Bush Administration

Cheney accuses the Obama administration of dithering on Afghanistan. Okay,  this is enough to make me reconsider everything I've said on the subject. Seriously: I think this guy is about as wrong about American foreign policy as it is possible to be. If he thinks something, that makes me doubt it. Especially when that Karl Rove piles on.  

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Yesterday Viola Gienger, a smart reporter at Bloomberg, asked me to compare President Bush's decision to surge in Iraq to President Obama's current deliberations. This is my response:

The biggest difference that strikes me is chronological. Bush ran the Iraq war one way for about three years. Then, in November 2006, the big Republican losses in the mid-term elections gave the White House a sense of urgency to take a different approach. In the following weeks, Bush not only adopted a new strategy, he got a whole new chain of command in place -- a new secretary of defense, a new Central Commander, a new commander in Iraq, and a new ambassador there too. (And six months later, a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.)

Obama has had less time in office. And he appears to have less time to make the decision. It took about five weeks from the Nov. 2006 elections to Bush's adoption of a new strategy. I think Obama will be lucky to have that long.

Second, when Bush endorsed the surge, he was rejecting the advice of almost all his military advisors. By contrast, if Obama goes for a troop escalation, he will be embracing the recommendations of his generals.

Third, for Bush, going with the surge required from him almost a change in personality -- for the better. I think that for several years, he had been cheerleader in chief. In December 2006, he finally became commander-in-chief, asking tough questions of his generals and exploring the differences in opinion. I don't think Obama will have to undergo such a change in making this decision. But he will have to embrace being a war president, which lately he has seemed kind of ambivalent about.

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This is one of those posts that no one is gonna like. But life isn't a popularity contest.

George W. Bush came into office with many of his national security officials thinking that their adversary would be China. The overarching foreign policy task of his administration, some of them thought, would be to manage the rise of China and the decline of Russia. This was reinforced by the EP-3 knockdown incident with China just six weeks into his first term. But nine months into that term, Bush found out different, as Islamic extremism got his notice with acts in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. He reacted, characteristically, with panic. Sometimes that manifested itself as a deer-in-the-headlights look, and at other times as pelvis-thrusting bluster.

I think Obama may be having his own 9/11 moment, finding out that things aren't gonna go like he planned during the campaign. He came into office, I think, believing that his tasks were to engage or contain Iran, manage the withdrawal from Iraq and change the war in Afghanistan. On Iran, I think, he has done pretty well-trends are certainly pointing toward a multilateral containment effort.

But Obama has done nothing much on Iraq except screw up a couple of appointments there and break a campaign promise to withdraw a brigade a month this year. And on Afghanistan, when told recently what it would take to implement the strategy he announced in March, he appeared to balk. So he reacted, characteristically, I think, by dithering. Some readers of this blog think this looks like leadership, but I disagree-it isn't leading of you do a multi-month review of Afghan strategy, decide what it is going to be, ask the general in charge how to implement it, and then respond by deciding to review strategy again for a few weeks. Sometimes Obama's stance manifests itself as professorial pomposity; at other times as repeated policy reviews.

The danger of his moderating instirncts was put well by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post :

All the options Obama faces in Afghanistan are unpalatable. With Iraq, when presented with a set of troop-withdrawal timelines this year, the president took the middle way. He has shown similar instincts on health-care reform and the detention of terrorism suspects. With Afghanistan, however, that may be the most perilous path.

The idea of sending thousands more troops will be a tough sell to Congress. Pulling back to a far more narrow mission could open Obama to charges of flip-flopping -- he told veterans as recently as last month that the conflict in Afghanistan is a "war of necessity" that is fundamental to American security. Splitting the difference could have the advantage of winning over moderates in both parties, as well as voters who have begun to question the extent of the U.S. commitment there.

But Obama may want to resist that lure. Although the middle ground is often safe political terrain, it can be the riskiest spot on the battlefield.

Bottom line: For the first time, I am getting worried by Obama's handling of a foreign policy issue. But I'll take dither over panic any day.

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"I would characterize the Taliban strategy in very simple terms," said retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno. Speaking at the Marine conference on counterinsurgency last Wednesday, Barno, who was the overall commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, and was one of the more competent generals we've had there, said the Talibian think that they are winning and that the war is nearly over, and so "their strategy is simply to run out the clock."

Robbert van der Steeg

We've been hearing from the League of Concerned Former CIA Directors recently, so I was interested to see in the new issue of Parameters, one of the Army's professional magazines, an empassioned article by John Wahlquist supporting the Obama administration's recent moves to curtail the American government's use of torture.

Wahlquist, a veteran interrogator who now teaches at the National Defense Intelligence College, writes that:

President Obama's executive order on interrogation provides an excellent opportunity to end abusive practices and to propose a new agenda for intelligence interviewing that increases the capability to collect accurate information from enemy detainees effectively and humanely. Seizing this opportunity is essential to increasing the chances of success for counterterrorism operations worldwide and reducing risks to the lives of American service members and civilians, as well as detainees. Doing so enhances the broader national security agenda without sacrificing American values.

In other words, treating detainees decently improves our intelligence, makes us safer, and protects our system. 'Nuff said.

Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster is about as close to a celebrity brigadier general as the Army has. He went from being in the middle of a big tank battle in the 1991 Gulf War to leading the first major successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq (in Tal Afar in 2005-2006) and then was the brains behind Gen. Petraeus during the Surge (which, in case you were wondering, succeeded tactically but failed strategically).

So when he spoke at the Naval War College's conference on counterinsurgency earlier this week, people listened. He politely but powerfully dissected American failures in Iraq from 2003 through 2005. First, he said, there was "a failure to recognize" that the security problem in Iraq had shifted from insurgency to a communal struggle for power. Then, in 2006, he added, there was a centrally directed, well-executed campaign to ethnically cleanse Baghdad, but American commanders and civilian officials failed to recognize this until late in the ballgame. Instead, he said, they kept talking about accelerating the transition to Iraqi authority, not seeing that "there really wasn't an Iraqi government." What looked to some like a government, he explained, was instead a situation where different people had captured parts of the government structure. "So in effect our strategy in 2006 was a rush to failure," and even was intensifying Iraq's problems, he said.

How did this come to pass, he asked? It wasn't that everything was going swimmingly until the Golden Mosque in Samarra was blown up in February 2006, he said. He called that view a "myth." Rather, he said, from early on in the war, American commanders failed to adjust to the realities of Iraq. "We were always a step behind."

Also, he said, "We had these maximalist objectives [such as transforming Iraq and the Middle East]. ... but we took a minimalist approach to the application of resources." The preoccupation of senior people, he said, always seemed to be how many brigades could be withdrawn from Iraq in the coming months. "This is the period of self-delusion," he said.    

McMaster argued for developing leadership that is more adaptive, more comfortable with ambiguity, and less inclined to believe that reality is captured by aggregated statistics. His bottom line on strategic planning: "Think what is a sustainable outcome. And then commit the damn resources or go home."

I agree with everything he said -- until that last line. The problem I have is that if you commit the resources, the military tends to use them -- even if that isn't the most effective course. If you have enough troops to go into Nuristan, you'll probably go there, even if that isn't the best course. By contrast, Congress capped the U.S. military presence in El Salvador, which forced the military to maintain a small advisory force. This was, I think, far more effective than pouring infantry brigades into there -- an option that of course wasn't available. Generally, focusing on advisory functions, and raising local police and security forces, seems a far better way to fight these wars than injecting tens of thousands of American infantrymen, backed by tens of thousands of support troops, plus tens of thousands of contractors, and some trigger-happy mercenaries to top it off.     

So, good Dr. McMaster: Astute diagnosis, but I have some concern on the prescribed remedy.

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The Obama people are throwing the Russians a bone and cancelling the Bush Administration move to put missle defense systems in Poland the Czech Republic. I hope this is part  of a deal or understanding that the Russians will help us out more on containing Iran.

This is, by the way, good news for the U.S. Navy, which now will have to plan on deploying anti-missile ships to the Black Sea, where they could try to intercept rockets the Iranians might be stupid enough to shoot northwestward toward Europe. Ah, "the Black Sea fleet" -- that has a nice ring to it. Turkey is also a nice place for liberty ports. There are lots of interesting and relatively inexpensive towns in Turkey, especially on its Mediterranean coast, which Americans never seem to have discovered. And the larger message for political leaders is a reminder that sea-based systems are less subject to political pressures than are land-based systems -- another plus for the Navy. 

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The essence of strategy, of course, is making hard choices -- figuring out what is essential and what is merely important, one the key distinctions that General Eisenhower made in planning the implementation of grand strategy in World War II.

Krepinevich and Watts make the important point that in order to do so, it is necessary to have some pretty tough arguments. Under President Eisenhower, they note, the members of the NSC's "Planning Board" "sought to deal with disputes among  their principals by emphasizing differences and conflicts rather than by sweeping them under the rug."

So, I think, one of the key measures of a strategic process is this: Does it identify and explore these disputes? On the Iraq war, I think the Bush administration sought to downplay differences (for example, the running feud between the CPA and the U.S. military) and so expensively and sadly wasted three or four years of blood, treasure and power.

Krepinevich and Watts suggest re-establishing the NSC's Planning Board, an idea I think should be explored.

It strikes me that Eisenhower is getting a lot of good press nowadays, coming to be seen as perhaps our only strategically minded president of the last 50 years. In my recent travels (I've moved from subways to airplanes) I've begun reading Dear General: Eisenhower's Wartime Letters to Marshall. In the introduction, Joseph Hobbs, the editor the volume, notes that in 1962, a poll of historians rated Eisenhower "near the bottom third of American presidents." His reputation certainly has risen through the decades.  

Hey, maybe I'm becoming an Eisenhower Republican -- just as the last of them are becoming scarcer than right whales as they are marginalized by the out-of-power and out-for-blood radicalized GOP. One of Ike's most scathing terms of criticism was "hysterical."

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