New Developments (Maybe) in Afghanistan

Some interesting news coming out of Afghanistan. It looks like US troops are pulling back from the countryside and focusing on the cities. Additionally, the mission seems to be shifting to a defensive one: pulling security and protecting the troops vs clearing/holding territory and expanding outward. Meanwhile, our government has reportedly negotiated directly with the Taliban in Qatar.
I'm no Clausewitz, but it looks to me like the US is starting to wind down, and may be in the early stages of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
I'm not a fan of leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations. It's their country, after all. But somehow, I think it'll be okay. I'm betting that a lot of Afghan gov't officials and military personnel will strike deals with the Taliban the day after we leave. Hell, I bet a lot of them are closet members of the Taliban, or some other militia, already.
Or maybe I'm just telling myself that to rationalize the US leaving a weak & fragile frenemy government in the lurch.
I'm not a fan of cutting the Afghan government out of the negotiations. Some of them genuinely put their faith in us, have worked with us toward building a stable & safe Afghanistan, and a few have even fought, bled, and died to make that vision a reality. Excluding them is a slap in the face, and is a cowardly move.
However, so is leaving. Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware of that. But here's the thing. The way we were going, we are not any closer to success now than we were in 2002. We have troops controlling every piece of the country, from one end to the other. We have the most technologically-advanced military on the planet, with some of the most fearsome weaponry invented. But none of that matters, because Afghanistan is about as unconquerable as it gets. The last person who came close was Alexander the Great. Just about every nation since then has eventually been chased out in defeat.

The US will likely be no different. No matter if we stay another year, another five years, or another fifty years. Now, maybe if we had gone about it differently - maybe if we had established an overwhelming humanitarian presence in 2001/02, instead of letting combat ops largely drive the mission - we could have succeeded. Maybe if we had brought in State and USAID, had invested billions in rebuilding the country's infrastructure, had put locals to work demining, planting crops, building roads, a power grid, water treatment facilities, and schools. Maybe that would have transformed Afghanistan into a success story. 
Maybe.
But that's a lot of water under the bridge, and we'll never know how it turned out. 2001/02 was arguably our one shot at that, because with everything that happened afterward - Iraq, the financial crisis, the ACA - we never had the money or manpower or political will to try again.
And some seventeen years later, it's long past time to cut our losses. All the money we've spent on Afghanistan, in one form or another, might as well have been put in a pile and set on fire, for all the return on investment that the US got. To say nothing of the thousands of dead and crippled Americans and Afghans the war has produced. 
I would hate it if Afghanistan became another example of blowback - if our ostensible allies today become our enemies in a decade or two. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened, not even the first time in Afghanistan. 
So while I am really, really dismayed and disgusted that we're leaving the Afghan government twisting in the wind, I support the decision to wind things down and leave - if that indeed turns out to be the case.

PS: Before someone asks, I realize that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, if it happens, will likely be on Trump's watch. Meaning that I have to give him credit for something. I'm okay with that. Now, it remains to be seen whether he screws it up somehow, like he has just about everything else. It's also worth asking whether he's doing this on Russia's behalf, for some reason we're not yet aware of. (Paranoid? Sure. But given his past actions, it's a question worth raising.) But ultimately, I agree with what he's doing here. It doesn't even come close to cancelling out all the disastrous decisions he's made, but it is a pretty big item on the plus side of the ledger.

The Militaristic Undercurrent of American Discourse

"You'll be sorry you messed with the US of A - 'cause we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." - Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (2002)

There was an old story I remember hearing once or twice back during my days as an intelligence analyst, about how the Soviet Union responded when four of its diplomats were kidnapped in the mid-1980s.  The Lebanese militia called Hezbollah kidnapped the diplomats to get the Soviets to put pressure on Syria, which was making life hard for Hezbollah at the time.  Well, this didn't sit well with the Soviet Union, and it responded rather uniquely.  The legend goes that the KGB tracked down a key Hezbollah leader's relative, castrated him and sent his testicles to the Hezbollah leader, then shot him (the relative) in the head.  The KGB then guaranteed Hezbollah that it would treat the militia members' in a similar fashion if the Soviet diplomats weren't released immediately.  This evidently was enough to convince Hezbollah to free the Soviet hostages.  Now, the part about Hezbollah kidnapping four Soviet diplomats is true, but the rest sounds like an urban legend.  Although, the KGB has never shied away from these types of brutal tactics, which makes this story at least a bit plausible.

So why did I bring up that story? Because it's indicative of an undercurrent of militarism undercurrent running through American society.  The story usually came up after the US had suffered an attack on its interests, such as the kidnapping of a US citizen or terrorist attack against an overseas US installation, and it often ended with a statement along the lines of "Those Russians didn't fuck around, and nobody messed with them.  Maybe if we [the US] were more like that. . ." It reflects a desire for America to be tougher, more ruthless, less restrained in the use of force.  A mindset that thinks force is the first and best solution to solving a conflict.  And it's not limited to overseas issues such as hostile nations or international terrorism:

Dealing drugs? Harsh punishments and long jail terms.

Rogue state saber-rattling? Bomb the shit out of 'em.

Civil disobedience? Make it legal to run protestors over.

You kind of see it in a lot of places if you think to look for it; hell, you see it all over the place even without looking for it.  You see it in social media posts and news article comments in the aftermath of a terrorist incident ("Let's round all those people up and throw them in camps! They ain't got no rights!") or when a hostile nation does some saber-rattling ("We should just turn that country into glass.") And, of course, you see it on the campaign trail, when politicians )who have usually never spent a day in uniform) try to outdo each other with their "tough guy" talk (for example, here's Ted Cruz in 2015, boasting that he'll "carpet bomb" ISIS if he becomes president.)

And, to nobody's surprise, we see this militaristic attitude emanate from the White House frighteningly often.  We saw it on the campaign trail.  We saw it in the belligerent rhetoric toward North Korea.  We saw it in the decision to drop the MOAB on an insurgent stronghold in Afghanistan.  And most recently, we saw it while watching a video of a drone strike, Trump showed he had no qualms with killing the target's family in the strike.

"Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled." (Washington Post)

Let's try a thought experiment and imagine that Trump's stance becomes military doctrine.  Would it be effective? That is, would it help the military achieve its objectives? Research shows that, at least in Afghanistan, the answer is no.  I suspect that the answer would be the same for Iraq, for Syria, and for any of the other places that the United States is engaged in counterterrorism operations - because common sense tells you that people who get hit want to hit back.  History is full of cases where people fought back hard against their persecutors.  Despite being outnumbered and outgunned.  Despite whatever unimaginable atrocities a Goliath-like military can inflict upon them.  The Eastern Front, World War II.  Gaza, now.  Afghanistan, the 1980s.  I think it's safe to say that Trump's tactics would not only be unhelpful, they would be counterproductive.

And in case you're thinking that upping the brutality high enough will eventually lead to victory - it's probably been tried already.  Crop destruction, land mines, torture, destroying entire villages - all of these things have been used in the past, and none of them helped achieve victory.  Further, some countries have been more brutal than the United States could ever imagine being, yet they couldn't brutalize their way to victory.  And even if they had been successful, is that the kind of behavior we want to copy?

If it seems like I'm worried about this out of some softhearted concern for ISIS or the Taliban or whoever, rest assured, I'm not.  Do the names John Walker Lindh, Jose Padilla, or Anwar al-Awlaki ring any bells? Lindh was a US citizen captured in Afghanistan and convicted of fighting against US forces; Padilla was a US citizen convicted of aiding terrorists; and Awlaki was the leader of an anti-US terrorist cell in Yemen.  Awlaki was killed by a Hellfire missile, while Padilla and Lindh are still serving prison sentences.  I don't particularly care what happens to them, or to any other US citizen who takes up arms against his or her own countrymen; if they happen to be in a great deal of agonizing pain before they die, I don't feel any sympathy.

What I do care about is what the way we treat these individuals says about our country and its values. There's a giant difference between sympathizing with the country's enemies and raising objections about our conduct toward those enemies.  Let's take torture: the intentional inflicting of suffering and physical harm on someone who doesn't pose any threat, and which produces questionable results.  What does it look like when a country - any country - endorses torture as an acceptable and effective method? Especially a country that prides itself on being "the land of the free" and a "beacon of democracy." The president recently nominated a CIA agent who supervised a black site where torture was routine to lead the Agency; that's not a good look for a country that has played a major role in capturing and prosecuting perpetrators of war crimes over the past several decades.  And it's not just torture; our country should be moving away from things like "preemptive" wars of choice and indiscriminate killing, yet our current head of state is okay with it. And around 40% of the citizenry are okay with him.

Ask yourselves: is a country that has a "might makes right" approach to conflict resolution the kind of country you want to live in?

Lessons (not) learned from Vietnam

The recent PBS series on the Vietnam War and the recent debate over the national anthem got me thinking about the parallels between then and now, and I'm putting my thoughts into this stream-of-consciousness post about how little has changed since the end of the war.  Specifically, how little we (as a country) have learned since then.  Let's look at the lessons we thought we learned, but then discarded.

First, the US government (the White House and the Pentagon) fell back into the habit of sending troops to fight wars for flimsy justifications, vaguely-defined objectives, and inadequate equipment and resources.  This hasn't happened all the time, but more often than not, the troops went in without what they needed for victory: a coherent plan, resources that matched the objective, and a valid reason to fight.  When it comes to smaller, shorter conflicts, the score is about even.  Grenada and Panama didn't become quagmires, but Somalia and Lebanon did.  In regard to large-scale conflicts, the tally is pretty one-sided.  The 1990-91 Gulf War had a clear mission and sufficient resources, if a rationale that was more about economics than security; but on the other side of the ledger, we have Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq Part II.

There was supposed to be a deep discussion about America's use of military power in the wake of Vietnam, but it never really got off the ground.  Not enough to lead to any meaningful changes, anyway.  The senior officers who hoped to avoid a repeat of the Vietnam quagmire succeeded for a few years, and during that time they managed to implement meaningful reforms.  For example, when Colin Powell served in the White House as a military assistant to Secretary Weinberger, he helped craft the "Weinberger Doctrine", which acted as a litmus test for when to commit US troops.  The war hawks eventually outmaneuvered those senior officers, though, and critics who charged that the Doctrine was so narrow that it practically guaranteed US troops would never be deployed anywhere.  Vaguely-defined missions began to come back into favor in the 1990s, and became standard procedure after 9/11.

Washington also ably deflected any deep discussion by transitioning from a draftee military to an all-volunteer force.  Richard Nixon wisely calculated that halting the draft would deflate anti-war protests, and he was right.  Once the overall population stopped having a stake in America's wars, they stopped worrying that they might someday get dragged into a quagmire conflict.  This weakened the bond between the military and the general population, and gave military leadership much more license to send the military anywhere they wanted.  Somewhere along the way, Congress (which holds the power to declare war) stopped holding the president accountable in any meaningful way.  How it got there is a story about a lot of boring political maneuvering, but the moral of the story is that "accountability" was a sham.  Political appointees and mid-level staffers took the fall for military failures, partisan bickering replaced debate, and nobody asked the questions that should have been asked after Vietnam.  Which brings us to the present, where history is repeating itself.

I'm almost done here, but I'd like to make one more point.  To me, this isn't an academic debate.  I served in the Army for four years and spent five years after that as a defense contractor.  During that time, I made several trips to combat zones and deployed locations.  My experiences have made me very skeptical of how the government employs the military, to the point where I oppose a military intervention by default unless I see a very good reason for it.  I'm probably not evaluating a military intervention impartially, but I don't really care if I'm being fair or not.  I think being extremely skeptical is preferable to not being skeptical enough.  Every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is someone's child/parent/sibling/friend, and if the president and the senior generals put them in harm's way, they need to be absolutely certain that the sacrifice is worth it.  Anything less is morally repugnant in my opinion.

Trump's Half-Baked Strategy for Afghanistan

On Monday evening, August 21st, President Trump gave a speech laying out his plan for addressing the war in Afghanistan, a place where the US has occupied since 2001.  Given Afghanistan's track record of resisting and outlasting invading armies, I'd be pessimistic about the plan's odds of success even if an exceptionally brilliant general or statesman like Clausewitz or Metternich had drawn it up; and Trump is certainly not on the same level as them.

First, a few things to say about the speech's tone and timing.  The speech itself is far more eloquent and articulate than many of Trump's previous oratories - could this be a sign of a shift in the administration's collective culture now that Bannon has left? Possibly.  It's too early to tell, but there was a distinct change in Monday's speech.  The emphasis on the bonds within the military makes me speculate that McMaster, himself a career soldier, had a major role in writing the speech.  The speech also stresses the importance of national unity, which many pundits attribute to the recent events in Charlottesville, as well as Trump's verbal bungling in the aftermath.  The speech's timing also conveniently benefits Trump: although he couldn't have foreseen the Barcelona terrorist attack, laying out a policy that escalates the war in Afghanistan certainly helps Trump look tough in the face of terrorism.

That covers my thoughts on the speech's timing and tone.  Now for its content - and we've got quite a bit to unpack here.

First, there's the speech overall.  As I already mentioned, Trump signaled his intent to ramp up the war in Afghanistan.  This confirms that Trump plans to keep America's foreign policy on the same military-centric, interventionist foreign policy it has been on since the Truman Administration.  He might make a few changes around the edges, but the core approach remains fixed.   Trump has effectively fallen prey to what retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich disparagingly labeled the "bipartisan military consensus" in his book, The Limits of Power.  This is a significant point in Trump's administration, because it represents an important indication of the path his policy will lead, not only in Afghanistan, but in other fronts in the war on terror.  Expect to see him maintain or increase the op-tempo in Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq eventually.

The policy which he outlined in his speech is also self-contradictory and painfully naive.  Early on, he expresses a distaste for nation-building, stating "I share their [the American people's] frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy and most importantly lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations." However, later in the speech, he states that the United States will "participate in economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us." I could be wrong, but economic development sounds a lot like nation-building.  In fact, the economic component is a key part of nation-building.  Additionally, leaving a nation in ruins creates the conditions which Trump himself acknowledges exploit to establish a safe haven.  There's not going to be any way around nation-building, and Trump will soon learn this; unfortunately, an understaffed State Department will pose an obstacle.  Trump's strategy also seems determined to avoid making the mistakes of the previous war: leaving a power vacuum in a broken and divided country.  This applies to Afghanistan in the 1990s, but particularly Iraq, which is fresh in many generals' minds.

A dearth of nation-building efforts implies an emphasis on military force, and Trump's strategy reflects this.  He's evidently opting for a Bidenesque emphasis on counter-terrorism over counter-insurgency.  Trump has also wised up to NATO's importance, emphasizing that this will be a multinational effort.  How well that goes over with the other NATO countries is anyone's guess, though.

Trump also indicates that he wants the Afghan military to take the lead.  There's logic in that, but also huge potential for trouble.  A nation's army must maintain a strict monopoly on force; but in Balkanized countries like Afghanistan, there's a lot of overlap among the military and a particular faction.  Trump's approach will only make insurgents target US forces more, because they'll see us as allies of their enemies.  Also, the US has been in Afghanistan for seventeen years, so our adversaries have already formed their own opinions of us, and those opinions likely won't change.  Trump stated he's open to a political settlement with the Taliban; if so, letting the Afghan army take the lead will make any settlement more difficult to achieve.

Trump also shows a serious lack of understanding for how the Afghanistan policy rebounds into other areas.  First, publicly criticizing Pakistan and lauding India probably won't incentivize Pakistan to cooperate; and since one of Pakistan's key allies is China, this could potentially make dealing with North Korea more difficult.  In fact, China has already responded.  Second, eschewing nation-building will create a void that other nations could rush to fill, and Russia has already been expanding its influence in Afghanistan through the use of "soft power."

This might all be cause for concern, but the "bipartisan consensus" hasn't really been bothered by half-baked plans in the past.  Whether that's due to indifference or because nobody wants to tell the emperor that he's naked I can't really say, but my guess is that the US wants to keep a flag planted in Afghanistan as part of some grand geopolitical scheme.  Trump's bungling won't make a difference, but it will throw a bit of sand in the gears.  This is one of Trump's major tests as president, and he failed miserably.  His speech showed how little he understands about Afghanistan, military tactics, geopolitics, and the consequences of his words.

Finally, there were a few parts of the speech that I wanted to mention briefly:

• Trump's comment that "historically I like following my instincts." As professor Michael Horowitz of U-Penn insightfully notes, this is a clever way of preemptively shifting blame to the generals if the strategy goes south.
• In keeping with his fragile ego, there were a handful of times when he seemingly went out of his way to remind people that he's the president.
• He also threw a bit of red meat to his base by reinforcing the perception of Democrat weakness on military matters and talking about terrorists in the language of force.

That was what I took away from Trump's speech.  I have a feeling the next 3 1/2 years are going to be a bumpy ride.  Trump is woefully, hilariously, out of his league.