Support the President

[Warrior-Mentor]

Support the President
Beyond the squabbling and behind the mission.
by Frederick W. Kagan and William Kristol
12/14/2009
Weekly Standard
Volume 015, Issue 13

President Obama has ordered sufficient reinforcements to Afghanistan to execute a war strategy that can succeed.We applaud this decision. And we urge everyone to rally round the effort to defeat our enemies and accomplish objectives vital to America's national security.

Obama's decision, and the speech in which it was announced, were not flawless. The president should have met his commander's full request for forces. He should not have announced a deadline for the start of the withdrawal of U.S. forces. He should have committed to a specific and significant increase in the size of the Afghan National Security Forces. He should also have explained more clearly the relationship between defeating the Taliban and defeating al Qaeda, the significance of such a victory, and the reasons his Afghan strategy can succeed. The secretaries of defense and state, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made those arguments far more compellingly in subsequent congressional testimony than the president did at West Point.

We shouldn't miss the forest for the trees, however. When all the rhetorical and other problems are stripped away, the fact remains that Obama has, in his first year in office, committed to doubling our forces in Afghanistan and embraced our mission there. Indeed, the plan the president announced on Tuesday features a commendably rapid deployment of reinforcements to the theater, with most of the surge forces arriving over the course of this winter, allowing them to be in position before the enemy's traditional fighting season begins.

The bottom line: Our very capable field commander, General Stanley McChrystal, will have 100,000 American troops by the middle of next year to take the fight to the enemy and regain the initiative in the war. General McChrystal has expressed confidence in his ability to execute his strategy with these resources. He and his superior in the chain of command, General David Petraeus, have earned the right to the nation's confidence in their judgment.

It's also important to note that General McChrystal and his forces have not stood still for the last four months, as the president pondered his options. They have moved rapidly to set the conditions to take advantage of the surge of forces, accomplishing a number of important tasks that will make the job of taking the fight to the enemy in 2010 much easier.

Problems of command-and-control in particular have bedeviled our efforts in Afghanistan, especially in the south where the fight is the most important right now. British forces have been focused on Helmand and Canadian on Kandahar--such that the regions were often called "Helmandshire" and "Canadahar"--but there was no unified approach even within Regional Command South (commanded until recently by a Dutch general without a full staff working for him), let alone between the south and the U.S.-controlled Regional Command East. There was also no operational command in Afghanistan equivalent to the Multinational Corps-Iraq structure. The effort to train Afghan security forces was run from a headquarters that was not part of the same command structure as the U.S. and allied troops on the ground fighting.

These deficiencies made the development and execution of a coherent, theater-wide strategy for fighting the insurgency and building up Afghan forces almost impossible. They generated friction between allies and between the coalition and the Afghans. They played an important role in the deterioration of the situation to this point.

All have now been corrected. Lieutenant-General David Rodriguez (who previously commanded a division in Afghanistan) heads a newly created joint command similar to the Multinational Corps-Iraq headed so successfully by General Ray Odierno during the 2007 surge. Lieutenant-General William Caldwell heads the new NATO training command. The British have deployed a full division headquarters to take control in Regional Command South and enact a coherent plan for the entire region that fits perfectly with McChrystal's overall theater strategy.

Another major flaw in the U.S. and NATO approach to the Afghan conflict was the failure to understand the full nature and scale of the challenge. Some NATO countries did not want to admit that they were fighting a war or a counterinsurgency and such language was avoided. The mission was understood to be supporting the Afghan government without addressing its endemic corruption and abuse of power. Economic activities focused on development--as though what mattered about Afghanistan was its poverty rather than the insurgency.

Additional NATO forces arriving in Afghanistan now know that they are going to fight a counterinsurgency war. General McChrystal's assessment noted that the failings of the Afghan government are as much of a challenge as the enemy's capabilities. The commanders are well aware that they must do more than "connect the government with the people" (the previous mantra), but must also reform and restrain the government while strengthening it. The American aid community and parts of the international aid community are also changing their approaches to recognize that defeating the insurgency and providing security are the pre-requisites to development and anti-poverty efforts.

General McChrystal has in addition improved the effectiveness of the forces he has under his command today. He pulled U.S. troops out of isolated and remote outposts where they were in some cases more targets for the enemy than components of a coherent offensive strategy. He has also taken steps to reduce Afghan civilian casualties.

Perhaps most important, he has transformed the way allied forces work to build the capacity of Afghan Security Forces, importing critical lessons from our experience in Iraq. In addition to mentoring and advising Afghan units with small numbers of embedded trainers, General McChrystal has ordered American combat units to partner with their Afghan counterparts. They plan and conduct operations together as units, share intelligence, and fight together. As we saw in Iraq, a partnership at all levels is the fastest and most effective way to build indigenous combat forces, and it will be the model for U.S. and allied training efforts in Afghanistan from now on.

All of these changes create the conditions in which the deployment of additional American combat forces may be able to achieve decisive results over the next 18 months. This would be even easier if our civilian leadership in the country integrated their efforts with the military's as was done in Iraq in 2007. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and his team were almost as crucial to our success in Iraq as General David Petraeus. And the fact that Crocker and Petraeus worked hand-in-glove was of inestimable value. President Obama owes it to our troops--and to the American people--to try to replicate that happy conjunction of civilian and military effort in Afghanistan.

Nothing is certain in war, and the enemy always gets a vote, but we can be confident that the strategy and forces that will be in place in Afghanistan early next year have a good chance of success. And success will mean more than merely reversing the Taliban's momentum. Taken together with the recent achievements of the Pakistani military against that country's separate but related Taliban movements, success in Afghanistan could mark a turning point in the struggle against Islamism in South Asia. In this way, our efforts over the next couple of years in Afghanistan are not simply the assumption of a distressing duty; they are the seizing of an important opportunity in the global struggle in which we're engaged.

National security has been a polarizing issue in American politics for a long time. Democrats--including, unfortunately, many in the Obama administration--still want to blame the Bush administration for all our woes. Republicans can't resist focusing on the flaws in the president's plan and annoying aspects of his West Point speech. Everyone wants to relitigate past fights. In the case of Afghanistan--a war both parties have agreed is vital to our national interest, with tens of thousands of American soldiers already on the line and more on the way--we should get beyond the squabbling.

Republicans will have the opportunity--and the responsibility--to criticize this administration's policies toward Iran, China, and Russia; its defense budgets; and its detainee policies, to say nothing of its domestic policy initiatives. Democrats will respond. But the president's announcement of a sound and feasible strategy in Afghanistan gives us a chance to show to ourselves and the world that politics really can stop at the water's edge when the nation's safety is at stake and our troops are fighting on our behalf.

So we say: Support the troops. Support the mission. Support the president.

--Frederick W. Kagan and William Kristol

SOURCE:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/307lxxjy.asp

[deepblack 18x]

I support his decision and felt as though it was the best move he has made yet, at the same time though he was trying to play both sidesof the fence. He knew his decision would aggravate the left wingers so he dropped a deadline in there to keep them at bay. I don't believe he is truly committed to victory.
Also I was watching Hannity last night and he mentioned that the white house made McChrystal change his goal from defeating the Taliban to keeping them out of Afghanistan. That doesn't make much sense to me.

[Bordercop]

The link: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Y2M0OWI4NDYwMmQyNTZiODkyM2NmZGE1ZDkyOTU4MjU=&w=MA==

Moving forward in Afghanistan
Pete Hegseth miscontrues the case against the McChrystal plan.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

In his heroic service to our country, Pete Hegseth has forgotten more about warfare than I could ever hope to know. But his NRO article on Monday, offering — in rebuttal to my column from last week — a defense of President Obama’s political decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, is ill-informed. Hegseth caricatures my views, and he fails to address — much less to answer — most of what I actually did say.

He also attributes to me an assertion I’ve never made and to which I don’t subscribe, claiming that I believe “counterinsurgency is nothing more than glorified nation-building.” He purports to quote me as having written that the strategy of surging troops to conduct counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare is a “nation-building, soft-power strategy.” He doesn’t link to anything I’ve written in which that quote appears (it certainly does not appear in the one column of mine to which he directs readers). I don’t recall ever saying such a thing, and word-searches through my articles and Corner posts at NRO do not turn it up. I can say for sure that I don’t think COIN is a soft-power strategy and that I’ve written things about COIN that are the antithesis of Hegseth’s portrayal of my position.

To be clear, I don’t think COIN is nation-building, let alone that it is “nothing more than glorified nation-building.” It can be used in conjunction with nation-building, and I have expressed concern that “under the rubric of counterinsurgency” an imprudent nation-building effort could masquerade as a military mission. But I fully appreciate that COIN is a serious combat strategy, and I have expressly credited the surge in troops to conduct counterinsurgency operations in Iraq with “the rout of al-Qaeda” — hardly an assessment of “soft power” in action.

I am a dissenter not from COIN per se but from the McChrystal plan, the strategy urged by the Afghanistan theater commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Hegseth’s purpose is to defend the McChrystal plan, even though President Obama is not instituting it. The McChrystal plan and COIN are not one and the same. General McChrysal would employ COIN tactics in the course of a broader nation-building scheme. It is the nation-building to which I object. It is premature: Nation-building, if we should do it at all, should follow the enemy’s defeat.

The rationale behind the McChrystal plan is fallacious. It surmises that the war is Afghanistan’s, not ours, and that Afghanistan’s war can somehow be won without addressing the enemy’s support systems outside that country. It holds that Afghans are more likely to side with us than with their fellow Afghan Muslims, fighting them on our behalf after we leave, against the edicts of their religious authorities. And it assumes that it is somehow America’s responsibility — indeed, the job of our armed forces — to address what McChrystal calls “a crisis of confidence among Afghans, in both their government and the international community.” And therefore, the thinking goes, we owe it to the Afghans to risk American lives, and to subordinate the imperative of destroying the enemy, while we find them jobs and build them a functioning, accountable government capable of raising revenue, securing the populace, and providing social services, even for remote tribal enclaves that prefer independence from Kabul.

That the McChrystal plan is an extravagant nation-building exercise is clear from the leaked portions of the general’s white paper. Further, U.S. military commanders have told the New York Times that the buildup in forces will focus less on combat and more on job-training and the delivery of government services. More significant, in explaining his rationale for adopting the 18-month draw-down deadline (to which both Hegseth and I object), President Obama bluntly stated that failure to set a departure date “would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade.”

As Hegseth points out, my background is in the law, not military operations. If the war we are fighting were fully contained in Afghanistan, and I were the commander-in-chief, I would have to get the best advice I could get from people like Hegseth and Generals McChrystal and Petraeus, as well as from the many military strategists who are not COIN enthusiasts. If the COIN adherents convinced me that their approach was the best way to break the enemy’s will, I’d have no trouble directing that it be implemented, with every confidence that it would result in the enemy’s defeat.

Concededly, Hegseth would have an uphill battle convincing me that COIN is the way to go, but not because COIN is “soft power.” The war is not fully contained in Afghanistan. It is global, and I continue to believe the roadmap to victory is the Bush Doctrine as originally articulated right after the 9/11 attacks (and before it was modified by the “forward march of freedom” rhetoric that has nothing to do with American national security). That is, we must attack al-Qaeda and its affiliates wherever they operate, and we must regard rogue regimes that aid and abet the terror network exactly as we regard the terrorists. Therefore, I am predisposed to agree with critics who argue that COIN fails to address our enemies’ support systems outside the countries where COIN is employed, that COIN concedes too much of the initiative to the enemy (it permits the enemy to choose the time and place of combat), that COIN is of questionable value in a place where the insurgents have broad support among the populace, and that COIN’s features (years of fitful, defensive engagements and casualty-taking) are ill-suited to maintaining the political support a successful war effort must have in our impatient democracy.

Hegseth and other proponents of escalating troop levels to conduct COIN operations in support of nation-building enterprises point to Iraq as proof that their approach is the way to go. I think Iraq proves the opposite. As I’ve acknowledged, General Petraeus’s COIN strategy certainly did smash al-Qaeda’s cells in Iraq. It did not, however, destroy al-Qaeda; the terrorists just moved elsewhere and, in fact, they are gradually becoming more active in Iraq again as our forces wind down and prepare to depart next summer.

And while General Petraeus took on Iranian operatives inside Iraq, Iran itself was kept immune from attack, despite its arming and directing the activities of anti-American jihadists. That was not the general’s fault; he was stuck with a feckless determination by administrations of both parties to pursue the holy grail of a grand deal with our committed enemies, even as the mullahs defiantly built their nukes and continued killing Americans.

Al-Qaeda aside, Americans were told that our nation-building effort in Iraq would (a) be cost-free, since Iraq would be grateful for our sacrifices and its oil riches would underwrite them, and (b) result in a stable democracy that would be a staunch American ally against terrorism. In the event, hundreds of billions of American dollars later, Iraq is an emerging sharia state that vows “not to establish relations with the Zionist entity” and indulges rampant persecution of religious minorities. It draws ever closer to Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of jihadist terror, and has pressured Obama into releasing Iran-backed terrorists who murdered American troops. It denies future basing rights to the United States and, according to a 2008 BBC poll, 42 percent of Iraqi citizens believe attacks against American troops are justified, while over 70 percent want American forces out of their country.

Unquestionably, the COIN approach has tamped down the violence in Iraq. While it lasts, it is likely to do the same in Afghanistan. But while reducing violence — however temporarily — is a good thing, it has never been our primary objective. Neither is “freeing Afghans from the chains of tyranny,” as Hegseth and others described the mission in a recent letter to President Obama. Chains of tyranny are a characteristic of fundamentalist Islamic nations. That is why such nations breed and tolerate jihadism. It is also why they feel so threatened by the forces of freedom and Western civilization. Obviously, we need to convince them, in the language of force and resolve (a language they understand), that we will pulverize them if they threaten our country or allow their territories to be used to launch attacks against us. But we should otherwise let them be and have as little to do with them as possible. Their shackles are their own problem, and it’s not one we can fix.

Understand, though, I am fundamentally with Pete Hegseth. I supported the surge in Iraq, even though I was much less enthusiastic about it than most of my friends. I was, and remain, indifferent about Iraq’s political development, but I didn’t think we could afford to leave while al-Qaeda was still a vibrant force. Afghanistan is a different dynamic, and the commitment of our new commander-in-chief is suspect, but I still believe it would be terrible to give our enemies the propaganda victory of a U.S. withdrawal at a time when they are ascendant. Our withdrawals under siege in Beirut and Somalia had disastrous consequences: Al-Qaeda still uses those examples to stir its operatives. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is the appearance of American weakness, not Guantanamo Bay, that drives jihadist recruitment and attacks.

Continued: