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Obama's Afghanistan Surge Misdirected
Calling it "Obama's Surge" is actually misdirected.Excerpted from Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan The day after he arrived in Kabul in June 2009, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, gathered his senior officers to discuss the state of the war. The metrics were grim, the conclusion obvious: The Americans and their NATO allies were losing. The part of the country that concerned McChrystal most was the city of Kandahar and the eponymous province that encompasses it. Founded by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., Kandahar city has long been the symbolic homeland of ethnic Pashtuns. In the 1990s, just as every other band of conquerors had done for the past thousand years, the Taliban used it as a springboard from which they captured Kabul and much of the rest of the nation. If the Americans were going to retake Afghanistan, they needed to start with Kandahar. The author's conclusion. But why couldn't Kandahar be the last province retaken? But the Pentagon had not sent most of the new U.S. forces that had arrived in Afghanistan to Kandahar. The first wave -- a Marine brigade comprising more than half of the 17,000 additional troops President Obama authorized in February 2009 -- had been dispatched to neighboring Helmand province, which McChrystal and his top advisers considered of far lower strategic significance. "Can someone tell me why the Marines were sent to Helmand?" the incredulous McChrystal asked his officers. Because that was a better place to start? The answer -- not fully known at the time to McChrystal and his officers -- would reveal the dysfunction of the U.S. war effort: a reliance on understaffed NATO partners for crucial intelligence, a misjudgment of Helmand's importance to Afghanistan's security, and tribal politics within the Pentagon that led the Marines to insist on confining themselves to a far less important patch of desert. As Obama battles for reelection, White House aides have sought to depict the president as an engaged and decisive leader on national security matters. But the Helmand deployment also exposes the limits of his understanding of Afghanistan -- and his unwillingness to confront the military -- early in his presidency. Just weeks after Obama took office in 2009, Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged him to approve the 17,000-troop increase before the new White House had finished a review of war strategy. Mullen said the additional forces were needed to secure the country in advance of Afghanistan's presidential elections that August. But White House officials never pressed the Pentagon for details about where the new troops -- the first major military deployment of Obama's presidency -- were heading. If they had received them, they would have learned that more than half of the forces were heading to a part of the country that was home to about 1 percent of its population. Maybe Champ was too busy figuring out how he could spin the surge. When McChrystal presented his troop request to Obama's war cabinet -- he spoke via a secure video link from Kabul to participants in the White House Situation Room -- he displayed a map of Afghanistan dotted with blue bubbles that indicated where he intended to place the new forces. Several bubbles were in Helmand. But in more than two hours of discussion, the 14-member war cabinet -- which included Vice President Biden, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton -- never asked McChrystal why he wanted so many more Marines in Helmand. The civilians didn't know enough about Afghanistan to focus on that issue. They were also concerned about micromanaging the war, of looking like President Lyndon B. Johnson picking bombing targets in North Vietnam. Besides, if the military fell flat on its face, Obama was not to blame, was he? Nicholson insisted that the Marines could be used more effectively in Helmand for three other reasons: It was the epicenter of poppy production, the Taliban were conducting more attacks there, and Afghan officials had told commanders that foreign troops should stay out of Kandahar city, given its religious significance. But Exum thought the new troops should be closer to the largest population center in the south, not where violence was worst. The drug argument similarly made no sense to him, because Richard C. Holbrooke, the State Department's point man for Afghanistan, had just announced that to avoid antagonizing farmers, the United States would no longer participate in the eradication of poppy fields. A CIA study also claimed that the Taliban got most of its money from illegal taxation and contributions from Pakistan and Persian Gulf nations, not from drugs. More Monday-morning quarterbacking at the link. Remember, it's an except from a book. Posted by: Bobby 2012-06-24 |
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