Obama
Boxed In by Generals on Afghanistan
By Ray Mc
Govern
Just back from
Afghanistan, Marine Commandant, Gen. James Conway held a news conference
Tuesday to add his voice to the Pentagon campaign to
disparage the July 2011 date President Barack Obama set for U.S. troops to
begin leaving Afghanistan.
Conway claimed that intelligence intercepts suggest that
this deadline has strengthened the conviction of those resisting the U.S.-led
occupation that it is just a matter of time before most foreign forces leave.
Thus,
Conway:
“In some
ways … it’s probably giving our enemy sustenance. … We think he may be saying
to himself … ‘Hey, you know, we only have to hold out for so long.’”
Conway, however, was quick to reassure supporters of the
war in Afghanistan that
Taliban
morale is likely to drop when, “come the fall [of 2011] we’re still there
hammering them like we have been.”
Conway began his press conference by adding a new measure
to the refrain led by Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and allied forces
in Afghanistan, that considerable time will be required before Afghan forces
can take over from U.S. troops.
The
Marine general said, “I honestly think it will be a few years before conditions
on the ground are such that turnover will be possible for us,” adding, “When
some American unit somewhere in Afghanistan will turn over responsibilities to
Afghan forces in 2011, I do not think they will be Marines.”
President Obama and his generals have emphasized that any
withdrawal will be “conditions based,” much as President George W. Bush did
regarding Iraq. But setbacks in Afghanistan over the past several months — in
particular, the failure of the large Marine campaign to secure Marja, a rural
area of Helmand province — have made it abundantly clear that “conditions” are
not likely to favor more than a token withdrawal next July.
On a June visit to Afghanistan, Joint Chiefs Chairman,
Adm. Mike Mullen discussed the setbacks with Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius. Mullen admitted, “We underestimated some of the challenges” in Marja,
which the Marines tried to clear in March, only to have
Taliban
fighters return.
“
They’re coming
back at night, the intimidation is still there,” said Mullen. Marja had been
widely advertised by the Pentagon as the warm-up for driving the
Taliban out of Kandahar beginning in June 2010.
The U.S.
military postponed the campaign against Kandahar in May, and Mullen conceded
that, “It’s going to take until the end of the year to know where we are”
there.
Top Brass
vs. President
The Obama
administration’s reluctance to discipline senior generals for comments
bordering on insubordination seems to have encouraged the generals to believe
they can speak their mind with impunity about President Obama's management of
the Afghan conflict.
The exception
to this rule was the extraordinary case of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was
commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan until he became the subject
of a Rolling Stone article, “Runaway General,” in which McChrystal and
his military inner circle were quoted as mocking Obama and the civilian
leadership.
The title
had an ironic twist since the derogatory comments enabled McChrystal to run
away from the consequences of his stumbling war effort, by getting himself
fired. After Marja and the abject failure of his campaign to win hearts and
minds of most Afghans, McChrystal knew better than anyone that the war was
hopeless.
Crusty old Marines like Gen. Conway do not run away—they
no longer “fade away,” either. Scheduled to retire this fall after 40 years, he
also isn’t angling for some big promotion. Nor is he inclined to sugarcoat
military realities in order to calm political nerves in Washington and
elsewhere in the country.
Conway has spoken out before against what he considered —
legitimately, in my view — arrogant politicians trying to micromanage Marine
offensives in ways that caused needless killing of his Marines. For instance,
he objected to the Bush administration’s cavalier use of Marines to crush
resistance in Fallujah, Iraq, in the spring of 2004. (See below for more detail
on Conway’s experience in Fallujah.)
So Gen. Conway let loose at
Tuesday’s
press conference, pointing out “
The
President was talking to several audiences at the same time when he made his
comments regarding July 2011.” Implication:
The
July 2011 date was pure politics; there was no military justification for the
deadline then; and there is certainly no military justification for it now.
Conway may be insubordinate, but he is also correct about
that.
Obama tried to have it both ways, giving the hawks in his
administration the escalation they wanted while offering the doves in his
political base a fixed date for beginning a troop withdrawal. Such cleverness
can work sometimes in politics, but it won’t work in a difficult war like the
one in Afghanistan.
However much Obama may have resented it, by last fall he had
to admit to himself that he had been thoroughly outmaneuvered by high-profile
generals.
Take McChrystal, for
example, who was well known to have run special operations assassination squads
for five years in Iraq under the aegis of Vice President Dick Cheney.
McChrystal also demonstrably lied about who killed football-star-turned-soldier
Pat
Tillman in Afghanistan.
And yet, Obama couldn’t say no, when Defense Secretary
Robert Gates and the Pentagon’s most famous “water-walker,” Gen. Petraeus, told
the President to put McChrystal in charge of the war in Afghanistan.
Either from naiveté or hubris or a combination of both,
Obama apparently felt he still could maintain some control over the situation
through his persuasive skills. Instead, he found himself in a corner.
The Long
Reassessment
During last year's long review of U.S. strategy in
Afghanistan, McChrystal’s recommendations for a major escalation of troops and
an open-ended commitment for 10 years or more were leaked to the press. Joint
Chiefs Chairman Mullen also made a public case for a long-term commitment, as
did Petraeus, who was chief of the Central Command.
Then,
during a public presentation in London on Oct. 1, 2009, McChrystal himself said
he could not support a presidential decision to fight the war primarily with
drone aircraft and Special Forces, the more limited approach advocated by Vice
President Joe Biden.
Instead of firing McChrystal then, Obama on Oct. 2 gave
the general a 25-minute counseling session on Air Force One. He then told
Pentagon leaders to stop their public advocacy of McChrystal’s proposals.
In the book,
The
Promise: President Obama, Year One, author Jonathan Alter said the
President was sending the Pentagon “an unmistakable message: Don’t toy with
me.” Obama wasn’t going to let himself get backed into a corner, said Alter.
Right.
Mullen and Gates were summoned to the White House, but all
that emerged was a flaccid statement from Gates saying it was “imperative” that
generals provide their advice “candidly but privately.” Mullen did tell the
generals to knock off the public campaign for a substantial troop buildup in
Afghanistan, and the leaks mostly stopped.
However, Obama had been softened up politically. By
October 2009, with the reassessment on Afghanistan having dragged on for
months, Obama came under attack from former Vice President Dick Cheney and
others for supposedly “dithering.”
Yet, behind the scenes, other generals — former ones, with
less personal stakes in the Afghan War — were resisting the push for major
escalation.
James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser and a
former four-star general, had been pushing back against McChrystal and other
hawks. Undercutting the rationale for escalation, Jones told the press on Oct.
4, 2009:
“I don’t
foresee the return of the
Taliban.
Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. …
The
al-Qaeda presence is very diminished.
The
maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no
ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”
In early November, Obama also received cogent, sober
advice from his ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, himself a former general
who knew twice as much about Afghanistan as McChrystal and Petraeus put
together. From 2002 to 2003, Eikenberry was responsible for training Afghan
security forces. He then served 18 months (2005-2007) as commander of U.S.
forces in Afghanistan.
In two highly sensitive cables of Nov. 6 and 9, 2009, (the
texts of which were almost immediately leaked by an unknown U.S. official to
the New York
Times), Eikenberry
declared, “I cannot support [the Defense Department’s] recommendation for an
immediate Presidential decision to deploy another 40,000 here.”
Damning McChrystal’s recommendations with faint (and
condescending) praise, Eikenberry described them as “logical and compelling
within his [McChrystal’s] narrow mandate to define the needs for a military
counterinsurgency campaign within Afghanistan.”
Eikenberry then went on to list a dozen compelling factors
that would make adding more troops a fool’s errand — among them these three:
--Hamid
Karzai was not and never would be “an adequate strategic partner;”
--“More
troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain … and
Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by a weak neighbor;”
--“We
overestimate the ability of Afghan security forces to take over … by 2013.”
(Who would be better qualified to make the judgment on
security forces than the senior officer trying to build and train a fledgling,
predominantly illiterate Afghan army from 2002 to 2003?)
Obama Bows to the Four-Stars
But Obama found himself outgunned politically by the
pro-escalation crowd.
Thanks in
large measure to a fawning media, Gen. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal enjoyed
much higher public profiles that James Jones and Ambassador Eikenberry.
And, besides, if the U.S. and NA
TO
failed to prevail in Afghanistan (whatever “prevail” might mean), the overly
smart advisers in Obama’s White House thought they could blame the generals.
After all, the President was giving them what they had demanded.
This kind
of reasoning seemed to persuade Obama to dismiss the informed commentary of
Ambassador Eikenberry and national security adviser Jones, as well as the views
of Vice President Biden. Whether
Petraeus and McChrystal had it right or wrong, the politically smart ting to do
would be to defer to them.
On Nov. 11, 2009, Veterans Day, Obama called his key
advisers and generals together. According to Jonathan Alter, it was then that
the President gave preliminary approval for 40,000 more troops to be sent to
Afghanistan. But he wanted them in and out quickly.
The
Pentagon was to prepare a ”targeted” plan for protecting population centers,
training Afghan security forces, and beginning a real — not a token —
withdrawal within 18 months of the escalation.
Too
Inexperienced &
Too Clever by
Half
Obama’s dilemma was how to project an image of strength in
the fight against the
Taliban and
still avoid letting Afghanistan become an albatross around his neck in
2011-2012 as the next presidential election drew near.
In Obama’s calculation, the image of toughness was to come
from giving the generals pretty much what they demanded to carry the fight to
the
Taliban.
The
albatross would be avoided, the President thought, by giving the generals a
deadline — a date on which U.S. troops would start coming home. Such a deadline
would also be helpful in appeasing what used to be called Obama’s base—more
recently branded “the professional left.”
The dual
message was crafted presumably with the help of the inept folks who led the
long assessment with the wrong conclusions—functionaries like former CIA official
Bruce Riedel and Ambassador Richard "we’ll-recognize-success-when-we-see-it"
Holbrooke. Never ones to pick a fight with beribboned four-stars, they probably
repeated their mantra: the military knows best.
Next stop for Obama in deciding how to massage the message
was to consult with his own inside group of political wheeler-dealers — folks
with long experience in Congress and in White House positions, such as chief of
staff Rahm Emanuel, CIA Director Leon Panetta, former White House chief of
staff John Podesta, and Joe Biden.
With the help of this brain trust, Obama settled on what
he thought would be a win-win solution — for his administration, if not for
U.S. troops.
In the formal meeting on Nov. 29, Obama would get the top
brass on record buying into the escalation and timetable. In other words, he
would turn the tables on the generals, boxing them in for a change. According
to Alter, the dialogue went like this:
Obama:
“David [Petraeus], tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do
this in 18 months?"
Petraeus:
“Sir, I am confident we can train and hand over to the ANA (Afghan National
Army) in that time frame.”
Obama:
“If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going
to suggest we stay, right?”
Petraeus:
“Yes, sir, in agreement.”
Mullen:
“Yes, sir.”
Obama
then asked Defense Secretary Gates if he had any problems with the scenario,
eliciting a response from Gates saying he was fine with the decision.
Obama:
“I’m not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don’t agree with me
that we can execute this, say so now.
Tell
me now.”
Mullen:
“Fully support, sir.”
Petraeus:
“Ditto.”
Am I the only one who finds that scene extraordinary?
Alter adds that as Biden walked with the President to the
meeting, the Vice President asked if the new policy of beginning a significant
withdrawal in 2011 was a direct Presidential order that could not be
countermanded by the military. Obama said yes.
That
response no doubt accounts for the assurance that Biden later gave at the end
of an interview in his West Wing office: “In July 2011 you’re going to see a
whole lot of people moving out [of Afghanistan]. Bet on it. Bet on it.”
I imagine that this is not the first foolish bet Joe Biden
has made. How naïve for him and Obama to think that they had the generals boxed
in and that the generals -- along with their powerful allies -- could not
figure out some way to insist that a change in circumstance necessitated a
longer time frame or additional resources.
The next
two years are far more likely to witness a Donnybrook between the Pentagon and
White House, as the security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate
and Petraeus – now commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, with his
vaunted reputation riding on success – inevitably demands more troops.
Can Obama really believe that Petraeus will honor his Nov.
29 pledge; that when things go really bad in Afghanistan the beribboned general
will say, “Shucks, I was wrong”; and then tuck tail, forfeiting any ambition he
may harbor eventually to run for President?
With all due respect, President Obama and Vice President
Biden, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Gen. Conway and Fallujah
We are likely to hear more from Gen. James Conway before
he retires this fall.
The Marine
Commandant has been outspoken for over five years — and with very good reason
since his Marines were often the ones bearing the brunt of the fighting in Iraq
and Afghanistan, at times taking casualties because of politically inspired
orders that made no military sense.
After turning over command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary
Force in Iraq in early September 2004, Conway let not a day pass before
excoriating higher officials for misguided, counterproductive orders to attack
the Iraqi Sunni stronghold of Fallujah in retaliation for the brutal killing of
four U.S. Blackwater contractors on March 31, 2004.
Conway did not repeat the criticism of UN envoy in Iraq,
Lakhdar Brahimi, and many others who denounced the Fallujah offensive as
"collective punishment," a war crime under international law. But the
Marine general did observe that the attack "certainly increased the level
of animosity that existed."
Conway stressed the stupidity of ordering the attack, in
which six Marines were killed and six more wounded, and then halting it just
three days later.
The
reason for the rash order to attack and the sudden reversal related to concerns
within George W. Bush’s White House, first, that the killings of the
contractors could not go unpunished, followed by the realization that the
worsening war in Iraq could affect Bush’s chances in the 2004 election.
Conway found particularly galling what happened after he
was ordered to break off the attack. A handful of former Iraqi generals were
allowed to form the "Fallujah Brigade" and were put in charge of the
city.
The 800
AK-47 assault weapons, 27 pick-up trucks and 50 radios that the Marines gave
this "Brigade" wound up in the hands of the resistance, which
remained in control of Fallujah.
The
equipment also was used against Marines positioned near the city.
Asked who issued the order to attack and then halt, Conway would only say that
he had advised against the attack in the first place but that "we follow
our orders." According to
The
Washington Post, senior U.S. officials in Iraq said the command to attack
and then desist originated in the White House.
Just days after Bush won a second term in November 2004, the assault on
Fallujah resumed with U.S. forces virtually leveling the city, partly in
retribution for the dead Blackwater contractors and the humiliation that had
been dealt the Bush administration.
Eye for an Eye
Most Americans are unaware of this sequence of events in
Fallujah in 2004, but should know and ponder what actually happened. First, the
Blackwater contractors had taken a wrong turn on March 29 and ended up in the
wrong neighborhood in Fallujah.
Western press accounts left the impression that the murder
of the four Blackwater operatives was the work of fanatics who acted without
provocation and eventually got — along with thousands of their neighbors — the
punishment they deserved. Few are aware that the killings of the contractors
represented the second turn in that particular cycle of violence.
On March 22, 2004, Israeli forces assassinated in Gaza the
spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin — a withering old man, blind and
confined to a wheel chair.
The
Blackwater operatives in Fallujah were killed by a group that described itself
as the “Sheikh Yassin Revenge Brigade.” One of the trucks that dragged the
bodies of the mercenaries had a large poster of Yassin in its window, as did
many Fallujah storefronts.
Gen. Conway may already know the full story. As his
retirement nears, he may feel free to point out the actual sequence of events
stretching from Gaza to Fallujah and join other realists who have served in the
U.S. military and noted the increased dangers to U.S. troops that flow from the
widespread perception that U.S. policy is identical to that of Israel.
Ray Mc
Govern
works for
Tell the Word, the
publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Washington. He served as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer, and then as a
CIA analyst for a total of almost 30 years. He now serves on the Steering Group
of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.
