For the crisis du jour, the mode is ultra-cautious optimism as we tiptoe deeper into the Afghan-Pakistan quagmire with an infusion of 4,000 more military trainers along with civilian advisers.
The President's announcement today will put the bravest face on it, but the shadow of Iraq will be in the picture. An expert once described the war there as playing three-dimensional chess in the dark but that looks more like checkers compared to this. (See the gung-ho Long War Journal for a sampling of the daily reality.)
David Brooks comes back from his guided tour today "skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here," a non-sequitur after his gloomy assessment of the situation:
"Afghanistan is one of the poorest, least-educated and most-corrupt nations on earth...It has powerful enemies in Pakistan, Iran and the drug networks working hard to foment chaos. The ground is littered with the ruins of great powers that tried to change this place.
"Moreover, we simply do not know how to modernize nations. Western aid workers seem to spend most of their time drawing up flow charts for each other. They’re so worried about their inspectors general that they can’t really immerse themselves in the messy world of local reality. They insist on making most of the spending decisions themselves so the 'recipients' of their largess end up passive, dependent and resentful."
Add to this an intractable culture of corruption that has made the US-backed Karzai government shaky and the uncertainty of Pakistani support in the tribal regions despite our billions of aid to their government, and the questions of what we're doing there, for how long and with what prospects of success add up to another possible Iraq with more at stake and even less hope of disentanglement.
The Neo-Cons were criminally naïve about the Middle East, but it's hard to see much improvement in the "new" approach.
Showing posts with label quagmire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quagmire. Show all posts
Friday, March 27, 2009
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Mission Unaccomplished
"OK, we're in Baghdad, what next?"
Before the invasion, an Army commander asked that question and never got an answer, according to a new 700-page study by the Army itself based on 200 interviews by military historians with active or recently retired officers on what went wrong in Iraq after the man in a flight jacket stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier to declare victory.
In what amounts to the non-Rumsfeld story of the disaster, we finally get first-hand accounts of the making of a quagmire, and it is not a pretty picture.
“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV [postwar] planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study notes. “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place."
The Bush Administration, the Pentagon and its Iraq commander, Gen. Tommy Franks were plentifully supplied with wishes but short of methods to realize them. Disregarding one proposal that called for 300,000 soldiers to secure postwar Iraq, they deployed half as many and were in a rush to reduce even that number during “an abbreviated period of stability operations."
“In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime," the report says, "Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for U.S. ground forces in Iraq.”
Behind all this was the genius of Defense Secretary Don Rumseld who kept smugly assuring Americans that it would all be fine. "As you know," he told the troops, "you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."
Meanwhile, we now learn, the Army itself was finding out otherwise. Maybe when Rumsfeld gets around to publishing his memoirs, he'll tell them how they got it all wrong.
Before the invasion, an Army commander asked that question and never got an answer, according to a new 700-page study by the Army itself based on 200 interviews by military historians with active or recently retired officers on what went wrong in Iraq after the man in a flight jacket stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier to declare victory.
In what amounts to the non-Rumsfeld story of the disaster, we finally get first-hand accounts of the making of a quagmire, and it is not a pretty picture.
“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV [postwar] planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study notes. “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place."
The Bush Administration, the Pentagon and its Iraq commander, Gen. Tommy Franks were plentifully supplied with wishes but short of methods to realize them. Disregarding one proposal that called for 300,000 soldiers to secure postwar Iraq, they deployed half as many and were in a rush to reduce even that number during “an abbreviated period of stability operations."
“In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime," the report says, "Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for U.S. ground forces in Iraq.”
Behind all this was the genius of Defense Secretary Don Rumseld who kept smugly assuring Americans that it would all be fine. "As you know," he told the troops, "you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."
Meanwhile, we now learn, the Army itself was finding out otherwise. Maybe when Rumsfeld gets around to publishing his memoirs, he'll tell them how they got it all wrong.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Mission Creep in the Middle East
John McCain's hyperbole about keeping troops in Iraq for a hundred years is alarmingly echoed in a Washington Post OpEd by one of the saner foreign policy experts on the Washington scene.
"What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common," Anthony Cordesman writes, "is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war.
"Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020."
Only seven months ago, Cordesman was pointing out that some recent advances in Iraq were the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents and quoting a U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."
Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman made a case then for phasing down troop levels starting early this year. Now, another trip to Iraq and Afghanistan has persuaded him that "these are wars that can still be won" if we stay another decade or more.
Does the word quagmire ring a bell? In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam and stayed another five years before accepting a humiliating defeat.
Now, once again, we are testing our will in places thousands of miles away against antagonists who are willing to do anything for as long it takes to get control of their own territory.
We started out to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, a mission that has morphed into policing the entire Middle East, with Pakistan and Iran next on the horizon. Can Cordesman and John McCain explain how we do that without breaking our military and busting the budget?
"What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common," Anthony Cordesman writes, "is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war.
"Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020."
Only seven months ago, Cordesman was pointing out that some recent advances in Iraq were the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents and quoting a U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."
Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman made a case then for phasing down troop levels starting early this year. Now, another trip to Iraq and Afghanistan has persuaded him that "these are wars that can still be won" if we stay another decade or more.
Does the word quagmire ring a bell? In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam and stayed another five years before accepting a humiliating defeat.
Now, once again, we are testing our will in places thousands of miles away against antagonists who are willing to do anything for as long it takes to get control of their own territory.
We started out to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, a mission that has morphed into policing the entire Middle East, with Pakistan and Iran next on the horizon. Can Cordesman and John McCain explain how we do that without breaking our military and busting the budget?
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