The decision

• Last Updated: November 05. 2009 11:41PM UAE / November 5. 2009 7:41PM GMT

Eight years after the invasion of Afghanistan, Spencer Ackerman writes, America’s ‘right war’ still needs a strategy.

Everything about the ballroom of the St Regis Hotel indicates Washington courtliness. The entranceway is filled with glittering chandeliers and polished marble, giving way to high ceilinged majesty. Located steps away from the White House, the hotel signals power, control and spectacle. So it was the natural venue for Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to unveil in August the dozen-member team he assembled to reverse the flagging civilian assistance efforts for the troubled region, at the moment this summer when the city began, for the first time, to question the wisdom of the war.

Holbrooke choreographed the event with his characteristic attention to atmospherics. It was moderated by John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff who ran Barack Obama’s presidential transition. Holbrooke was flanked by his team, which represented every significant US agency and department and even the British government. The dozens of journalists in the room might not have appreciated the policy details – about contesting Pakistani Taliban short-wave radio communications; microcredit programmes for Afghan agriculture; and supporting the forthcoming Afghan elections – but Holbrooke, who has decades of experience with the elite press, evidently gambled that the more their eyes glazed over, the more they would be likely to write that the Obama administration had gathered together an impressive and united civilian team to match the military effort.

And then Holbrooke stepped on his own script. Asked how he would know when he had achieved the ultimate endpoint of the entire enterprise he’d assembled hundreds of people at the St Regis to discuss, Holbrooke replied that it was like the famously vague test enunciated by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart for determining when an artwork was pornographic. “We’ll know it when we see it,” he said. There was little chance of the event’s elaborate stagecraft being remembered after that.

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The foreign-policy community in Washington is an entity powered by euphemism. As much as the fraternity of experts and analysts wishes to congratulate itself for its deep thinking and farsightedness, debate occurs within rigid boundaries that exist to make policymakers believe they can unlock every intractable problem of geopolitical management. Like all good boundaries, these both protect and corral: they insulate the members of the foreign policy establishment against embarrassment when disasters emerge, provided that no one admits a situation is indeed helpless.

Holbrooke’s awkward admission at the St Regis may have pierced this illusion of control, but the truth is that an inability or unwillingness to define the ends of the Afghanistan conflict has been the rule in Washington for the last eight years. There has never been a debate about when the United States will meet its goals in the region it entered after the September 11 attacks, just as there has never been a clarification of those goals. The Iraq war provided everyone with an alibi.

The Bush administration viewed Afghanistan as a nation-building sinkhole that distracted from the war it wanted to fight. Accordingly, the military prioritised Iraq, and so no talented officer had any incentive to innovate in Afghanistan. The Democratic Party, all the way up to Barack Obama, insisted that Afghanistan was the truly necessary war, and turned it into a cudgel to be used against the Iraq war. American journalists made careers in Iraq and barely asked for embeds in Afghanistan; their editors ticked the box by running an annual short feature, usually about how Afghanistan was the “forgotten war”. There was no critical thought from anyone about arresting Afghanistan’s deterioration, and half-true clichés about a “Graveyard of Empires” accumulated. That was the brittle architecture underlying the national consensus about Afghanistan. Without the supporting wall of Iraq, it has now collapsed.

Out of its wreckage, Obama will make two critical decisions in the coming weeks: whether a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is suitable for the country’s woes; and whether a second troop increase in the span of a year is required to wage it. Obama’s advisers, military and civilian, are locked in a debate over how to provide an alternative to Holbrooke’s admission. Some, like Vice President Joseph Biden, contend that the complexities of counterinsurgency are both insurmountable and unmoored from the stated goal of removing al Qa’eda as a security threat. Others, like Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, contend that the United States has already spent eight years attacking al Qa’eda and senior Taliban leaders without regard for the conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan that the militants exploit to retain support.

But there is another debate layered on top of that one, both inside the administration and across the Washington foreign-policy community in general. That debate is about the meaning of the Afghanistan war and the scope of American commitment to it. But it is also about what lessons to draw from the Iraq war, and whether they can be exported to Afghanistan.

All of the ideological attention in Washington previously committed to Iraq is now flooding into Afghanistan – or at least to the simulacrum of Afghanistan that exists in Washington. That still-congealing ideology forms the prism through which Obama’s ultimate decisions will be viewed. What was once a relatively simple (though operationally complex) mission to avenge the September 11 attacks has since been overtaken by theories about how to establish lasting peace and stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If those theories are correct, the United States may endure a period of bloody hardship but reap the benefits of radically diminishing the threat of al Qa’eda. If not, it will court disaster.

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No one in the Obama administration or the Democratic Party had ever referred to Afghanistan as “the good war”. But Democratic politicians spent years contrasting it with an Iraq war they pledged to end, a template perfected by Obama, who promised on the campaign trail not only to escalate the Afghanistan war but mused about circumstances under which he might expand it into Pakistan. Iraq was the war that never should have been fought; in a reductive political context, Afghanistan, therefore, became, if not the good war, then the right war.

And so, barely a month after taking office, Obama fulfilled a campaign promise to escalate in Afghanistan, ordering 21,000 additional troops into the “right war” shortly after announcing a plan to gradually withdraw from Iraq – all before the administration’s new strategy review for Afghanistan was completed.

It is hard to overstate the contempt that Obama administration officials have for their predecessors in the Bush White House. Their distaste is both politically expedient – a means of marshalling support among a public that still regards the Bush years as a disaster – and completely sincere. In public and in private, administration officials, particularly those dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, still marvel at the extent of the disaster they inherited. But as the Obama team’s plan for Afghanistan took shape over the course of this year, its strategic and tactical bearings were heavily moulded by a coterie of military theorist-practitioners who came to prominence under Bush. Their influence – both their insights and their blind spots – has shaped every aspect of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy.

As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama was vocal in his opposition to the invasion of Iraq; as a US senator, he argued against the troop surge; and as president, he moved immediately to announce a strategy for ending the Iraq war. But that last act coincided with a decision to rehire the team that designed and implemented the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and the troop surge that supported it. Obama renominated Adm Michael Mullen, a driving force in support of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, for a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He asked Lt Gen Douglas Lute, who co-ordinated inter-agency efforts for Iraq and Afghanistan as Bush’s White House “war czar”, to stay on, and stripped Iraq from his portfolio to give him greater focus on the crisis in South-west Asia. Obama embraced Gen David Petraeus, the hero of Iraq, whom he inherited at US Central Command. And he calculated that Robert Gates, Bush’s pragmatic defence secretary, would be more at home in an Obama administration. Several months ago an outgoing Bush White House staffer marvelled that the hiring decisions from a Democratic administration dedicated to ending the war represent the greatest vindication the surge could have received.

Despite the progressive vitriol directed against the surge in Iraq during the Bush years, many of the civilian counterinsurgency thinkers who helped formulate a kind of triage for the disaster in Iraq have joined the upper echelons of the Obama foreign policy team. This is thanks largely to the influence of a new think-tank founded in 2007 by two luminaries of the Democratic party foreign-policy establishment, called the Center for a New American Security. While formally non-partisan, CNAS became a nexus for top Democratic politicians to familiarise themselves with a once-marginal community within security circles that focused on preparing for irregular wars. Unlike previous military movements, this one, with Petraeus as its principal exponent, stressed the primacy of political solutions over military ones; embraced rather than dismissed the concerns of human-rights groups about the impact of conflict on civilians caught in the crossfire; criticised the military for its overemphasis on outmoded and technologically driven conflict; and held itself to a higher standard of rigour when analysing its own premises.

It is easy to see why the counterinsurgents’ ideas found currency with politicians who are generally sceptical of military power. They combine a rationale for the wise use of military force with an analysis of its limitations, all in a manner immediately relevant to the wars America is waging. After Obama’s inauguration, the staff of CNAS appeared to move en masse into the new administration: founders Kurt Campbell and Michele Flournoy became, respectively, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and undersecretary of defence for policy. A bevy of CNAS analysts work at State and Defense, to the point that at the think-tank’s annual conference in June, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, Judith McHale, joked that she hoped CNAS would teach her the secret handshake.

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The first place where the counterinsurgents made their imprint was the administration’s strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In March, the Obama administration released the results of a review co-chaired by Flournoy and Richard Holbrooke and led by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official, that recast strategy for the two countries as a conjoined twin called Af-Pak. (The term is gradually losing favour at the White House; even Riedel blasted it for disrespecting the uniqueness of both countries.) In a televised presidential address, Obama, flanked by his war cabinet, said the new strategy was designed to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qa’eda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and prevent their return to either country”.

The conclusions of the review were outlined in a six-page white paper, whose first line asserted that “The United States has a vital national security interest in addressing the current and potential security threats posed by extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The paper outlined a programme designed to bolster Afghan governance at the provincial and district levels; provide thoroughgoing economic aid to Pakistan’s civilian government; reorient its military strategy in Afghanistan around providing security to Afghans beleaguered by both insurgents and US troops; train and mentor Afghan security forces to eventually take control; and integrate US civilian and military efforts in support those objectives. While its ultimate goal remained the destruction of al Qa’eda in south-west Asia, Flournoy explained in a press conference, the strategy – which built off reviews conducted by Mullen, Lute and Petraeus – “is very much a counterinsurgency approach towards that end”.

Yet the consensus within the administration for a counterinsurgency strategy was not as stable as it appeared. When Obama ordered 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan within weeks of taking office, “everyone kind of nodded their heads,” one administration official conceded, but officials knew support for Afghanistan – with death tolls rising – would quickly erode.

But after unveiling the new strategy in his March speech, Obama spent practically no time at all talking publicly about the war and its aims. Petraeus, Holbrooke and Flournoy testified before Congress in April, mostly about Pakistan and its campaign to take the Swat Valley back from the Taliban. Gen Stanley McChrystal, a distinguished special-operations officer who became US commander in Afghanistan in June with a mandate to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, began telling reporters about his new plans to end air strikes as an offensive weapon in Afghanistan and restrict troops from engaging insurgents in populated areas. But Obama made only offhand remarks about Afghanistan and Pakistan and focused on his domestic agenda and his other foreign priorities. His one deviation from that pattern came in August, when he told a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Afghanistan was a “war of necessity... fundamental to the defence of our people”.

In the meantime, public support for the war began to flag, and criticism of the administration’s approach piled up. A number of journalists, bloggers and policy analysts suggested that the Obama strategy, which ostensibly aimed at the destruction of al Qa’eda, in no way required an expansive commitment to rebuilding an Afghan state.

In July, the former British foreign service officer Rory Stewart, who now heads the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, blasted the Obama approach in a widely-read London Review of Books piece. After asserting that the “apparent success” of the surge in Iraq is unlikely to be duplicated in Afghanistan, Stewart accused the administration of providing “misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state”. His criticism was all the more shocking because the administration had solicited his advice. (In an interview with the Financial Times, he memorably likened the process to being asked whether or not one should wear a seat-belt while driving off a cliff.)

A more fundamental criticism has come from realist thinkers like Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University professor and retired Army officer whose son died serving in Iraq in 2007. In a number of articles and television appearances, Bacevich has argued that the foreign policy priorities that defined the “Global War on Terror” – first and foremost the attempt to secure and stabilise Afghanistan – have little connection to the national interest. “What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention?” he asked in a typical August piece. In June, he presented a version of this argument at the annual CNAS conference; the counterinsurgents clearly respect Bacevich, and find sparring with him, healthily, a way to keep their thinking from going stale. But there is little evidence that the criticisms levelled by Stewart or Bacevich has had any impact among the counterinsurgents or the members of Obama’s team; several administration officials have told me that they read Stewart’s article, but I am unclear as to any influence it had on their thinking.

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Inside the administration, the long public silence that followed the March announcement seemed to have convinced lower-level officials that with the strategy already established, the debate that remained was over implementation. As the left began to turn against escalation in Afghanistan, some officials were bewildered by criticism of the administration’s embrace of counterinsurgency. “We tried for seven and a half years to have an almost exclusively counterterrorism strategy and that pretty manifestly was not working,” one said. “It was not achieving either counterterrorism results nor doing a heck of a lot for Afghan stability or security.” The bureaucracy kept working toward the ends that had already been stated, convinced that Obama had already charted their course.

By the late summer, the bottom had fallen out. Polling showed, for the first time, that the war in Afghanistan had become an unpopular one – a stunning drop in public support for a conflict linked directly to the September 11 attacks. The Obama administration’s base was split: a Washington Post poll in September found only 30 per cent of Democrats believed the war was worth its costs, which stand at nearly 900 US fatalities and $228 billion since 2001.

The drop in public support came at the worst possible time. First, on August 20, Afghanistan held a presidential election marked by widespread fraud on behalf of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president whose relationship with the Obama administration remains an icy one. The Obama strategy was predicated on the notion that the elections would provide new credibility to the Afghan government, enabling it to isolate the insurgency and win popular allegiance by enacting wide-ranging reforms. “Engaging the Afghan government and bolstering its legitimacy” was a bullet-point recommendation in the March white paper, but now Karzai had stolen an election that he probably would have won anyway.

What brought matters to a head, however, was the leak of a strategy document prepared for McChrystal by a dozen security experts, which was published by the Washington Post in September. Delivered to the Pentagon in late August, the so-called McChrystal strategy review was a lengthy report meant to explain how the military would implement the white paper authored by Riedel, Holbrooke and Flournoy in March. The report envisioned a complex and protracted counterinsurgency campaign that required between 12 to 18 months not to win, but just to see whether reversing the Taliban’s momentum was possible. It seeded the bed for a request, delivered several weeks later, for tens of thousands more troops.

Obama’s reaction was to announce that his cabinet would begin a series of internal debates about what strategy to adopt before addressing McChrystal’s much-telegraphed request. The move stunned many midlevel and lower officials. Hadn’t the white paper been the strategy? Wasn’t that the whole point of sending McChrystal to Afghanistan? It’s well and good to revisit strategy in the face of setbacks, some thought. But was the administration returning to square one after the bureaucracy had begun the slow and arduous process of mobilising for counterinsurgency? Had Obama truly understood his own strategy? And if not, how could he be trusted to craft a new one?

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It is unknown to anyone outside the White House what Obama is truly thinking about Afghanistan and Pakistan. But several distinct patterns within the administration have emerged as the debate continues.

First and foremost is that Iraq – both the intellectual proposition and the war itself – looms over every aspect of the Afghanistan conflict. To a great degree, Afghanistan is a proving ground for what the United States will ultimately consider the true lessons of Iraq.

For the political appointees in the Obama administration – all of whom, except for Gates, opposed the surge in 2007 – the lesson of Iraq is not to become blinded by a particular version of what the circumstances of the war are or ought to be. For years, Clinton, Biden and Holbrooke criticised Bush for refusing to hear bad news about Iraq and remaining oblivious to the need to change course. So the Obama administration has not shied away from conceding that its approach has flaws. The public sees Obama’s weeks-long review of strategy as vacillation. But senior administration officials view it as a mark of intellectual honesty, and have indicated that they believe it to be irresponsible to escalate the war without interrogating its foundations. Much as the counterinsurgents have solicited Bacevich’s views, Holbrooke let it be known that he had consulted his old friend from Vietnam, the anti-war journalist and historian Stanley Karnow. In a hearing, Holbrooke confessed to Senator Russell Feingold that he could not be sure that a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan would not merely destabilise nuclear-armed Pakistan by leading insurgents to cross the border. Feingold was less than reassured; months later, he became the first US Senator to call for a “flexible timetable” to withdraw troops.

For the military, and particularly the counterinsurgents, the lesson of Iraq is that what diminished the violence in Iraq should be applied to Afghanistan. This, however, presents a contradiction. Among the invocations of the Army and Marine Corps’ counterinsurgency field manual is that local circumstances and local knowledge matter above all. Petraeus, in recent public appearances, has said that he is attentive to the dangers of simply importing strategy from Iraq to Afghanistan.

But, to a great degree, that is exactly what is happening. When counterinsurgents are asked what the differences are, their answers are usually tailored to problems of military tactics – such as the fact that Afghanistan is overwhelmingly rural, without the urban combat that became a feature of the Iraq war. At a recent Washington counterinsurgency conference, sponsored by Marine Corps University, speaker after speaker praised the military’s ability to adapt itself for counterinsurgency fights, and measured the Afghanistan war against counterinsurgency principles and their application in Iraq. The concern among all of them was how thoroughly the tenets of counterinsurgency – such as the protection of the population; deep partnership and mentoring with local security forces; and co-operation with local and tribal governance elements – could be embraced in Afghanistan. None asked if any such principle should be jettisoned because of its inapplicability to a much different war. An intellectual movement that criticised the military in Iraq for confusing the war it wished to fight with the war it actually confronted is on the precipice of tragic irony.

These two lessons are theoretically reconcilable. It is possible to both embrace what worked in Iraq while constantly asking if it is working in Afghanistan. That is partially why the alliance between the counterinsurgents and the Obama administration has held. But what no one has attempted is to answer precisely the two questions looming over the entire debate: to what degree did counterinsurgency actually yield lasting security in Iraq? And even if it did, how, exactly, do conditions in Afghanistan allow for the import of those tactics?

For now there is no answer to either question, not from the administration, not from the press, not from Congress, not from policy analysts. As a result, the longer the war continues without evident progress, the more likely it becomes that a split will emerge between those who believe counterinsurgency has failed and those who believe it has not been given adequate time to work. That will make the Obama administration seem like nothing so much as the Bush administration during the worst days of the Iraq war.

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In an interview with 60 Minutes a week before he released his strategy in March, Obama acknowledged that he needed a vision for the war’s end. “There’s got to be an exit strategy,” he said, in order to ensure “this is not perpetual drift and stalemate.”

But what he announced the following week had no exit strategy at all. Instead it contained an expanded commitment to Afghanistan. And there is still no exit strategy up for discussion. While Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, others assured reporters that the new strategy review will scrutinise the “assumptions” the administration embraced – consciously or otherwise – in March, both Gates and Clinton have stated that withdrawal, or even troop reductions, are not live options for consideration. Nor do the counterinsurgents’ critics favour such an approach. Biden has been excoriated on the right for pushing a minimalist counterterrorism strategy, but his proposals would still hold US troop levels at 68,000 – the highest they have ever been. The question raised by Bacevich and others – is the Afghanistan war truly a core interest of the United States? – is evidently out of bounds.

Which leads to the biggest question of all, and one that looks unlikely to be answered even by the new strategy review: How does Obama envision the end of this war? There is no indication that he has an answer. Obama has spoken of a long-term US relationship with both Afghanistan and Pakistan that will extend well beyond the withdrawal of American troops, but has not explained the conditions under which those forces might actually be removed. In March, after Obama announced the goal of the war was to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al Qa’eda, I asked Denis McDonough, one of his closest advisers, what that meant. “They have to be met by force,” McDonough said, and prevented from carrying out their plans, but “defeating” them ultimately meant providing “different opportunities” to Afghans and Pakistanis. If it sounded like anything, it sounded like containment, confrontation and confusion over when the United States will have ultimately won. In practice, it is a road map for open-ended war.

In truth, no one has an answer. Not a single Obama critic or smug pundit has ever offered a vision of what the end of the conflict in Afghanistan looks like, except the blithe and question-begging urge for “victory,” a comic-book fantasy masquerading as a policy option. The foreign-policy community in Washington has never had to think that far ahead, or put itself out in the position of making hard and reputation-jeopardising choices. What Holbrooke confessed to at the St Regis was a collective sin.

The people who appear to have thought most rigorously about the end of the war work for McChrystal. “We’re going to leave here under shades of grey,” McChrystal’s director of operations, Brig Gen William Mayville, told a PBS documentary crew. “We’ll have stability – at least reasonable stability. We’ll have a firm understanding that more has to be done. But in the end, you’ll have an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem. And that’ll be good enough.” McChrystal’s deputy, Gen Michael Flynn, told the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins, “it’s probably going to take us three years to really turn the insurgency to the point where it’s waning instead of waxing.” And then? “Beyond those three years, we are looking at another two years when the government of Afghanistan and the security forces of Afghanistan begin to take a lot more personal responsibility.”

If Flynn is correct, then the Afghanistan war will reach its 14th birthday without concluding, and will pass even more mournful milestones after that. If the echoes of Iraq are in the air, and in the cavernous ballroom of the St Regis, none is more hauntingly resonant than the famous plea that David Petraeus made to the journalist Rick Atkinson, who accompanied Petraeus’ division to Mosul during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to “Tell me how this ends.” The answer has merely been deferred, thousands of miles eastward.


Spencer Ackerman is the national-security correspondent for The Washington Independent.