Jan. 16, 2009
What's the plan for Afghanistan?
What is the incoming Obama
administration's plan for Afghanistan? According to a story in this
week's Washington Post, President-elect Barack Obama's national
security team needs more time, until at least April, to come up with
the "parameters" of a new strategy. Although lacking a plan, Obama
still intends to sharply increase in 2009 the number of U.S. soldiers
in the country, from about 32,000 today to more than 50,000 later this
year.
As the Obama team attempts to achieve a consensus, both
among its members and with the NATO allies also fighting this war, what
will the additional U.S. troops do after they arrive? The Los Angeles
Times reported on a debate between factions within the Pentagon on what
the mission should be for these soldiers. One faction, representing
counterinsurgency theorists, is recommending using the additional
soldiers to protect as much of the Afghan population in urban areas as
possible. The other faction recommends deploying the soldiers to rural
areas near the Pakistani border to cut off infiltration from militant
sanctuaries there.
The Small Wars Council had a gloomy view of
the transition on Afghanistan policy. Participants stirred up memories
of Lyndon Johnson's handling of Vietnam policy after the death of John
F. Kennedy. And the debate over urban protection versus securing the
Pakistani border brought to mind postwar analyses of the Soviet Army's
failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Let's think through the plan first, and then reach for the toolbox
Don't
let your tools, especially your fancy gadgets, determine your strategy,
warns H.R. McMaster, a colonel in the U.S. Army (selected last year for
promotion to brigadier general) and a top advisor to Gen. David
Petraeus. In an essay in World Affairs Journal, Colonel McMaster
explicitly bundles Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan into one package.
With
all three conflicts, Colonel McMaster concludes that top U.S.
decision-makers failed to account for the human element, including
cultural, tribal, and political identities, in those conflict zones.
Instead, American leaders adopted strategies driven by U.S.
technological advantages (mostly air power), such as "graduated
pressure" during the Vietnam War and "rapid decisive operations" during
the early periods of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. In all three
cases, U.S. policymakers hoped that American technological advantages
would influence the adversary's decision-making, resulting in a rapid
and cheap success for U.S. policy.
A discussion of Colonel
McMaster's essay at the Small Wars Council described how top American
decision-makers in all three cases received warnings beforehand from
cultural experts well versed in the human dimensions of the looming
conflict zones, yet opted to downplay these warnings. The allure of an
easy technological answer, Colonel McMaster argues, trumped the alarms
sounded by the "human element" experts.
Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap
of the U.S. Air Force asserts in an essay at Armed Forces Journal that
manpower-intensive, "large footprint" campaigns such as those the
United States fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are no longer
politically acceptable to the U.S. electorate. Dunlap concludes that if
it is no longer politically possible for the United States to deploy
large numbers of general-purpose ground forces for counterinsurgency or
stabilization missions, it is unwise for defense planners to remold
their forces for these very scenarios.
When confronting irregular
warfare challenges, if technological fixes are ineffective and
manpower-intensive ground campaigns are politically infeasible, what
remains in the Pentagon's toolbox? Critics of the technocentric
approach to warfare, such as Colonel McMaster, blame defense planners
of the 1980s and 1990s for leaving the U.S. military unprepared for the
challenges of this decade. Are today's defense planners also leaving
policymakers without effective options?
Obama's team moves into the Pentagon's policy shop
Michèle
Flournoy, cofounder and president of the Center for a New American
Security (CNAS) think tank, will be the next U.S. under secretary of
defense for policy (Foreign Policy's Tom Ricks is a senior fellow at
CNAS). Flournoy served in several high policy positions in the Pentagon
during the Clinton administration and was a professor at the National
Defense University. According to several news reports on the transition
at the Pentagon, many of Flournoy's colleagues at CNAS will serve under
her at the Pentagon or will move to the State Department.
One
official who seems to be staying at his post, at least for now, is
Michael Vickers, the assistant secretary of defense for special
operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities.
Vickers is most famous for having organized weapons support for the
Afghan resistance to the Soviets while he was a CIA officer, as
depicted in Charlie Wilson's War. Before that, Vickers was a U.S. Army
Special Forces officer and a combat veteran of Central America and the
Middle East.
Vickers came to the Pentagon after Robert Gates took
over the department from Donald Rumsfeld. A Washington Post story from
December 2007 described a very long list of duties Gates and Eric
Edelman, the outgoing head of policy, have assigned to Vickers. Items
on the list include planning and supervising the United States' global
counterterrorism operations; various partnerships with foreign military
forces; retooling U.S. conventional forces for low-intensity and
counterterrorism operations; and modernization of U.S. nuclear forces.
With
a new boss in Flournoy, will Vickers retain his long portfolio of
duties? Will Flournoy keep Vickers, or does she have a replacement in
mind? Or does Vickers have a "special relationship" with Secretary
Gates?
In this era of persistent irregular conflict, Vickers's
office is more important than ever -- we'll be watching closely to see
what happens.
These are just the highlights from an average week at Small Wars Journal. Small Wars Journal collects the latest news, thinking, and
discussion on the world's small wars. It is a forum for discussion and debate.
We look forward to hearing from Foreign Policy's readers.
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