[Peace-discuss] Why are we in AfPak?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following is by a retired navy officer, Jeff Huber. Despite the rather 
forced breeziness of his style, he manages I think to point out some of the 
apparent contradictions of the US position in Afghanistan.  Given that US 
policy-makers aren't idiots, what accounts for their insistence on killing 
people in AfPak?  The explanation given by Obama (and apparently received 
without much reaction in the US) -- that we're "fighting terrorism" -- is 
contemptible. --CGE]


	Friday, May 15, 2009
	Fort Palooka

The recent announcement of General Mark McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort 
Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary 
Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely 
reflected a need for “fresh thinking,” but even the war mongrels on the rabid 
right can see it was a stratagem to make McKiernan the fall guy for all the 
collateral damage caused by the air strikes that President Obama authorized.

Ironically, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, McKiernan’s replacement, has 
a proven record of executing just the kinds of strikes McKiernan got fired for. 
On top of that, Obama still intends to send the 30,000 additional troops to 
Afghanistan that McKiernan requested for no apparent reason. (When Obama asked 
him how he’d use the extra troops, McKiernan made the sound of sandbags forming 
a levee.)

So we’re on track to escalate a war for which the administration admits there is 
no military solution and continuing to employ attrition tactics that make more 
new bad guys than they attrite. It's enough to make Clausewitz claw at his 
coffin lid.

Here’s how you’re supposed to plan and execute a military strategy. You look at 
a situation and you decide what kind of political end state you want to achieve. 
Then you decide if you can formulate a feasible military objective that can 
accomplish the policy aim. Next you determine the adversary’s center of gravity, 
which is the thing (or collection of things) he can use to thwart your military 
plan, and the thing you have to defeat. Only when you’ve done those things do 
you begin to calculate how many troops you need to accomplish the mission, and 
after that you start working details like logistics.

But with our Bananastan strategy, we started with logistics and worked our way 
backwards. In January 2009, the Washington Post reported that the Army was 
already building $1.1 billion worth of Fort Palookas in Afghanistan to 
accommodate additional troops, and planned to begin spending an additional $1.3 
billion on construction in 2010. That money started queuing up at the hopper 
well before McKiernan’s request for 30,000 additional troops became public. It’s 
a cherished military stratagem: throw bad seed money at whatever hooliganism you 
want; then Congress has to throw good money after it or be labeled as “weak on 
national security.”

Gates’s bull feather merchants had been making a show of working on a Bananastan 
strategy when they decided to let the stink roll uphill for a change. As the 
Post reported, they began “looking for Obama to resolve critical internal 
debates.” That’s a traditional military leadership technique known in the 
trenches as “the buck stops there.”

The White House national security team—laughably described by Robert Dreyfus in 
a recent Rolling Stone article as “Obama’s chess masters”—unveiled a white paper 
describing its new Bananastan strategy in late March. National Security Adviser 
James Jones and the rest of the chess club based their plan on “realistic and 
achievable” objectives that are fantastic and unattainable. We cannot, as they 
suggest, make stable governments in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “Increasingly 
self-reliant Afghan security forces” is a pipe dream that, even if it comes 
true, would simply give us one more armed outfit in the region that we can’t 
control. Their initiative for “involving the international community” makes one 
wonder if they’ve been paying attention at all. To hear Gates tell it, 
everything that’s gone wrong in the Bananastans is NATO’s fault, so why would we 
want more international involvement?

The most delusional aspect of the new strategy is its “core goal,” which is to 
“disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens.” Modern terrorists 
need safe havens like dolphins need power tools. The only sanctuary they need to 
plan and coordinate their operations is a pocket large enough to conceal an iPhone.

The white paper makes no mention of centers of gravity, critical strengths and 
vulnerabilities, measures of effectiveness, decisive points, courses of action, 
lines of operations, or any other term that belongs in a proper strategy 
involving military action. It contains a host of trendy platitudes about a “new 
way of thinking” and “building a clear consensus.” The paper even has talk of 
bringing non-military forms of power to bear, as if that’s something new. 
Information, diplomacy and economy were key elements of warfare long before 
Thucydides and Sun Tsu wrote on the subject around 400 BCE. And make no mistake; 
when a foreign policy action involves shooting people and blowing things up, 
it’s not “economic assistance” or “education and training.” It’s “war.”

When a strategy’s aphorisms morph into non-sequiturs, you know none of the think 
tankers involved with the project was doing any thinking, new or otherwise. “A 
strategic communications program must be created, made more effective, and 
resourced,” the chess set tells us in its white paper. I wonder which they’ll do 
first: create the program or make it more effective.

I’ve said before that in order to put an end to the American security state, 
Obama needs to order every military officer from the full bird level up to 
retire. It is now clear that he also needs to purge the defense apparatus of its 
thundering flock of foreign policy wonks. It may be that the generals and tank 
thinkers driving our ship of state will drop dead from brain hemorrhage before 
they make America the latest superpower to embalm itself in Afghanistan, but 
don't count on it.

I doubt if Obama will do what needs to be done. Look on the bright side, though. 
Athens produced most of the art and philosophy that defined western civilization 
only after it lost its wars with Persia and Sparta, so maybe America can still 
become Ronald Reagan's "shining city upon a hill.”

If we do, we’ll need a new generation of strategists who know that it’s better 
to charge down a hill than up one.

http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/