The New Yorker's George Packer and the Washington
Post's Bob Woodward weigh in with complementary pieces that illuminate a
lot of what is going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Packer's profile of aging diplo-wunderkind Richard Holbrooke
is close to book length, and every word is worth reading. He plumbs three great
mysteries: problems: the future of Afghanistan, the situation in Pakistan, and
the size of Holbrooke's ego. He also offers up some wonderful asides. This one
particularly struck me:
Washington promotes tactical
brilliance framed by strategic conformity -- the facility to outmaneuver one's
counterpart in a discussion, without questioning fundamental assumptions.
Packer also touches on an issue of strategic process I was discussing
last week, that the purpose of high-level meetings must be in part to find and
explore differences of view. Holbrooke tells him:
... you want open airing of
views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy's decided you
want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the
government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don't air
their real differences a false and sloppy consensus papers over those
underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work
at cross purposes, even actively undermining each other.
That strikes me as a pretty good summary of the Bush
Administration's handling of Iraq, 2002-2006 -- but if other examples occur to
readers, I would be interesting in hearing about it. I think this is a frequent
problem in developing American strategy.
Packer also has a great anecdote about Vali Nasr challenging
U.S. policy on Pakistan on his first day on the job as an advisor to Holbrooke.
He wound up writing a memo that the president read the next day, and then said,
"I agree with Vali Nasr."
And Packer's summary of the dysfunctionality at the heart of
the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is very good:
Underlying the crisis was an
unhappy history with the United States: on the Pakistani side, a sense of being
exploited for American strategic goals; on the American side, a sense of being
chronically deceived.
Packer quotes Nasr on this disappointing history : "two
countries that aren't enemies but don't trust each other."
On Afghanistan, Packer also describes our basic problem
there, that we have two enemies -- on the one hand, the Taliban and its allies,
and on the other, our own allies. "[E]very time an Afghan encountered the
government, he was hurt by it -- abused, asked for a bribe, hauled off to jail
without evidence." He concludes that the recent Afghan election was "a disaster
that could change the course of the war."
Woodward's article
also hits this point about U.S. official worries about the Afghan government,
which, it quotes Gen. McChrystal's official report as saying, has "given
Afghans little reason to support their government." But Woodward focuses on
Gen. McChrystal's warning that if doesn't get more troops and regain the
initiative within the next 12 months, then "defeating the insurgency is no
longer possible."
Also, the intrepid Nancy Youssef has a piece
in the Miami Herald suggesting that McChrystal will quit if not given
the troops and other resources he is requesting:
In Kabul, some members of McChrystal's
staff said they don't understand why Obama called Afghanistan a "war of
necessity" but still hasn't given them the resources they need to turn
things around quickly.
Three officers at the Pentagon and in
Kabul told McClatchy Newspapers that the McChrystal they know would resign
before he would stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger
his forces or the strategy.
"Yes, he'll be a good soldier, but
he will only go so far," a senior official in Kabul said. "He'll hold
his ground. He's not going to bend to political pressure."
If the general is smart, he will make a sharp public
statement on this issue disavowing this sort of blackmailing the boss. That
ain't kosher in our system.
Finally, here is Andrew Sullivan's helpful summary
of the early round of reactions to all this. And, as always, the wonderful David
Wood.
Read More
(14)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE