings from our two wars winding down and put them into a genuine jobs program for the American people.

  The way to safety in our world is, I believe, to secure our borders against those who would harm us, and to put Americans back to work. With this in mind, next month I’ve called for a White House Jobs Summit, which I plan to chair. And there I will suggest that, as a start, and only as a start, we look at two programs that were not only popular across the political spectrum in the desperate years of the Great Depression, but were remembered fondly long after by those who took part in them—the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. These basic programs put millions of Americans back to work on public projects that mattered to this nation and saved families, lives, and souls.

  We cannot afford a failing war in Afghanistan and a 10.2 percent official unemployment rate at home. We cannot live with two Americas, one for Wall Street and one for everyone else. This is not the path to American safety.

  As president, I retain the right to strike at Al-Qaeda or other terrorists who mean us imminent harm, no matter where they may be, including Afghanistan. I would never deny that there are dangers in the approach I suggest today, but when have Americans ever been averse to danger, or to a challenge either? I cannot believe we will be now.

  It’s time for change. I know that not all Americans will agree with me and that some will be upset by the approach I am now determined to follow. I expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility for whatever may result from this policy departure. Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am convinced that this is the way forward for our country in war and peace, at home and abroad.

  I thank you for your time and attention. Goodnight and God bless America. END 8:35 P.M. EDT

  A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority

  On December 1, 2009, from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, speaking of his plans for Afghanistan, Barack Obama surrendered. There were no surrender documents. He wasn’t on the deck of the USS Missouri. He never bowed his head. Still, from that moment on, think of him not as the commander in chief, but as the commanded in chief.

  Give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot. The campaign began with a strategic leak of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s grim review of the situation in that country, including demands for sizeable troop escalations and a commitment to a counterinsurgency war. It came to include rumors of potential retirements in protest if the president didn’t deliver, as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by General McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive citizen-mobilization of inside-the-Beltway former neocon or fighting liberal think-tank experts, and a helping hand from an admiring media. In the process, the U.S. military succeeded in boxing in a president who had already locked himself into a conflict he had termed both “the right war” and a “necessary” one. After more than two months of painfully overreported deliberations, President Obama ended up essentially where General McChrystal began.

  Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was dusted off from the moldy Vietnam archives and made spanking new by General David Petraeus in 2006, applied in Iraq (and Washington) in 2007, and first put forward for Afghanistan in late 2008. It has now been largely endorsed, and a major escalation of the war—a new kind of military-led nation-building is to be cranked up and set in motion. COIN is being billed as a “population-centric,” not “enemy-centric,” approach in which U.S. troops are distinctly to be “nation-builders as well as warriors.”

  The additional thirty thousand troops Obama promised in his speech to surge into Afghanistan are more than the United States had there as late as summer 2008. In less than two years, in fact, U.S. troop strength in that country will have more than tripled to approximately one hundred thousand troops. We’re talking about near-Vietnam-level escalation rates. If you include the thirty-eight thousand NATO forces also there (and a possible five thousand more to come), total allied troop strength will be significantly above what the Soviets deployed during their devastating Afghan War of the 1980s in which they fought some of the same insurgents now arrayed against us.

  Think of the West Point speech, then, as Barack Obama’s anti-MacArthur moment. In April 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, President Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of U.S. forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure than either McChrystal or CentCom commander Petraeus (and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman’s plans to “limit” the war after the Chinese intervened. Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a “generals’ revolt”—amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who might well have presidential ambitions, and who has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what right-wing critics termed “dithering” and supporters called “thorough deliberations,” Obama dealt with the problem quite differently. He essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his field commanders. (Not that his Republican critics will give him much credit for doing so, of course.) This is called “politics” in our country and, for a Democratic president in our era, the end result was remarkably predictable.

  Monty Python in Afghanistan

  There was surprisingly little discussion about the president’s decis
ion to address the American people on Afghanistan not from the Oval Office, but from West Point. It was there, in 2002, that George W. Bush gave a speech before the assembled cadets in which he laid out his aggressive strategy of preventive war, which would become the cornerstone of the Bush Doctrine:If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.…

  Our security will require transforming the military you will lead—a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.

  But keep in mind that this was still a graduation speech and presidents have traditionally addressed one of the military academies at graduation time.

  Obama is not a man who appears in prop military jackets with “commander in chief” hand-stitched across his heart before hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers, as our last president loved to do, and yet he has increasingly appeared at military events and associated himself with things military. Has a president ever, in fact, given a non-graduation speech, no less a major address to the American people, at West Point? Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

  For his American audience, and undoubtedly his skittish NATO allies as well, the president did put a significant emphasis on an exit strategy from the war. That off-ramp strategy was, however, placed in the context of the training of the woeful Afghan security forces to take control of the struggle themselves and of the woeful government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai turning over a new nation-building leaf. Like the choice of West Point, this, too, seemed to eerily echo George W. Bush’s regularly intoned mantra: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

  In his address, Obama offered July 2011 as the date to begin withdrawing the first U.S. troops from Afghanistan. (“After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”) However, according to the Washington-insider “Nelson Report,” a White House on-background press briefing made it far clearer that the president was talking about a “conditions based withdrawal” that would depend “on objective conditions on the ground,” on whether the Afghans had met the necessary “benchmarks.” When asked about “scaling back” the American war effort, General McChrystal suggested a more conservative timeline—“sometime before 2013.” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates referred vaguely to the “thinning out” of U.S. forces.

  In fact, there’s no reason to put faith in any of these hazy deadlines. After all, this is the administration that came into office announcing a firm one-year closing date for the U.S. prison in Guantánamo (officially missed), a firm sunshine policy for an end-of-2009 release of millions of pages of historical documents from the archives of the CIA and other intelligence and military services (officially delayed, possibly for years), and of course a firm date for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops, followed by all U.S. forces from Iraq (possibly slipping).

  Finish the job in Afghanistan? Based on the plans of the field commanders to whom the president has bowed, on the administration’s record of escalation in the war so far, and on the quiet reassurances to the Pakistanis that we aren’t leaving in any imaginable future, this war looks to be all job and no finish.

  If it weren’t so grim, despite all the upbeat benchmarks and encouraging words in the president’s speech, this would certainly qualify as Monty Python in Afghanistan. After all, three cabinet ministers and twelve former ministers are under investigation in Afghanistan on corruption charges. And that barely scratches the surface of the problems in a country that one Russian expert recently referred to as an “international drug firm,” where at least one-third of the gross national product comes from the drug trade. The Taliban now reportedly take a cut of the billions of dollars in U.S. development aid flowing into the country, much of which is otherwise squandered, and of the American money that goes into “protecting” the convoys that bring supplies to U.S. troops throughout the country. One out of every four Afghan soldiers has quit or deserted the Afghan National Army, while the ill-paid, largely illiterate, hapless Afghan police with their “well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes,” not to speak of a drug abuse rate estimated at 15 percent, are, as it’s politely put, “years away from functioning independently.” Meanwhile, the insurgency is spreading to new areas of the country and reviving in others.

  Airless in Washington

  Not that Washington, which obviously feels it has much to impart to the Afghan people about good governance and how to deal with corruption, has particularly firm ground to stand on. After all, in 2008, the United States completed its first billion-dollar presidential election in a $5 billion election season, and two administrations just propped up some of the worst financial scofflaws in the history of the world and got nothing back in return. Meanwhile, the money flowing into Washington political coffers from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care industries, real estate, legal firms, and the like might be thought of as a kind of drug in itself. At the same time, according to USA Today, at least 158 retired generals and admirals, many already pulling in military pensions in the range of $100,000 to $200,000, have been hired as “senior mentors” by the Pentagon “to offer advice under an unusual arrangement”: they also work for companies seeking Defense Department contracts.

  In Congress, a rare Senate maneuver—needing a sixty-vote super-majority to pass anything of significance—has, almost without comment, become a commonplace for the passage of just about anything. This means Congress is eternally in a state of gridlock. And that’s just for starters when it comes to ways in which the U.S. government, so ready to surge its military and its civilian employees into Afghanistan in the name of good governance, is in need of repair, if not nation-building, itself.

  It’s nonetheless the wisdom of this Washington and of this military that Obama has not found wanting, at least when it comes to Afghanistan. So why did he listen to them? Stop for a moment and consider the cast of characters who offered the president the full range of advice available in Washington, all of it, as far as we can tell, from Joe Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy to McChrystal’s COIN and beyond, escalatory in nature. Just a cursory glance at the Obama team’s collective record should at least make you wonder:• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now said to be the official with the best ties to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and therefore the one in charge of “coaxing” him into a round of reasonable nation-building, of making “a new compact” with the Afghan people by “improving governance and cracking down on corruption.” Yet, in the early 1990s, in her single significant nation-building experience at home, she botched the possibility of getting a universal health-care bill through Congress. She also had the “wisdom” to vote in 2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

  • Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reputedly deeply trusted by the president and in charge of planning out our military future in Afghanistan, was in the 1980s a supposed expert on the Soviet Union, as well as deputy CIA director and later deputy to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Yet, in those years, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the Soviets were done for, even as that empire was disappearing from the face of the earth. In the words of former National Security Council official Roger Morris, Gates “waged a final battle against the Soviets, denying at every turn that the old enemy was actually dying.” Former CIA official Melvin Goodman writes: “Gates was wrong about every key intelligence question of the 1980s.… A Kremlinologist by training, Gates was one of the last American hardliners to comprehend the changes taking place in the Soviet Union. He was wrong about Mikhail Gorbachev, wrong about the importance of reform, wrong about Moscow’s pursuit of arms control and détente with the United States. He was wrong abo
ut the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

  • Vice President Joe Biden, described by James Traub in the New York Times as potentially “the second-most powerful vice president in history,” as well as “the president’s all-purpose adviser and sage” on foreign policy, was during the Bush years a believer in nation-building in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and later promoted the idea—like Caesar with Gaul—of dividing that country into three parts (without, of course, bothering to ask the Iraqis), while leaving 25,000 to 30,000 American troops based there in perpetuity.

  • General Stanley McChrystal, our war commander in Afghanistan and now the poster boy for counterinsurgency warfare, had his skills honed purely in the field of counterterrorism. The man who is now to “protect” the Afghan people previously won his spurs as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  • General David Petraeus, who has practically been deified in the U.S. media, is perhaps the savviest and most accomplished of this crew. His greatest skill, however, has been in fostering the career of David Petraeus. He is undoubtedly an adviser with an agenda and in his wake come a whole crew of military and think-tank experts, with almost unblemished records of being wrong in the Bush years, but to whom the surge in Iraq gave new legitimacy.