Petraeus V Obama: It Ain't Over

In January/February, we paid close attention to a running battle between General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, with his President over Obama's plans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It appeared, however, that the compromise over the Iraq withdrawal and last week's Obama announcement of the Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy established consensus. Indeed, Petraeus had won a quiet victory. The headlines said Obama had approved an extra 17,000 troops; in fact, if you include support forces, the boost was 30,000, the amount that military commanders had been seeking. No wonder Petraeus even went alongside Obama envoy Richard Holbrooke on the Sunday talk shows to promote the plan.

All right then?

No.

On Wednesday Petraeus was back to his My Way approach on the US military approach in Afghanistan: "American commanders have requested the deployment of an additional 10,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year, [although] the request awaits a final decision by President Obama this fall."

Dave couldn't have been clearer: if you want his plan in Afghanistan (which his spin machine is assuring you is the case), then give him more soldiers: "The ratio of coalition and Afghan security forces to the population is projected through 2011 to be significantly lower than the 20 troops per 1,000 people prescribed by the Army counterinsurgency manual he helped write."

How brazen, even defiant, is this? Consider that on Sunday the President tried to hold the line against precisely this "bit more, bit more, OK, a bit more" demand. He said he had "resourced properly" the strategy and pre-emptively warned his generals, "What I will not do is to simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation ... There may be a point of diminishing returns."

Michele Flournoy, the Undersecretary of Defense, tried to maintain this position in the Congressional hearing. She insisted that the US plan was to concentrate forces in "the insurgency belt in the south and east," rather than (Petraeus' preference) throughout Afghanistan. "Troops would arrive, as planned, in 2010."

The "comprehensive strategy" announced last Friday means different things to the President and Petraeus. For Obama, the troop increase has to be integrated with the non-military measures. If those measures, then the military approach also has to be reconsidered, not necessarily for another "surge" but for an "exit strategy".

For Petraeus, "comprehensive" means military-first. And, if the violence continues and even increases, then that will be his rationale for yet more soldiers into the conflict.

Lace up your boots, folks. There may be a war brewing in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but there is also one underway in Washington, D.C.

Michael Cohen on The Trouble with Counter-Insurgency

"Now I could offer you plenty of reasons why I think a counter-insurgency doctrine is a bad idea; it doesn't fit with the comparative advantage of the US military; its not applicable to the threats America will face in the future; its an example of fighting the last war and as Andrew Bacevich brilliantly and pithily puts it, 'If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn't be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda's game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?'"

Michael Cohen had an excellent guest piece in the Washington Note yesterday which considers the political impossibility of the US entering into another COIN conflict. Read it below.

As I've written before, I'm not much of a fan of counter-insurgency doctrine and two events over the past several days lend compelling evidence as to why. Quite simply, it's the politics, stupid.

First comes word from Baghdad of an outbreak of fighting between US-supported Sunni "Awakening" fighters and the Iraqi government. According to Brian Katulis, "This weekend's incident was the first crack in a shaky foundation constructed by the 2007 surge of U.S. troops--a foundation that largely glossed over long-standing political rivalries." This is not meant to criticize the "surge" but simply it is a recognition that for a counter-insurgency effort to succeed it requires not only a significant number of troops, it needs a long-standing time commitment to ensure that this type of violence doesn't turn into a larger conflict. And it also relies on genuine political reconciliation, which can of course take generations.

Next we have President Obama's recent announcement of his Administration's new policy for Afghanistan, which Fred Kaplan calls "CT-plus." The focus on counter-terrorism versus the broad counter-insurgency strategy advocated by the so-called COIN-dinastas is as Kaplan argues a reflection that following the latter course "could require too many troops, too much money, and way too much time--more of all three than the United States and NATO could muster--and that the insurgents might still win anyway. Better to focus U.S. efforts more narrowly on simply fighting the insurgents themselves, especially in the border areas with Pakistan."

Now I could offer you plenty of reasons why I think a counter-insurgency doctrine is a bad idea; it doesn't fit with the comparative advantage of the US military; its not applicable to the threats America will face in the future; its an example of fighting the last war and as Andrew Bacevich brilliantly and pithily puts it, "If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn't be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda's game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?"

But let me offer another reason why counter-insurgency is the wrong approach; and its one borne out by the experience in Iraq and now Afghanistan - there is simply no domestic political support for the sort of long-standing political, military and financial commitments that are required for counter-insurgency to succeed. There wasn't that type of commitment in 2003 (and I'll get to that issue in a second) but after 7 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is absolutely no desire among policymakers to go down this road today.

One of the architects of the military's COIN strategy in Iraq, David Kilcullen, argues that counter-insurgency in Afghanistan means a five to ten year commitment aimed at "building a resilient Afghan state and civil society" and extending "an effective, legitimate government presence into Afghanistan's 40,020 villages." That is the sort of commitment that very few US politicians are going to be willing to countenance. So not only are the COIN-dinastas preparing for war that we are unlikely to face, but they are preparing for one that the country is unlikely to be willing to fight.

It's worth remembering that the adoption of COIN strategy in Iraq was not a willful choice by US policymakers; it was a move of desperation by an Administration and a military caught flat-footed by a vibrant insurgency in Iraq. Indeed, it is worth also remembering that the Bush Administration assiduously avoided any discussion of a long commitment to Iraq and aggressively pushed back on anyone who asserted that more not less troops would be needed to pacify the country. The reason was clear: the American people and Congress would never have gone along with such a commitment.

Counter-insurgency only made sense as a strategy once, to paraphrase Bacevich, we had dug a very big hole in Iraq. And as we are seeing in Iraq right now, the surge has been only temporarily effective. We are still in that hole and even with the outbreak in violence one is hard pressed to find any US political leaders calling for more troops to be sent to Iraq. What happens in Iraq, going forward, will be determined by Iraqis, which by the way is the other flaw in COIN strategy - it presupposes a sovereign government is willing to go along with the long-term stationing of US troops in their country. Even if US troops wanted to stay in Iraq, the Iraqi government is not going to go along . . no matter what Tom Ricks says. (This is not to mention the fact that it's hard to see why it is in the national interest for the US to get in the middle of a civil war between rival Iraqi militias).

With that in mind, it should hardly be surprising that the Obama Administration rejected the COIN approach. And while there are elements of counter-insurgency strategy in the President's Afghanistan plan this is primarily a counter-terrorism effort. Let's put it this way, if Afghan security services are up to speed in two years and Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been sufficiently degraded the United States will not be sticking around to make sure Afghanistan's democracy is vibrant and robust. We're just going to go home. If you don't believe me; ask the Iraqis.

The choice made by President Obama represents the fundamental flaw being made by COIN-advocates. It's a fundamental flaw made also by supporters of bank nationalization; or those who would push for a single-payer health bill - a failure to reflect domestic political constraints. If the Obama Administration can't convince the American people to go along with a broad counter-insurgency strategy (and won't even try) in a country where we already have troops and where the 9/11 attacks were hatched what makes people think that this or any other Administration will be able to convince Americans that they should go along with a COIN-strategy in a country we haven't even invaded and occupied yet? And a military strategy that has no relation to domestic politics isn't going to be of much use.

Now I realize my example is sort of a straw man, but then not really.

The fact is, COIN-strategy is presupposed on the notion that the US will be getting into intractable conflicts that will necessitate the same sort of tactics used in Iraq over the past 5 years. As an observer of the American political scene, something tells me that simply ain't going to happen.

What has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past week is only further evidence that COIN is simply not a realistic or easily applicable military doctrine.

-- Michael Cohen

Iraq Update: US Awakening Ally Arrested for “Terrorism”, Siege Continues

On Sunday, we reported on the arrest of Adil al-Mashhadani, an Awakening Council leader in the Fadhil section of Baghdad, and the subsequent gunfight between Council militiamen and US-Iraq forces.

Well, the story is far from over.

Juan Cole passes on the news from the Arabic-language newspaper Al Zaman that Iraqi troops still have the Fadhil district under siege of the Sunni Fadl district. According to the paper, diseases are spreading amongst women and children with the blockade and curfew.

Beyond Fadhil, al-Mashhadani's arrest is threating a breakdown between the Councils and the Iraqi Government. The Awakening Council leader in Baquba in Diyala province has said that he will stop fighting "extremists". US military officers were calling Sunni contacts, promising that they will be defended against both a Government crackdown and will not be abandon to the mercy of Shi'a militias.

The Fadhil episode is graphic testimony to both the difficulties, swept away in the myth of the American "surge", of General David Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy and the flawed logic of those who insist that US troops have to remain in Iraq to prevent instability.

Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post correspondent who wrote about the fiasco of the US invasion of Iraq but is now a firm proponent of stay-the-military course, wonderfully and ironically demonstrated this in a tangled blog on Tuesday.

Ricks quotes Colonel Pete Mansoor, who was Petraeus's executive officer:

The Status of Forces agreement [of December 2008] would put U.S. forces into a position where they could not intervene to stop the government of Iraq from attacking the SOI [the Awakening Councils or "Sons of Iraq"]. If the Iraqi Security Forces needed help once engaged against the SOI, U.S. forces could be drawn into the fight against the very people who helped us turn the war around.

I certainly hope this doesn't come to pass, but given what we've just seen happen in Baghdad, the possibility is disturbing.

Ricks might draw the obvious conclusion that to bolster its presence in Iraq, the US military struck political deals that are now running aground in the battles between local leaders and the national Government. Instead, he stands logic on its head: the US military needs to stay as more political deals are struck, quoting Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group:

Absent the glue that US troops have provided, Iraq's political actors are likely to fight, emboldened by a sense they can prevail, if necessary with outside help. Obama should make sure that the peace he leaves behind is sustainable, lest Bush's war of choice turn into his war of necessity.

And so the Alice-in-Wonderland rationale of occupation continues: if the US stays, it will be entangled in more violence --- but it must stay to prevent more violence.