[Peace-discuss] A clear condemnation of the war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Another Rightist (she's a longtime political reporter for FoxNews.com and a 
contributing editor at The American Conservative, also a Washington 
correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine!) better on the war than most 
liberals. --CGE]

	Best Performance in a Farce
	by Kelley B. Vlahos, December 08, 2009

Within the last 11 months, while 500 coalition soldiers have perished and 
thousands have been wounded on the battlefields of Afghanistan, the Obama 
administration has treated the rest of us to an elaborate, Oscar-worthy 
performance of how to act in charge from the back seat of a car.

In other words, instead of approving the tens of thousands more in 
reinforcements military leaders said they needed to win right away, the 
president spent most of 2009 trying to look deliberative and in charge – and 
pleasing no one. Turns out the escalation was hardwired from the beginning. 
He’ll do what the military wanted all along.

It makes one wonder which is worse – the escalation itself, or leaving the 
operation foundering in virtual limbo for a year while this kabuki theater ran 
its course. They both stink.

The Washington Post figured it out this weekend – sort of – and came to this 
conclusion in Monday’s paper:

"When he finishes testifying on Capitol Hill this week, Gen. Stanley A. 
McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, will return to Kabul 
to implement a war strategy that is largely unchanged after a three-month-long 
White House review of the conflict. …

"[O]ther than a decision not to double immediately the size of Afghanistan’s 
uniformed security forces and the president’s pledge to begin withdrawing forces 
by July 2011, a deadline that has grown less firm since he announced it – 
[Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates said Sunday it might involve only a 
‘handful’ of troops – the new approach does not order McChrystal to wage the war 
in a fundamentally different way from what he outlined in an assessment he sent 
the White House in late August.

“‘Stan’s mission really hasn’t narrowed,’ said a senior Pentagon official 
involved with Afghanistan policy. ‘There won’t be a radical change in the way he 
executes.’”

We should have seen this coming down 7th Avenue like Clifford the Big Red Dog on 
Thanksgiving Day. All the harbingers and signposts were there along the way, 
pointing to an uninterrupted, military-heavy occupation through 2010. We can now 
look back at the verbal roundelays, the leaked reports, the titillating Bob 
Woodward "scoops," the endless strategy "reviews," and the lack of authority on 
the diplomatic front and say, ah… we should have known Obama would cave.

When people declare that "hindsight is 20-20," they usually mean to relieve you, 
themselves, and everyone else from the guilt of being so susceptible to the 
political mugging in the first place. And in the case of Obama, many of us were. 
But let’s face it: if there were more than just bloated gasbags and venal paper 
dolls representing us in Washington today (with a few exceptions), we might have 
been able to "get the hook" to stop this farce before summer vacation.

Instead, we are left at the end of 2009 with a path of poison bread crumbs and 
the Long War spirits of Christmas past, present, and yet to come, shadowy 
companions on the treacherous path of lessons never learned.

So while you’re trying to stomach the inevitable smooching sounds during 
McChrystal’s visit to Congress this week, don’t be fooled by pusillanimous 
Democrats and their suddenly knitted-brows; most of them will rubber-stamp 
anything the military asks for, anyway. Harder to watch will be the bloviating 
Republicans praising McChrystal for his brilliance and sacrifice, or worse, for 
indulging the administration while it "dithered" on the "new" policy.

Remember, it isn’t real, just more Oscar-baiting performances, the success of 
which depends on the gullibility and, of course, passivity of the audience. 
Everything about the so-called "Af-Pak strategy" is a foregone conclusion. Just 
check the program you’ve been grasping in your hand for the last year:

1. The military was "digging in" for the long haul anyway. As Obama was getting 
adjusted to his new digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January, Walter Pincus 
at the Washington Post published an interesting item about the quickened pace of 
building and a flurry of bids going out to contractors for new and expanded Army 
infrastructure. While it was mostly billed as necessary for accommodating the 
existing troop presence and new personnel already pledged, even Pincus said the 
breadth of the projects seemed long-term.

"Massive construction of barracks, training areas, headquarters, warehouses, and 
airfields for use by U.S. and Afghan security forces – which could reach $4 
billion – signals a long-term U.S. military commitment at a time when the 
incoming Obama administration’s policy for the Afghan war is unclear."

In fact, in October, more than a month before Obama announced the 30,000-troop 
escalation, Pincus reported that the Pentagon was asking for another $1.3 
billion – on top of the $2.7 billion already spent in the last three years – "to 
ensure the country’s infrastructure can support American and coalition personnel 
in 2010 and years beyond."

More recently, but still before the president’s "new strategy" was announced, 
Nick Turse cogently described what appear to be the elements of a very long-term 
occupation. Like Pincus, he points to the ever expanding Bagram Air Base:

"To keep up with its exponential growth rate, more than $200 million in 
construction projects are planned or in-progress at this moment on just the Air 
Force section of the base. ‘Seven days a week, concrete trucks rumble along the 
dusty perimeter road of this air base as bulldozers and backhoes reshape the 
rocky earth,’ Chuck Crumbo of The State reported recently. ‘Hundreds of laborers 
slap mortar onto bricks as they build barracks and offices. Four concrete plants 
on the base have operated around the clock for 18 months to keep up with the 
construction needs.’"

But it’s not just Bagram. There are also the Kandahar airfield and the forward 
operating bases (FOBs), the exact number of which nobody knows. Turse nails down 
current contracts for the expansion and new construction of at least eight FOBs. 
Some of these contracts, he reports, aren’t scheduled for completion until at 
least 2011.

"Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy and, if 
you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into 
Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, 
isn’t going to end any time soon," Turse wrote.

2. Diplomacy was handicapped from the start. If there was any early competition 
for the direction of the Afghanistan war – diplomatic or military – that was 
over months ago. The COINdinistas like to patronizingly talk about the "whole of 
government" approach when it’s politically expedient. But again, it’s not real. 
We all know where the bread is buttered these days: defense spending outpaced 
international affairs at the State Department 17 to 1 in 2009, according to 
Lawrence Korb at the Center for American Progress.

Of course Obama & Co. blew in with high hopes, brandishing what they thought was 
a serious diplomatic arsenal, with Hillary Clinton, Dennis Ross, and especially 
Richard "The Bulldozer" Holbrooke at the spear tip. They no doubt envisioned 
long tabletops and colorful shuras, hard-nosed and even feisty negotiations, 
which would all culminate in some photo-ready handshake and a Dayton-like 
accord. So far, crickets. And the "civilian surge?" It has been plagued by low 
recruitment, lack of experience, and again, a shortfall in resources.

So now the military says it is "forced" to take over public diplomacy and to 
dominate the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The burdens are enormous.

3. You and what Army, Obama? For argument’s sake, let’s say the president came 
into office with some vague notion of rethinking the neo-colonial impulses of 
the previous administration. But as reports dating back to the spring indicate, 
Obama’s chances of asserting himself against the Pentagon’s schoolyard bullies 
and their hardwired plans were about as good as Ben Shockley’s odds of getting 
prostitute Gus Mally back to Phoenix alive in The Gauntlet. At least they made 
it. From the looks of things, Obama’s political armor is about as shot up today 
as that inner-city bus Shockley was forced to commandeer – and he is no closer 
to appearing in charge of the war than he was a year ago.

First, he let go of Gen. David McKiernan in a publicly humiliating termination 
that left career military types scratching their heads. He replaced him with 
Gen. Stanley "Zen Man Hunter" McChrystal, a sanctioned disciple of Gen. David 
Petraeus’ COIN doctrine, and promptly set himself into a curiously submissive 
role that lasts to this day.

One could say Obama’s "last throes" of independence came with one of Bob 
Woodward’s tendentious insider chronicles in June, just as 4,000 fresh Marines 
launched a new operation into Helmand province. According to Woodward, James L. 
Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, had traveled to Afghanistan that month 
and warned the generals there not to ask for additional troops. But it didn’t 
take long for Jones to "clarify" his position in deference to "the generals," 
pointed out writer Michael Cohen at DemocracyArsenal.org in July.

Smelling blood, McChrystal’s (unnamed) handlers rushed to tell the the 
Washington Post that the general believed America would "lose the war" if more 
troops weren’t supplied, establishing the military’s dominance over the 
narrative from then on. "If anyone was perhaps operating under the assumption 
that the U.S. role in Afghanistan was going to begin winding down in 18-24 
months – as I once foolishly did – this article should quickly disabuse you of 
that notion," wrote Cohen.

In the meantime, McChrystal’s summertime "review" of the situation in 
Afghanistan, which we know now was written by a coterie of mostly think-tankers, 
largely pro-COIN and sympathetic to the Long War vision, was mysteriously – but 
not surprisingly – leaked to Bob Woodward in September. The report – again, no 
surprises here – called for more troops and more time and resources to train 
Afghan security forces.

This prompted a new chorus by reanimated neoconservatives and their freshly 
fanged comrades in Congress: the still-wet-behind-the-ears-president isn’t 
listening to his generals on the ground.

"Had Petraeus and McChrystal deliberately leaked the Afghan report and 
recommendations under Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, or Reagan, McChrystal would have 
been fired immediately and Petraeus reprimanded, if not also eventually 
relieved," said military analyst retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, critic of the 
Afghan war and author of the recently published Warrior’s Rage, in an e-mail 
exchange with Antiwar.com. "Unfortunately, Obama failed to respond to what was 
an obvious challenge to his authority as commander in chief."

My colleague at The American Conservative Dennis Dale said it best over the 
weekend, when describing the capping moment to a year of struggle, which Obama 
symbolically lost before his audience at West Point:

"Under political duress, the president has accepted the role of conditional, if 
not yet nominal, commander in chief, surrendering an authority he doesn’t want 
and wouldn’t know what to do with anyway. Now he bites his nails and waits, like 
the rest of us."

Like the rest of us watching a horror movie. But at least we know the plot. The 
question is, do we spend the rest of the year and 2010 with our hands covering 
our eyes, afraid to look at the screen – or do we finally take a stand and walk 
out of the theater?

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