Afghanistan: The Danger of Washington's "Experts" on Intervention

On the eve of President Obama's announcement on the next steps for the US in Afghanistan --- expect a public escalation of 30,000 more troops and a lot of rhetoric about non-military programmes and the necessity for the Afghan Government to be free from corruption and to take responsibility for security --- The Security Crank offers a loud, troubling polemic against so-called "expertise" in Washington.

It’s settled: the discussion about Afghanistan is no longer about Afghanistan. It is, instead, now a contest of who can write the most ridiculous article demonstrating their ignorance of the country. This isn’t a small deal: most of the people we’ll highlight below hold positions of great influence, including on General McChrystal’s review team this past summer. But they are all, pro- and anti-war, morons.

Afghanistan-Pakistan Video & Text: US Envoy Holbrooke Briefing (23 November)

It’s important to note that these opinion-mongers are not operating in a vacuum—they have willing accomplices in the media, most of which is utterly subservient to the U.S. military. In a lot of cases, this change is recent: Dexter Filkins, for example, used to write hard-hitting, critical pieces about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, he writes this:

The Pashtuns, who form the core of the Taliban, make up a largely tribal society, with families connected to one another by kinship and led by groups of elders. Over the years, the Pashtun tribes have been substantially weakened, with elders singled out by three groups: Taliban fighters, the rebels who fought the former Soviet Union and the soldiers of the former Soviet Union itself. The decimation of the tribes has left Afghan society largely atomized.

Afghan and American officials hope that the plan to make peace with groups of Taliban fighters will complement an American-led effort to set up anti-Taliban militias in many parts of the country: the Pashtun tribes will help fight the Taliban, and they will make deals with the Taliban. And, by so doing, Afghan tribal society can be reinvigorated.

The Afghan reconciliation plan is intended to duplicate the Awakening movement in Iraq, where Sunni tribal leaders, many of them insurgents, agreed to stop fighting and in many cases were paid to do so. The Awakening contributed to the remarkable decline in violence in Iraq.

I didn’t realize the Taliban were led by a group of tribal elders. Yuck. This reads almost like a press release from ISAF [International Security Assistance Force]: demonstrate one’s understanding of a SAMS course on Afghanistan, then talk about how it’s America’s job to reshape Afghan society into what we think our image of it should have been before the Soviets ruined everything. The arrogance the first pair of paragraphs requires—starting with the assertion that Pashtuns are tribal and form solidarity through kinship and ending with the assumption that we can repeat the Awakening movement in Afghanistan—is really just… wow.

These assertions have been discussed at length in a paper prepared by the Human Terrain System, which practically begs the Army to stop trying to repeat the Sunni Awakening in Afghanistan. “The desire for “tribal engagement” in Afghanistan, executed along the lines of the recent “Surge” strategy in Iraq,” it says, “is based on an erroneous understanding of the human terrain.” The reasoning is that tribes in both countries are structured fundamentally differently, and that Afghans, even Pashtuns do not primarily organize around tribal lines. (More on the tribal militia idea-that-just-won’t-die is here.)

The military has largely ignored this paper—why is that, do you think? Do they not like having their assumptions about a neat tribal solution to all of Afghanistan’s problems challenged? Like this former Taliban official says, no one in the West has done their homework. Well, no one in charge, I should say. To bring up our old theme: they just don’t care.

But it’s not just reporters losing their clinical distance who have been dumbing down the public understanding of Afghanistan. Below are some key concepts the willfully ignorant propagate in order to push whatever pet issue they have, which also happens to either obscure or twist a much broader, more fundamental issue—a children’s treasury of ridiculous assumptions and pet issues.

Pretending the War is Ethnic

Selig S. Harrison is by far the worst offender of the bunch. Without any evidence, and with a history that jumps from Alexander the Great (326 BC) to the British Army (1842) to the Soviets (1979), he says that all Pashtuns are xenophobic zombies who will unite against all outsiders and always win. Harrison supplements this argument by saying that this time, the Taliban’s xenophobia is being driven by a hatred of the Tajik minority lording itself over the Armed Forces, police, and government agencies. Needless to say, his argument is confusing and contradictory, starting with his apparent belief that Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, is a Tajik puppet.

Gareth Porter makes a similar argument: Tajiks are disproportionally more prevalent in the Army, so therefore Pashtuns are culturally compelled to resist the government. Missing in both kinds of argument is a realization that their ideas of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate ethnic ratios are 100% arbitrary, utterly dependent on which native informant happened to be whispering in their ear at that time. Neither demonstrates any understanding of ethnic relations (the original Taliban wasn’t xenophobic but kafiphobic—mistrustful of all non-Muslims), or why the Taliban actually gains social market share. But the neo-Taliban are a pan-Islamist resistance movement: they reject tribal and ethnic distinctions so long as everyone follows their version of Islam. There’s nothing ethnic about it.

Assuming arbitrary troop numbers will fix things

One of the key offenders here is Leslie Gelb, an otherwise respectable foreign policy scholar. The fact that anyone with his background—that is, with almost no academic or policy experience in Afghanistan of Central/South Asia—would say he’d prefer 15,000 trainers over the 34,000 foot soldiers President Obama is due to approve speaks volumes to the astounding ignorance of our pundit-class. Why would he know? Gelb has argued elsewhere that the troops in Afghanistan are being misused: how could adding more troops into that mix correct that?

SUUUUUUURGE!

You have to love the Kagans [Frederick and Kimberly]. They helped create the Surge in Iraq, which funneled troops into an area already in open revolt against AQIM [Al Qa'eda in Mesopotamia]. And of course, they blame themselves for it working, and not the thousands of Sunni Iraqis who decided to reject the insurgents operating in their neighborhoods half a year before the first surge troop arrived. It wasn’t those dirty browns we’re trying to rule, it was us and our surging, that saved the day!

Anyway, so they’ve been writing weekly op-eds in major newspapers about how badly we need more troops in Afghanistan ever since they realized their impassioned pleas in 2006 for America to ignore Afghanistan in favor of surging into Iraq was in fact a bad idea that needed to be reversed, even though they refuse to acknowledge they were one of the main drivers of said strategic inattention, but still this time their advice is super correct because they clearly got Iraq right because the country is peaceful and everyone really likes living there.

Their latest op-ed is a real gem, however: in a thousand-word explication on the necessity of using troops for political leverage, a lamentation of how the debate has ignored force levels (when in reality the debate has been dominated by a discussion of troop numbers), they can’t bring themselves to mention the Taliban once. I mean, even ignoring the ridiculous assertion that more troops will improve governance, development, education, law enforcement, health care, and whatever else… even ignoring all of that, they say troop numbers will fix Afghanistan but don’t mention why we need troops in the first place.

Somehow, these people are taken seriously. Do you get it?

Healthcare!

I don’t even know what to say: in a world of limited resources, the Obama administration is choosing to emphasize physical security over additional health care spending. This is a tragedy for the Afghans who won’t get health care, to be sure… but is it really undermining the government and the war?

Pee-yew. This is exhausting. I’m sure you get the idea. It is damned tough to find knowledgable people writing about the wars these days. For some reasons, the opinion pages seem dominated by ignorant celebrity-pundits, who of course tell us that we are good and never do wrong and always on the side of Right. Of course we want to believe them—who wouldn’t? But listening to these people both within and outside the government will, quite literally, result in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. They are making life and death arguments, and doing so without even basic diligence. I think we owe everyone—ourselves and the world—a tiny bit more effort than that.

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Another Sunday, another set of articles and punditry setting out the US can "win" the conflict in Afghanistan. The latest spin is that of the US military supporting a series of local militias throughout the country to defeat the Taliban: this, I presume, is more a signal of Washington's careful distancing from the perceived weakness of the Karzai Government to sell a troop escalation. The New York Times packages the spin as a report by Dexter Filkins, while David Ignatius openly backs the initiative in his opinion piece in The Washington Post, "Afghan Tribes to the Rescue?"

In a guest column for Juan Cole's website, William Polk, a former member of the State Department and professor at the University of Chicago, puts forth an alternative: political and economic steps linked to a measured withdrawal of US troops:

In its war in Afghanistan, the United States has come to a crossroads. President Obama will be forced to choose one of four ways ahead. The choices are cruel, expensive and dangerous for our country; so we must be sure that he chooses the least painful, least expensive and safest of the possible choices.

The first possible choice is to keep on doing what we are now doing. That is, fighting the insurgency with about 60,000 American troops and 68,197 mercenaries at a cost of roughly $2,000 a day per person. That is, we now actually have a total complement of over 120,000 people on the public payroll at an overall cost, of roughly $100 billion a year. We can project a loss of a few hundred American soldiers a year and several thousand wounded. Our senior commander in the Central Command, General David Petraeus, tells us that we cannot win that war.

The second possible road ahead would involve adding substantial numbers of new troops. In General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, the accepted ratio of soldiers to natives is 20 to 25 per thousand natives.1 Afghanistan today is a country of about 33 million. Even if we discount the population to the target group of Pashtuns, we will must deal with 15 or so million people. So when he and General Stanley McChrystal ask for 40,000, it can only be a first installment. Soon -- as the generals did in Vietnam – they will have to ask for another increment and then another, moving toward the supposedly winning number of 600,000 to 1.3 million. That is just the soldiers. Each soldier is now matched by a supporter, rather like medieval armies had flocks of camp followers, so those numbers will roughly double. Thus, over ten years, a figure often cited, or 40 years, which some of the leading neoconservatives have suggested, would pretty soon, as they say in Congress, involve “talking about real money.” In addition to the Congressionally-allocated outlay, the overall cost to our economy has not yet been summed up, but by analogy to the Iraq war, it will probably amount to upwards of $6 trillion.

Then there are the casualties: we have so far lost about a thousand -- or a quarter as many as in Iraq. Casualties we can count, but the number of seriously wounded keeps growing because many of the effects of exposure to modern weapons do not show up until later. We have no reliable figures yet on Afghanistan. In Iraq at least 100,000 of the one and a half million soldiers who served there suffered severe psychological damage and about 300,000 have reported post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar number have suffered brain injuries. Crassly put, these “walking wounded” will not only be unable fully to contribute to American society but will be a burden on it for many years to come. It has been estimated that dealing with a brain-injured soldier over his remaining life will cost about $5 million. Cancer, from exposure to depleted uranium is, only now coming into full effect. All in all, it is sobering to calculate that 40 percent of the soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf war – which lasted only a hundred hours – are receiving disability payments. Inevitably, more “boots on the ground” will lead to more beds in hospitals.

General McChrystal has told us that we must have large numbers of additional troops to hold the territory we “clear.” He echoes what the Russian commanders told the Politburo: in a report on November 13, 1986, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev commented that the Russians attempted the same strategy but admitted that it failed. “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan,” he said, “that has not been occupied by one of or soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize . . . Without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time.”

The Russian army fought a bloody, brutal campaign, using every trick or tool of counterinsurgency ever identified. The Russians killed a million Afghanis and turned about 5 million into refugees, but after a decade during which they lost 15,000 soldiers and virtually bankrupted the Soviet Union, they gave up and left. General McChrystal says it may take him a decade or more to “win.” But what “winning” means is unclear.

Third, we could marginally increase our troop strength. That is, adding only between 10,000 and 30,000 troops and a comparable number of mercenaries. Not the full complement that General McChrystal has now demanded. This road, according to Petraeus, McChrystal and their acolytes would lead to “mission failure.”

Not meeting the generals’ demands also brings forward the danger to the Obama administration of being charged with putting our soldiers at risk “with one hand tied behind their backs,” a phrase from the acrimonious aftermath of the Vietnam war which even General James Jones, President Obama’s director of the National Security Council, has recently repeated. The potential ugly campaign, against which even Henry Kissinger has warned us, could pose risks to our political culture and even to our legal structure: some military men are already talking about their restiveness in obeying civilian government. “You kind of get used to it after years of service” one Army general said at a convention in Washington last month. Forgetting the constitution, he continued, “We tend to live with it.” Maybe they will or maybe anger will be channeled into a further extension of the military into politics, intelligence and diplomacy.

For the first time that I know of in recent American history, the uniformed military have created what amounts to a pressure group of their own. Generals Petraeus and McChrystal are the leaders but, by influencing or controlling promotions panels, they have fostered the advancement of middle grade and junior officers who agree with them. Some have been brought into a group called “the Colonels’ council.” And numbers of retired senior officers have joined not only in what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” but have become the opinion-makers on foreign policy in the media. Private soldiers and non-commissioned officers have, at the same time, become a major component of the private armies of such groups as Xe (formerly Blackwater) and form an active part of the constituency of the right wing of the Republican Party.

In the dangerous months and years ahead, if this road is taken, we are apt to hear echoes – particularly in the next presidential election --of the post Vietnam rhetoric that the civilians sold out the military. In short, while this option sounds moderate and “business-like” I believe that it is the worst option for President Obama and, more importantly, for the nation.

Or, fourth, we could Get out.

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