Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

President Obama on Afghanistan: From “War of Necessity” to “How in the Heck Do We Get Out of Here”

David Sanger has a new book coming out next month, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.  Last week The New York Times published an article by Mr. Sanger on President Obama and Afghanistan, “Charting Obama’s Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan,” that was adapted from the book.

Other comments on the article have noted President Obama’s shift of policy in Afghanistan and his eventual exclusion of not only military leaders but also Defense Secretary Gates and Secretary of State Clinton from policy planning sessions.

What is more fascinating to me, however, is how little Barack Obama apparently knew about Afghanistan when he was elected President in 2008.  Throughout the campaign then-Senator Obama talked about the dumb war in Iraq and the “war of necessity” in Afghanistan.  Except the article makes it pretty clear that President Obama’s commitment to the “necessity” of the war in Afghanistan was shallow, if it existed at all beyond being a great campaign issue.

Which brings me back to the 2008 campaign.  One of the big stories of the campaign was how smart Barack Obama was.  He spoke so well, and he knew so much.  Except as Mr. Sanger’s article makes clear, then-Senator Obama didn’t really know what he wanted to do in Afghanistan or how he wanted to do it.

One of the other big stories of the 2008 campaign was how little Sarah Palin knew.  But after reading Mr. Sanger’s article, I wonder if then-Governor Palin knew any less about Afghanistan than Barack Obama did.  And I cannot help but think that she might have been a better learner than he turned out to be.

Protesting NATO. Why?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is meeting in Chicago on Sunday, May 21 and Monday, May 22.  It’s a big deal, and a lot of protesters are expected.  I’m not exactly sure why all these protesters are coming to Chicago.  Chicago police are going to look at this as a chance for baton target practice – just kidding.

Seriously, though, I do wonder what it is about NATO that the protesters don’t like.  Most recently, NATO has been fighting in Afghanistan.  I realize President Karzai is pretty marginal, but compared to the Taliban, he’s not so bad.  Unless you like things such as girls not being allowed to go to school, etc.

NATO has been involved in the Balkans, too, stopping fighting there.  The operations in Libya were perhaps the most controversial – and maybe questionable – thing NATO has done but they are over now.

In any case, Afghanistan and these other operations are not what NATO is really about.  If you are protesting against NATO, that means you are protesting against things such as:

• NATO helping maintain peace in Europe for over forty years after World War II, while giving the nations of Western Europe the chance to do what they wanted to do, instead of what the Soviet Union wanted them to do.
• NATO members working with the United States and West Germany to facilitate the peaceful reunification of Germany after the Wall fell in 1989.
• NATO supporting the people of Eastern Europe in their efforts to bring freedom and democracy to their countries when they finally had a real chance to achieve it.  And not just countries like Poland and Hungary, but Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, too.  Mind-boggling.
• The nations of Eastern Europe becoming members of NATO.  As soon as they could, members of the old Warsaw Pact, and even some republics of the USSR, joined NATO.  Why?  So the security promise that had protected western Europe for so long would now protect them, too.

When you protest against NATO, this is what you are protesting against.  I can see why Vladimir Putin might not like NATO, but protesters in Chicago?

I suppose some of the protestors may think that they are protesting against inequality and that they are supporting the 99% against the 1%.  Except that is not what NATO is about.  Protesting against those things at a NATO meeting misses the point.

But that is the main story of the protests:  The protestors are missing the point.  They don’t understand NATO: they don’t understand what it is, and they don’t remember all the good if has done over the years.  It sort of makes you wonder if they really know what they are doing at all.

President Obama on Osama Bin Laden. John McCain on Heroes.

President Obama, and his campaign, are celebrating the anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.  The Obama campaign has released a seven-minute video which includes Bill Clinton on the killing of Bin Laden.  The President himself, in a press conference with the Japanese prime minister, implied that Mitt Romney would not have sent the Navy SEALs in.  And President Obama flew to Afghanistan to sign an agreement with Afghan President Karzai* and to address the American people.  It was 4:00 am in Afghanistan, but just about prime time in the US.

The best comment on all of this may have been John McCain’s:

"I've had the great honor of serving in the company of heroes. And, you know the thing about heroes, they don't brag." 

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* I find it interesting that the President flew to Afghanistan personally to sign this agreement since, when he became president, he discontinued the regular personal communications that President George W. Bush had had with President Karzai.

We’re Coming Home From Afghanistan – And We Didn’t Get the Job Done

It’s pretty clear that the United States, and its allies, are leaving Afghanistan as soon as they (decently-?) can* and that, other than rooting Al Qaeda out initially (and killing Osama Bin Laden), we didn’t get the job done. We have no good reason to believe that the Afghan government will survive Taliban attacks once we leave (and I would not be surprised to see attempts by President Karzai, et al., to negotiate with the Taliban even as we are packing up to go). Whether Al Qaeda comes back after that will depend mostly on the Taliban’s views of its future interests. The whole area, i.e., Afghanistan/Pakistan/etc., will be a mess, and the level of the United States’ influence will be affected by the way we are leaving.

Clearly, President George W. Bush did not do a good job in Afghanistan. He was focusing on Iraq and did not pay enough attention to Afghanistan. But we also did not have enough troops to do both. Which raises a separate question as to why the Obama administration wants to cut the number of soldiers and Marines we have by 100,000. I know that nobody wants to do another Iraq or Afghanistan, but sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. (As every parent has explained to their children at one time or another.) How are going to do what we may have to do in the future with 100,000 fewer soldiers and Marines?

But back to Afghanistan: Once operations in Iraq slowed down (and eventually ended), why didn’t we do better in Afghanistan? Afghanistan was, after all, the “good war,” at least according candidate Barack Obama. Even if George W. Bush did a poor job there, why hasn’t President Obama done better?

For example, I realize we cannot control Afghanistan, but why didn’t the Obama administration do more to make sure the 2009 elections in Afghanistan were honest, instead of the fraud that re-elected President Karzai? Sure we pressured President Karzai to allow a run-off after the fraud in the first round, but what did we do before it happened?

If we were stuck with President Karzai, and if we thought he was little unstable or erratic at times, why did President Obama end the regular personal communications that President Bush had with him? Is that the way to treat the person you need to have a good relationship with to make sure things go right?

And why did so many of our people in Afghanistan have a bad relationship with President Karzai? I realize that President Karzai may be difficult to deal with (to say the least), but you have to deal with the people you have to deal with. Except we didn’t. The only person who seemed to have a decent relationship with President Karzai, General Stanley McChrystal, was fired for insulting President Obama. Which he did. But was President Obama so threatened by what General McChrystal said, that he had to fire the one person who had a good relationship with President Karzai? (President Obama’s hero, Abraham Lincoln, would not have done that – and didn’t. See, for example, President Lincoln and General George McClellan.)

Why did President Obama have to state, when he announced in December of 2009 that we were sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, the date the troops were leaving at the same time he announced he was sending them in? How did that demonstrate commitment? Was that going to make the Afghanis trust us?

But most of all, as The Washington Post said last week, and as I have asked, why hasn’t President Obama been out talking to the American people and explaining to the American people about how important Afghanistan is? We have troops over there. They are committing themselves. Why hasn’t President Obama committed himself to explain this war to the American people?

The bottom line is that President George W. Bush did not do enough in Afghanistan when he had the chance. And neither has President Obama. And President Obama had the last clear chance.

And so, as liberals have been trying to claim for so long (even though it was wrong until just recently), Afghanistan is going to wind up like Vietnam. It didn’t have to, but it will. And the biggest legacy of Afghanistan will be what the legacy of Vietnam was for so long: Can the United States be trusted to keep its word? Or, as The Economist put it on February 4, 2012: “[T]he whole sorry story will send a chilling message everywhere about the worth of Western commitments.”**

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* If most Americans, or at least most Democrats, view staying in Afghanistan as a mistake, I wonder when John Kerry will be asking President Obama: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

** “The spectre of comparisons,” The Economist, February 4, 2012.

Leaving Afghanistan

I see that we are leaving Afghanistan earlier than expected, and possibly before the job is done, and that Defense Secretary Panetta told the news media before we told our allies.*  The latter is somewhat similar to what we did back in 2009, when we abandoned the ABM system we were planning against missiles from Iran and other such countries.  Important parts of the system were to be located in Poland and the Czech Republic, and the governments in those countries had taken huge political risks by agreeing to participate.  But we just changed our mind and too bad for them.**  (A couple more things like this, and we’ll need that "Reset button" for our friends.)

Basically, it appears that Afghanistan just isn’t that important to President Obama any more.  Or at least it isn’t as important as it was back in 2008 when he could use the “good war” of Afghanistan to beat up the Republicans in comparison to the “bad war” of Iraq.

I certainly understand that relations with Afghani President Karzai are not good, but diplomacy was where the Obama administration was supposed to be so much better than George W. Bush.  And if President Karzai was elected in a corrupt election, why didn’t we do more to make sure the Afghani presidential election in August of 2009 was honestly run?

In any case, the Administration says we can cut back in Afghanistan because we are succeeding.  Things do appear to be getting better in some parts of Afghanistan, but I doubt we are “succeeding” enough to justify the cutbacks that President Obama seems to want, both in terms of the number of troops in Afghanistan and what they should be doing.  It would be great if the Afghani forces were ready by next year to allow U.S. troops to switch to a purely advisory role, but I don’t think many people believe they will be.  And if we try to turn the fighting over to the Afghanis before they are ready, the result won’t be good.

But President Obama also says that we have to cut back in Afghanistan because we need to spend the money at home.  No, that’s wrong.  If we need to be in Afghanistan, we have enough money to be there.  Defense comes first, not last.  If our defense requires it, we can do it – if we want to.

Which brings me back to where I started.  As I said above, when President Obama was running for president, he would compare the “good war” of Afghanistan with the “bad war” in Iraq.  When he first came into office, he sent more troops to Afghanistan, and he affirmed the counterinsurgency strategy we had belatedly started to implement in Afghanistan.  Later in 2009 year, after a very long further review of our policy in Afghanistan, President Obama once again affirmed the counterinsurgency strategy, and he sent more troops to Afghanistan for a surge.  But this time he hesitated a little.   He didn’t send as many troops as were requested, and he announced when they would be coming home at the same time he said they were going.  This was a little unusual.  The idea of counterinsurgency operations is to protect the people.  But here was President Obama telling both the Afghani people we were going to protect and the enemy we were going to protect them from, when the protection was going to end.  There was a disconnect between those that I have yet to figure out.

But now, we are apparently done with counterinsurgency operations (based on the President’s defense budget for next year), and we are coming home from Afghanistan, apparently even faster than we previously said (or at least faster than we led people to believe).  Which makes me wonder why we did all that we did in Afghanistan over the last 2-1/2 years if we are leaving now in what seems like a bit of a rush, and regardless of whether we have accomplished what we set out to do.

So why are we leaving now?  Is President Obama tired of Afghanistan?  I understand why the American people have gotten tired of Afghanistan, especially when the Administration hasn’t spent much time explaining why what we are doing there is important.  But presidents are not supposed to give up just because they are tired.  Certainly, the American people got tired of Obamacare, but the President didn’t stop on that one.  Why is Afghanistan different?  If it was important to be there before, why is it not important now?

And don’t tell me it’s because the job is almost done.  As I said before, nobody really believes that.  Don’t tell me it’s because Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden.  Hiding out like he was, he couldn’t have been providing real leadership to Al Qaeda for years.  Certainly, when George W. Bush was president, there were plenty of Democrats willing to say that killing Osama Bin Laden was all that important.  I can’t believe that they changed their mind just because we have a Democrat in the White House.

So why are we leaving now?  I don’t want to be cynical, but I almost wonder if it’s just that President Obama doesn’t care about Afghanistan now that it’s not an issue to use against President Bush.  Or maybe he really didn’t know what was going on in Afghanistan when he was running for president, and it has taken him three years to decide what he wants to do.

Whatever the reason for our leaving, and the clumsy way we are doing it (or at least announced it), if we are leaving before the job we promised to do id done, the results will not be good – either for the people of Afghanistan or for the United States.

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* Adam Entous, “Panetta Draws Fire Over Afghanistan Shift,” The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2012.

** Marc Champion and Peter Spiegel, “U.S. Missile U-Turn Roils Allies,” The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2009; “Obama’s Missile Offense,” The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2009.

Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party

Milton Wolf writes in The Washington Times about “[Newt] Gingrich’s rise and the Tea Party’s embrace of him”.  Dr. Wolf says:

“The conservative movement deserves an unapologetic, full-throated Great Communicator once again. Few can articulate conservatism as effectively as the former speaker.”

But what Dr. Wolf is missing, and what Tea Partiers (or anybody else) who are for Mr. Gingrich because of what they have heard him say in debates over the last few months need to realize, is that Newt Gingrich is a lot more, and less, than what they have seen and heard in those debates.  Obviously, that is true for all politicians (and all people, for that matter), but it may be a little more true for Mr. Gingrich.

Certainly, Mr. Gingrich was the architect of the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994.  He was also thrown out of the Speakership by his own party four years later.

While Newt Gingrich was Speaker, the federal government enacted welfare reform.  The country also re-elected Bill Clinton at least in part because President Clinton beat Speaker Gingrich hands-down in the political battles over government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996.

I don’t object to people making money, but I wonder about all the money Mr. Gingrich made while consulting for federal government agencies.

And then there is his idea of having federal marshals effectively arrest judges to force them to testify before Congress about decisions Congress doesn’t like.

For those who have looked at all of Mr. Gingrich’s record and have decided to support him, I say more power to you (even though I disagree with you).  But for those who support Mr. Gingrich based on what he has been saying over the last several months, I say: Beware.  You may be surprised by what you get.

Afghanistan: I’m Concerned.

Remember Afghanistan?  Remember the 33,000 troop surge that President Obama sent there (and set a date to bring back in the same speech).  Well, the last of the surge is getting ready to come home, and I don’t think things are going all that well.

Secretary of State Clinton went to Afghanistan and Pakistan last month and talked about a revamped approach: “Fight, Talk, Build.”  The problem with this approach is, obviously, you have to have somebody to talk to, and it’s not clear we do.

In September, Ryan Crocker, our ambassador to Afghanistan, summed up we have to do in Afghanistan (according to an article in The Wall Street Journal*):

“Peace negotiations with the Taliban are unlikely to bear results until additional military pressure is brought on the insurgents, the new American ambassador to Kabul said ….

‘The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile, Ambassador Ryan Crocker cautioned in an interview ….’”

The problem is, I don’t think we are doing this.  In a New York Times article about Secretary of State Clinton’s trip, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger wrote:

“[A]n emerging American strategy aims to attack the Haqqanis on both sides of the border.  An eight-day NATO offensive this month [i.e., October] involving 11,000 allied troops and 25,000 Afghan security forces in seven provinces in eastern Afghanistan killed or captured more than 200 Haqqani fighters and commanders, allied officials said; the pressure on the Pakistani side is being generated almost entirely by the drone strikes.”

That doesn’t sound like the kind of population security/counterinsurgency strategy that worked when we finally implemented it in Iraq.  Instead, it sounds that the old “search and destroy” strategy that failed in Vietnam and that we used in Iraq BP (i.e., “before Petraeus”).  “Body count” is not how you succeed in this kind of war.  If body counts are what we are focusing on now, or at least talking about, that is not a good sign.  Because body counts are not counterinsurgency and population security.

If we really want the other side to talk to us in Afghanistan, we need to bring steady, continued pressure on them.  We need to demonstrate our seriousness and that they can’t wait us out.  But it does not seem like we are demonstrating that seriousness and that determination.  With the surge just about gone, it’s unclear whether we have enough troops to do population security any more.  So we’re doing sweeps and talking about body counts of enemies killed instead of numbers of Afghanis protected.

Back in Washington, according to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal**, the Obama administration is yet again trying to figure out what strategy they want to follow in Afghanistan:

“The Obama administration is exploring a shift in the military’s mission in Afghanistan to an advisory role as soon as next year, senior officials said, a move that would scale back U.S. combat duties well ahead of their scheduled conclusion at the end of 2014.

Such a move would have broad implications for the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.  It could begin a phase-out of the current troop-intensive approach, which focuses on protecting the Afghan population, in favor of a greater focus on targeted counterterrorism operations, as well as training the Afghan military. …

The recent discussions reflect ambivalence within the administration over whether the counterinsurgency approach was merited.

Some administration officials privately argued that it was too costly and unrealistic, compared to a counterterrorism strategy that relies more heavily on using Special Operations forces to hunt down and kill militants.”

It almost seems like the Administration is looking for some kind of quick fix for Afghanistan like they keep trying for the economy:  Cut Social Security by two percentage points for one year and hope unemployment will do down.  Except companies won’t hire permanent employees because of a one-year tax break.  And the other side in Afghanistan isn’t going to negotiate with somebody who can’t figure out what their strategy and whose main goal seems to be getting out as opposed to getting the job done. 

That is why I am concerned about Afghanistan.

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* Yaroslav Trofimov and Maria Abi-Habib, “Taliban Need ‘Pain’ to Talk, Envoy Says,” The Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2011.

** Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. Explores Faster Afghan Handover,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2011.

Ryan Crocker On Afghanistan

Back in April I posted a summary of comments Ryan Crocker made to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs about Iraq and more.  In June I complimented the Obama Administration for appointing Mr. Crocker to be our new ambassador to Afghanistan.  Mr. Crocker is now on duty in Kabul, and in recent interviews he has been reporting on what he sees there and how things are going.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

“Peace negotiations with the Taliban are unlikely to bear results until additional military pressure is brought on the insurgents, the new American ambassador to Kabul said ….

‘The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile, Ambassador Ryan Crocker cautioned in an interview ….’”*

The idea that the Taliban needs to feel that things aren’t going their way before they will seriously negotiate is both obvious and something that people who want to leave Afghanistan NOW, don’t seem to understand.** 

Just because we want the war with al-Qaeda to be over, doesn’t mean we can end it.  In military matters, as in many others, the other side gets a vote, too.  Ambassador Crocker told The Washington Post:  “It’s hard.  It’s going to go on being hard.  But it’s not hopeless. … The key is strategic patience, which is hard for us Americans.  We need it here, we needed it in Iraq and we certainly need it with Pakistan.” 

The questions are whether the President, including those in his Administration, and the various candidates pursuing the Republican presidential nomination, have that strategic patience themselves and whether they are willing to try to convince the American people of the need for the U.S. to exercise it in Afghanistan.

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* Yaroslav Trofimov and Maria Abi-Habib, “Taliban Need ‘Pain’ to Talk, Envoy Says,” The Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2011.

** Many people didn’t understand it in Vietnam, either.

Random Thoughts on Afghanistan, “Large Armies Overseas,” and “Unleashing Innovation”

In his speech on Afghanistan last Wednesday evening, President Obama said:

“Peace cannot come to a land that has known so much war without a political settlement.”

Actually, a political settlement cannot come just because one side wants it.  A political settlement needs both sides’ consent (or at least grudging acceptance).  If one side would rather fight than negotiate, then they get to decide.  I get more than a little tired of people who say the solution to a problem is to negotiate with the other side, without understanding that the other side has to be willing to negotiate, too.  If the other side thinks that they can achieve their goals better by fighting, they are going to do that.  And if we say that we are leaving (or are significantly reducing our presence), where is the incentive for the other side to negotiate, as opposed to waiting until we leave – unless, of course, they think we will be so desperate to negotiate, that they can get what they want that way.

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David Ignatius said this in The Washington Post:

“This Vietnam history is a caution against premature optimism about diplomatic solutions to deeply embeded conflicts, such as the one in Afghanistan.  But the fact remains, as is so often stated, that there is no military solution to such conflicts.”

Actually, that is not true.  In fact, Vietnam is an example where there was a military solution.   The military solution was simple:  The North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam in 1975, and they won.  Winning is a military solution.

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In his speech, President Obama also said:

“We must chart a more centered course. Like generations before, we must embrace America's singular role in the course of human events. But we must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute. When threatened, we must respond with force -- but when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas.”

I’m sorry, President Obama.  Who are you saying wants to “deploy large armies overseas” “when … force can be targeted”?  Instead of saying you are against things that nobody is in favor of, tell us how you would do things differently than what real people either have done or are proposing to do.  Anybody can sound reasonable when they are comparing themselves with silly positions that aren’t held by other people.  What President Obama needs to do is to explain how his positions are different than positions that other people really do hold.

(Perhaps President Obama is trying to make a subtle reference to Iraq here.  Well, that doesn’t work.  To accomplish what President George W. Bush was trying to do in Iraq (and what lots of Democrats voted for when they got a chance to approve our going into Iraq before we went there) required a large army.  In fact, it probably required a larger army that we initially sent.  You may disagree with what we were doing.  But you can’t say that what we were doing did not require a large army.)

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And finally, near the end of his speech Wednesday evening, President Obama said:

“Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America's greatest resource -- our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industries ….”

If President Obama really wants to “unleash innovation”, then he needs to get out of the way.  Government is not going to unleash innovation by what it does.  It will unleash innovation by what it doesn’t do.  By the new laws it doesn’t pass.  By the new regulations it doesn’t impose.  Our schools can’t even fire incompetent teachers (or at least very many of them).  Why do we think government can do anything positive to unleash innovation?  Except that President Obama and many of his supporters really do think that.  Which is depressing.

Ryan Crocker to Afghanistan

There are times when I get so frustrated with President Obama.  His failure to send free trade agreements to Congress, the hyperpartisan tone of his second budget speech on April 13, etc., etc.  And then, every once in a while, he will do something like he recently did when he appointed Ryan Crocker to be ambassador to Afghanistan.  What an incredibly good choice.  Congratulations to President Obama for picking him.  And thanks to Ryan Crocker for taking this difficult job.

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PS For a summary of Ambassador Crocker’s comments on Iraq and more to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs meeting on April 4, 2011, see here.