Cordesman on Afghanistan

Tony Cordesman has a short op-ed in today's Washington Post titled "How to Lose in Afghanistan." He is bemoaning the lack of forward momentum by the Obama administration in its efforts to prosecute the war in Afghanistan.

The appointments this summer of Karl Eikenberry as ambassador to Afghanistan and McChrystal as commander of U.S. and allied forces have created a team that can reverse this situation. In fact, given the rising unpopularity of the war and Taliban successes, they are our last hope of victory. Yet they can win only if they are allowed to manage both the civil and military sides of the conflict without constant micromanagement from Washington or traveling envoys. They must be given both the time to act and the resources and authority they feel they need. No other path offers a chance of a secure and stable Afghanistan free of terrorist and jihadist control and sanctuaries.
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Unfortunately, strong elements in the White House, State Department and other agencies seem determined to ignore these realities. They are pressuring the president to direct Eikenberry and McChrystal to come to Washington to present a broad set of strategic concepts rather than specific requests for troops, more civilians, money and an integrated civil-military plan for action. They are pushing to prevent a fully integrated civil-military effort, and to avoid giving Eikenberry and McChrystal all the authority they need to try to force more unity of effort from allied forces and the U.N.-led aid effort.

Cordesman has lots of advice - the only things he doesn't address in his column is what exactly constitutes "winning" - is it unconditional surrender by the Taliban? an effective Afghan government and army? stable borders with its neighbors? And of course, he doesn't offer opinions on exactly how much this will cost and how many more years it would take to "win." Little things.

He's done better with analyses of how to "fix" things in Iraq. It's disappointing that he can't do the same with Afghanistan, understanding that there is an element of national strategy missing here. That is to say, we still don't know what we want for Afghanistan. If it includes stabilizing the government and giving it effective security forces while battling the Taliban and drug lords while seeking out bin Laden, we're going to be there for a very long time and even then, there's no guarantee of "winning." I don't think that's an acceptable political position here in the United States, and that's the real challenge. We need a better set of objectives, ones that are practical, affordable, and achievable. 

Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, commenting on an individual's 1950 article "Why We Lost China" - "China was ours, and it was something to lose; it was an assumption which was to haunt foreign policy makers for years to come. Countries were ours, we could lose them; a President was faced with the blackmail of losing a country."

Comments

[Ray]

It's the penalty for entering a Thoughtless War. Now it's attempting to be a Thoughtful one.
The language used is now what "we" want for Afghanistan. What do the Afghan's want? They'll be the ones who finally accept, modify, or discard.

[jibs]

This is an interesting piece - I disagree with the premise that AMB Eikenberry can get the job done - we have not had a good AMB/Political team in Afghanistan since AMB Neuman was last in country. He had a good pulse of what was going on; was well respected (based on what he accomplished and what his father before him had done) and understood the nuances of the country and its people. I accompanied him on over 50 trips throughout the country to all the "hot spots" and watch him work his magic with the locals. A better statesman has yet to be appointed in such a volatile region.

As for the McChrystal fiasco - people throw credit where credit is not due. General M is a standup soldier BUT he is not a statesman nor over time will he get to that point; at least not the kind of statesman that is required in this conflict. When addressing the issues associated with the continued rise of the Taliban in the region you need an approach espoused by Ralph Peters several months back that is distinct (engage the insurgents) across the country and another that focuses on "nation building" and whatever that loose term actually means.

To that point - those who espouse nation building have either never been to Afghanistan to see that in fact it wont happen or do not understand that peasant farmers and drug producers don’t really care about democracy...they want to provide for there family and sleep peacefully at night…that’s it!

Again, I think Cordesman hit the nail on the head...he left out what you would consider to be the important things because (quite frankly) they are unattainable!

BH

[JT]

Well keep doing the same things over and over and expect different results.
Once I'd like to see us pulled out early and completely from these "wars we can't afford to lose" and see how badly things really go.
As for the capacity to "build" nations, I haven't really seen we have the capacity to "build" ours successfully yet.

[NVH]

He's going to get a year, maybe two, since it'll take time to get more troops fully there and rotated in. They revamp the issue back to the original mission and setup strike teams to sit on waziristan and the AF pak region to go in as needed SOF like or use drones and keep the man (Al Qaeda) down. It's the squeeze theory that's worked before it'll work again. Except b/c of Democratic micromanagement by Admin, it'll take longer to get there and alienate the generals. Who of course will always ask for more bombs bullets and manpower, won't get it eventually, and Obama loses in 2012 b/c he's soft on defense (or too hard on acquisition) and god forbid we see some semblance of terror attack in CONUS again...how's that for strategy and theory?

[J.]

NVH, I think you're a pessimist or pragmatist who believes that Dems can possibly do worse than the last eight years of mismanaged military operations in Afghanistan under Bush. I'm not convinced that Obama will micromanage the war or pull back on resources (and in fact I'm afraid he will do the opposite - leave the fighting to the generals and overresource it to match Iraq War levels).

And as long as we're fighting over there, the terrorists won't come over here, and no terror attack in CONUS can happen. So we have to stay there forever. GW Bush said that, and I believe him...

My prediction, more troops go in, Obama declares that we're pulling out of Afghanistan right before the 2010 elections, Dems win overwhelmingly and get the mandate to continue, operations wind down to a containment strategy, Karzai is killed in an IED attack, Taliban envoys make peace with Afghani government, we're out by 2012, Obama gets second term, reforms defense acquisition and drops DADT.

The people rejoice.

[NVH]

I ALMOST started laughing...we'll know in a year won't we. A sixer to the winner then, whenever we might run into one another anyway...