• Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador to Kabul, in his previous career in the U.S. military served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and as the commander of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan was the general responsible for building up the Afghan army and “reforming” that country’s police force. We know how effective those attempts proved.
• And then there are key figures with well-padded Washington CVs like Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, or James Jones, present national security adviser and former commandant of the Marine Corps, as well as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, as well as a close friend of Senator John McCain, and a former revolving-door board member of Chevron and Boeing. Remind me just what sticks in your mind about their accomplishments?
So, when you think about Barack Obama’s Afghan decisions, remember first that the man considered the smartest, most thoughtful president of our era chose to surround himself with these people. He chose, that is, not fresh air, or fresh thought in the field of foreign and war policy, but the airless precincts where the combined wisdom of Washington and the Pentagon now exists, and the remarkable lack of accomplishment that goes with it. In short, these are people whose credentials largely consist of not having been right about much over the years.
Admittedly, this administration has called in practically every Afghan expert in sight. Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn’t in Afghanistan; it’s in Washington where knowledge is slim, egos large, and conventional national security wisdom deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down. The president campaigned on the slogan, “Change we can believe in.” He then chose as advisers—in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error, narrow and unimaginative thinking, and overidentification with the powerful could easily be compiled—a crew who had never seen a significant change or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with.
As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guantánamo remains open, black sites are still operating in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s budget has grown yet larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for yet more money to pay for George W. Bush’s wars will, despite promises, continue.
Obama has ensured that Afghanistan, the first of Bush’s disastrous wars, is now truly his war, as well.
The Nine Surges of Obama’s War
In his West Point speech, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the “surge” is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media’s focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those thirty thousand new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually under way.
In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it’s scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together. What follows, then, is my attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the Unites States has been surging as part of Obama’s widening war.
1. The troop surge: Let’s start with those “30,000” new troops the president announced. First of all, they represent phase two of Obama’s surge. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were “just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan” when he took office in January 2009. In March 2009, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. By December 2009, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. However, if you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 dispatched after the March announcement, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, 11,000 of those were “authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year,” bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan “surge” was already under way when Obama arrived. It also seems that at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door without notice or comment. Similarly, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the [30,000] number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.” That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed “senior military official” told DeYoung that “the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.”
Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.
2. The contractor surge: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many formerly military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases.
There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. They certainly went unmentioned in Obama’s West Point speech. Yet a modest-sized article by August Cole in the Wall Street Journal the day after gave us the basics, if you went looking for them. Headlined “U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace,” Cole’s article reported: “The Defense Department’s latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40 percent between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5 percent in the same period.… Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total.” In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.
Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corporation, the website TPM Muckraker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 “third country nationals” among the contractors, and among those 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that DynCorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan, “which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years.”
3. The militia surge: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a minisurge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently t
o create a movement along the lines of Iraq’s Sunni Awakening movement that, many believe, ensured the “success” of George W. Bush’s 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we’ll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of cash.
This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense Initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of USA Today, will “funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize ‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with security.” Think of this as a “bribe” surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy “friendship.”
4. The civilian surge: The State Department now claims to be “on track” to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by early 2010. Of course, that means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government, including “diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country.” A similar civilian surge is evidently under way in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for that humongous new, nearly billion-dollar embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.
5. The CIA and special forces surge: Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog had it right when he wrote: “The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn’t mention at West Point,” referring to the CIA’s “covert” (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. In fact, the CIA’s drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af-Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report that the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House “for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the CIA’s budget for operations inside the country.” In addition, Scott Shane of the Times reports, “The White House has authorized an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said…to parallel the president’s decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time—a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas—because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”
The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a complex tinderbox of a region with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.
In addition, thanks to the Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates “a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the “surge” there means.
6. The base-building surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama’s latest troop-surge announcement, but he has continued it. A December 5, 2009, NBC Nightly News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a “boom town,” shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which—especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades under way—are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.
As Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported, forward operating bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. “Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy,” he wrote, “and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn’t going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military’s building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon.”
7. The training surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan National Army and police. Despite years of U.S. and NATO “mentoring,” both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions, running at a rate of at least 25 percent of those trained annually, and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by fall 2010 and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.
8. The cost surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan army, and another $7 billion has gone into police training, staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the country’s security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works, which seems unlikely, try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-person force. Afghan president Hamid Karzai has suggested that it will take at least fifteen to twenty years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule (“You break it, you own it”). In this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. And this is even without adding in those local militias we’re planning to invest “millions” in.
9. The endlessly receding horizon surge: By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting “an open-ended commitment.” With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post headline said it all: “McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact.” On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of drawdown promises. More
over, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right wing began to blaze away about the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date “to the enemy,” there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful. In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a “flurry of coordinated television interviews,” the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows “in lockstep” to reassure the Right (and they were reassured) by playing “down the significance of the July 2011 target date.” The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. (“July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [national security adviser] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’ rather than a ‘cliff.’”)
When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: “We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” This seemed a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re talking about a relatively lightly armed minority Pashtun insurgency. Against them and a minuscule number of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched an unbelievably costly buildup of forces over vast distances, along fragile, overextended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan. This is the reality the president and his top officials didn’t bother to explain to the American people.
And yet, confoundingly, as the United States bulks up, the war only grows fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, has written, “Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.” Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, give it some credit: the ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.
American Way of War Page 23