Worst National Security Administration Ever: Heirloom Edition

One of the most unfair aspects of George W. Bush’s foreign policy disasters, not counting the literally millions of people who have been killed, maimed or driven from their homes in direct consequence — we’re not counting them because, let’s face it, for Americans they don’t count — is that he won’t suffer any repercussions from them. He’s had his two terms, unlike Poppy, and even though he won’t be worth much as a speaker, Poppy’s friends and their descendants will once again step in to artificially inflate Junior’s post-presidential value. He wants $100,000 a pop for, lord help us, speeches? He’ll get it.

No: once John McCain surges to a Bob Dole-like finish in November, it’s Barack Obama who’ll be stuck with the fallout. And the chances are that he’ll take a couple of bad situations and, contrary to the laws of physics, make them worse, perhaps simultaneously.

One of my favorite quotes from the neoconservative camp originated with the late Max Boot. I say “late” because any man with a shred of decency or dignity would have gutted himself after writing what Boot did in the Weekly Standard soon after 911, to wit, “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”

Self-confident the Bush administration may be, but they are very far from possessing the British genius for repression and economic exploitation, which in any event didn’t serve the jodhpur and pith helmet crowd very well in Afghanistan, a fact of which Kipling idolator Boot could hardly have been ignorant before he failed to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Afghanistan has in fact been the ruin of many a poor boy — the Brits invaded the country three times with what could most sanguinely, in both senses, be described as mixed results shading toward the horrific — and Bush is leaving office just in time to ensure that the latest victim isn’t him.

The country is once again screwed, not least because Bush had a corrupt, illegitimate and mostly totemic government installed like a cheap carpet which has been rolling up around the edges ever since. Each year but one following the US invasion has brought a new record for opium production. At last count, the poppy accounted for more than half the country’s gross domestic product, with foreign aid accounting for most of the balance.

The brother of president Hamid Karzai is reputed to be among the country’s premier opium kingpins. Karzai himself is guarded by foreign troops and mercenaries because he’s afraid that local bodyguards would kill him; a well-founded fear, as they’ve tried. His government’s influence barely extends to the outskirts of Kabul. Life is so generally foul that, just as many Iraqis now view the Saddam years through a gauzy filter, many Afghanis now suffer nostalgia for the overthrown Taliban regime, which explains in large part why Taliban 2.0 are enjoying considerable success in their efforts to retake the country.

It’s into this morass that Obama wants to put more US troops; not nearly as many as Army doctrine recommends — 20 troops for each 1,000 civilians, which translates to more than 600,000 troops for Afghanistan’s population of more than 30 million — but more than are there now. This means taking troops from Iraq, where the same formula suggests an occupying force of more than 500,000, which helps to explain why things haven’t gone so well for the US in that country. Having abandoned the pretense of morality, we can’t even do immorality right.

The most likely immediate consequence of withdrawing troops from Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan is that both countries will go equally to hell: Iraq because the US will no longer have enough troops there to maintain the counterfeit semblance of order that momentarily prevails, and Afghanistan because the US will still not have enough troops to impose a counterfeit semblance of order there.

Among the problems with the Iraq-Afghanistan tradeoff is that the Obama plan for withdrawing US troops from Iraq will founder on its own shoals. Its mortal flaw, one that both Obama’s supporters and opponents seem determined to overlook, each for their own reasons, is that it isn’t a plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq; only a plan to withdraw enough troops to make the remaining ones more tempting targets and less effectual sheriffs.

Even in the highly improbable event that Obama actually does end the US presence in Iraq, he still won’t have enough troops to quell Afghanistan. Not without a draft, or a commitment to stick around for a decade while the Army and Marines recruit, train and equip an additional half-million or so reluctant wretches.

What his plan actually calls for, though, is a reduction in Iraq to the number of troops necessary to protect the troops necessary to protect other US personnel and conduct tactical operations against terrorists, who can of course be anyone the US says are terrorists. Some analysts place that protection-protection-attack force at 50,000 troops, but the real number will be closer to 130,000, or about what we’ve had there, aside from The Surge, during the past four years.

That will place about 15,000 troops at Obama’s immediate disposal for Afghanistan, plus an additional 15,000 or so each year that the Army and Marines struggle to add a total of 100,000 reluctant wretches to their ranks. Fortunately the economy will also continue going to hell, so recruiting people to go suffer, die and kill large quantities of tinted foes and their wedding parties in service to a morally bankrupt and physically lost cause won’t be as difficult as might otherwise be the case.

And that’s the Bush legacy. He makes everything worse, and Obama will be no exception: a man who might have surmounted any number of difficulties to become a mediocre president will wind up being regarded as, at best, a mildly repugnant one. On the sunny side, though, he too will profit from office when he leaves — at least he’ll deserve his speaking honorariums — and he has great legs for jodhpurs.

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9 Responses to “Worst National Security Administration Ever: Heirloom Edition”

1. 1
   JackD Says:
   

   Just out of curiosity, do you agree that Afghanistan and the Taliban/alQueda (also residing in Pakistan) are a problem and, if so, how would your ideal president deal with it?

   July 24th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
2. 2
   Weldon Berger Says:
   

   Hey, Jack. I agree that al Qaeda is a problem. Not so sure about the Taliban, who are somewhat repugnant, in my view, but are distinct from the bin Laden crowd and didn’t/don’t pose a serious threat to anyone other than their own countrypersons.

   The way to deal with the Taliban, according to me, is to recognize that 1) they don’t pose any real threat to anyone outside Afghanistan, and 2) they have enough of a consituency in Afghanistan to make any military solution short of totally eradicating them and their supporters futile, and 3) the only realistic solution to the problem is a political arrangement between the Taliban and other groups with political legitimacy in the country.

   Throwing more troops but never enough into the country will simply prolong a doomed effort until the next president takes over four years from now.

   As for al Qaeda, I don’t really have a clear enough grasp of the situation in Pakistan to advocate a particular solution, but my sense is again that no one has enough troops to make a military resolution possible, and even if they did, the price would be so terrible that it would just spawn yet another generation of America-hating terrorists. So again, I would think that the solution would be in large part internal.

   You may recall that Taliban leaders, while temporizing about turning loose of bin Laden, didn’t shut the door on the idea; it was the Bush administration who sealed that particular exit. Again, the two groups are not one and the same, and it’s a mistake to think of them or deal with them as if they are. Al Qaeda will never have a position in any legitimate Afghani government because for the most part, they are not Afghani. The challenge is to bring the disparate Afghani parties together to form a government that, unlike the current one, is seen to legitimately represent the interests of most of the country.

   If/when that happens, we can expect that the government will deal with al Qaeda in much the same fashion that some Iraqis began dealing with the imported fighters there because it is in their interests to do so. I would expect that the same is true of Pakistan’s Taliban or Taliban-esque groups as well, but I’m not as certain of it because I don’t know the situation well enough.

   July 25th, 2008 at 7:31 am
3. 3
   Weldon Berger Says:
   

   Adding … I don’t understand the willingness of some people to dismiss the probability that our lack of troops makes an even remotely palatable military solution extremely unlikely. I don’t know whether or not that includes you. The people who write counterinsurgency and peacekeeping manuals don’t just pluck numbers out of a hat: they base them on a reluctance to lose wars, asymetrical or otherwise, and historical experience of similar operations. If we don’t have the troops, which we don’t, then the military approach is unworkable and we have no choice but to look at other avenues.

   July 25th, 2008 at 7:45 am
4. 4
   JackD Says:
   

   Our memories differ on the relationship between the Taliban and al Queda prior to our invasion of Afghanistan. Zinya and I went around and around about it a bit at the time. It appears (although I don’t pretend to be an expert either) to me that the relationship continues and is akin to the situation with the Pakistani tribesmen on the border. Bryzinski, over at Huffington Post warns against getting bogged down in Afghanistan and suggests buying off the Taliban and the cross border warlords as well as the poppy farmers. Maybe, but that approach didn’t work too well when binLaden escaped at Tora Bora.

   As to troops, we have enough to make a significant impact if they are out of Iraq. Whether or not that’s wise, I am unsure at this point.

   July 25th, 2008 at 10:51 am
5. 5
   Weldon Berger Says:
   

   As you know, I strongly question the extent to which Obama will withdraw troops from Iraq, and even if he does do so, we will still not have enough to accomplish what he apparently hopes to do, which is to rid Afghanistan of Taliban influence.

   Again, the military did not simply make up the formula for successful counterinsurgency and peacekeeping operations, and we do not now and will never have sufficient troops to meet their criteria absent a draft or, roughly, quadrupling the size of the volunteer Army. The reason various senior officers keep mentioning the formula is in the apparently barren hope that someone on the civilian policymaking side, and perhaps some number larger than one among the population at large, will take note of its implications.

   As for impact, well sure: we’re making an impact now and we could expect to make a larger one with a larger presence. Unfortunately it’s a negative impact, and adding more troops who will kill more civilians and turn more survivors against us, breeding more insurgents, seems counterproductive.

   As always, your mileage may vary.

   July 27th, 2008 at 10:59 am
6. 6
   Zinya Says:
   

   I heard my name. Hi Jack. Just now catching up on BTC installments since 7/22…

   While I don’t share all of Weldon’s recent povs (to wit - eek - the fantasy that a McCain term, heaven help us with the SCOTUS from total hell rather than just partial hell, would ever waken this too-benumbed stupor the majority, at least of legislators, would still be in — a position i dare say he — hi Weldon! — writes of with more wit than wits … imho), I do as you rightfully recall (and presumably project here) share his (hi Weldon) pov re Taliban/Al Qaeda/Afghanistan. I had forgotten you, Jack, and I had gone as many rounds on it only because almost everyone took me on (or was it me who took them on?) back in 2001 ff…. grounded in my secondhand knowledge, such as it was/is, via my Afghani friend and would-have-been coauthor — had Bush not launched the war that Oct. 7 am just as we were struggling to finish editing a piece we hoped to publish advocating something quite different. The only real Taliban / Al Qaeda link (at least at that point) was in the person of (granted) their allegedly tumor-ridden, delusional leader Mullah Omar whose family bin Laden had married his own offspring into, plausibly for the most ancient of orchestrated reasons. The Taliban as a whole had other fish to fry and comprised a range of adherencies from moderate to fundamentalist, and well… I won’t rehash the whole argument again unless provoked (and I don’t read you here as provoking :-)

   In short, we don’t know and never did know what we were doing in Afghanistan any more (and perhaps even less) than we knew and know in Iraq. I actually think we — errr, Bush’s war deviners — had quite a bit more awareness of the Iraqi blood feud history between three tribes than we did of the Afghan blood feuds because they only ever really caught US attention at a rare time when they were united against our “Great Game” enemy, the USSR.

   I agree then with Weldon that the only solution is political. It’s utterly inconsistent that Obama thinks otherwise - or at least articulates otherwise (though i can’t go pretzel on this, i.e., will not vote for much less stomach McCain because of this) - given his very reasonable radicalness about sitting at a table with adversaries and a world-class translator to at least hear each other as unfiltered as possible. The internecine feudal tribal realities of Afghanistan which the Taliban were one kind of bandaid over and now Karzai is another kind of bandaid over are beyond the ken of external military forces. To quote Dylan, how many Khyber Passes must a blind man trail?

   I will add one note that to me is symbolic and I know I never noted before. The very name of the country, Afghanistan, taps consciously or unconsciously (for Afghanis) into the root of the quagmire. “Afghan” was the name, originally, that non-Pashtuns gave to the Pashtuns who, as you know, remain a reduced but still decisive majority of the populace of current Afghanistan. The fact that the country’s name is the one derived from how the minority ethnic groups called the majority and that majority (which was getting itself ethnic-cleansed — raped and massacred — by the coalition of minority groups who ruled in post-Soviet, pre-Taliban days) — the Pashtuns — summoned the Taliban (religious students in exile in Pakistan) back to their rescue, which happened via imposition of rigid application of sharia law (e.g., burqas) is the tip of the iceberg for why we are headless in pandora’s box there. Karzai is ethnically Pashtun but a cageyish co-opted guy who was obliged by the West in the Bonn conference in Dec 2001 to entrench the Northern Alliance by making all of his ministers — with much of the real ‘power — be non-Pashtun N.A. warlords and their allies. So the majority of Afghanis (and the original ethnic group named “Afghans”), the Pashtuns, had plenty of reason to see themselves being as collectively co-opted as Karzai was personally. So of course it was only a matter of time before they would be resummoning and/or rewelcoming the Taliban to their rescue.

   But, again, the Taliban is not al Qaeda and we have only ourselves to thank for the extent to which they are in any cahoots in the year 2008.

   August 4th, 2008 at 6:03 am
7. 7
   Zinya Says:
   

   p.s. to Weldon: presumably, hopefully, you know I went for the wit-wits remark only because it was “there” and i fell for it, i.e., to be witty (probably my wit-envy) … not remotely in an ad hominem intent … :-)

   August 4th, 2008 at 6:51 am
8. 8
   JackD Says:
   

   Hi, Zin. Would have replied earlier but have been hiding from the world up near Lake Superior with wife, kids and grandkids and sans computer. I recommend it for those in a position to do it. I would never, of course, intentionally provoke you but I do recall your denial of binLaden’s role in the Taliban government (defense minister) was a little lame. Oh well, that was then and this is now but there is this little problem of binLaden and his circle still functioning there and in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

   August 4th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
9. 9
   Zinya Says:
   

   Gosh, Jack, six hours for an uptake seems downright prompt to me - but glad to hear of your hideout …

   but as to the other hideout matter here, are you sure you’re not conflating conversations? I cannot (maybe a sign I do need a hideout) recall ever having a conversation with anyone about bin Laden being or not being defense minister for the Taliban. But that indeed was then, a long then ago … and now i have a paper to be written all too soon and this was one of those procrastination-digression-writers’ block-thingies … and glad to exchange greetings :-) albeit truncated for the moment …

   August 4th, 2008 at 9:30 pm

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