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Afghanistan Journal (PoliticsDaily.com)

October 1, 2009

Obama's War: Take Your Time

By David Wood

Out on Afghanistan's dusty battlefields, the war is so complicated that some of America's most hardened,
experienced counterinsurgency warriors are stymied and frustrated. Frustrated that they don't have the right
tools or enough manpower or, most of all, enough time. Frustrated at the difficulty of grappling with IEDs,
corrupt Afghan officials and contractors, and a sullen and skeptical population. Frustrated that their troops
don't speak the local language or understand the local culture. Frustrated at trying to manage battles without
harming civilians, and struggling to coax signs of life from a flat-lined economy and an inept and sometimes
venal government.

One brigade commander, Col. Michael Howard, is on his fourth tour in Afghanistan and understands it like
few others. Still, there are pieces of this war that stop him cold. One of them is government corruption. "It's a
cancer without a cure in Afghanistan, and if we don't come up with a cure, it will cause us to fail,'' Howard
told me last month, biting off his words angrily.

A battalion commander in eastern Afghanistan, also fed up with the war's complexity, confessed: "Sometimes
you just want a good, old-fashioned firefight to settle this whole damn thing.''

But if the Afghan war looks maddeningly complex from a battalion or brigade tactical operations center, try it
from the White House, as President Obama and his top national security advisers gathered to do Wednesday
afternoon in the first of five war-strategy sessions.

Even as criticism mounted that this "strategic review'' is taking too long, the officials sitting around the
Situation Room conference table were confronting what may be the most complicated conflict the United
States has ever become engaged in. Consider these brain-stunners, drawn from the views of senior
commanders and national security officials:

--The war cannot be won with military force alone. Yet, military force is virtually the only tool available to
the commander in chief.

--The war can't be won by the United States and its allies; it must be won by Afghans themselves and,
specifically, by their government and security forces. Yet, they are demonstrably unable to do so.

--Time is quickly running out, as the patience of Americans, Europeans and Afghans themselves wears thin.
Yet, if there are strategies and tactics that will win the war, they each require years to take effect.

--Even to establish a holding pattern, to arrest the insurgent gains, will require tens of thousands of additional
U.S. troops. Yet, manpower is the one resource that Americans and Europeans are most (and increasingly)
reluctant to provide.

--If something isn't done soon, the United States could lose.

--'Losing' would mean not only abandoning the American goal of preventing further attacks from the region
on the United States, but more important, could accelerate the destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan next
door.

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So, it is not simply a matter of deciding whether or not to approve the request for 40,000 more troops,
forwarded to the Pentagon two weeks ago by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan.
McChrystal himself emphasized that point in the strategic assessment he forwarded to Washington last month:
"Additional resources are required,'' he wrote, "but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the
point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our
strategy and the way that we think and operate.''

Or as Obama explained it two weeks ago: "My determination is to get this right ... And I'm going to take a
very deliberate process in making those decisions ... one of the things that I'm absolutely clear about is you
have to get the strategy right and then make determinations about resources. You don't make determinations
about resources, and certainly you don't make determinations about sending young men and women into
battle, without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.''

On Wednesday evening, Obama sent National Security Adviser James Jones, a retired Marine four-star
general, to brief the Senate, the start of what Obama promised would be "regular consultation sessions'' with
Congress.

The "deliberative'' strategy review, which the White House said would take "several weeks,'' has been
complicated by the hard-to-miss corruption in last month's Afghan elections, widely viewed as stolen by
President Hamid Karzai. It's not that the voting "irregularities" were a surprise, said a U.S. official involved in
the issue, but that they highlighted what McChrystal believes are two principal enemies in Afghanistan: the
spreading insurgency and the fast-eroding confidence of the Afghan public it its government and, by
association, in the United States and its allies. This "crisis," McChrystal wrote, springs from non-performing
national government ministries and district offices, "the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and
power-brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a longstanding lack of economic
opportunity.''

By contrast, Taliban insurgents have a reputation of intolerance of corruption and for swift, brutal justice.
Many local Taliban shadow governments include panels to weigh citizen complaints against Taliban officials.
The United States must do at least as well to protect the Afghan people from the scourge of their own
government, as well as protecting them from insurgent attacks and intimidation.

Clearly, most of these problems cannot be solved with military force. "Our conventional warfare culture is
part of the problem,'' McChrystal acknowledged to the White House. Despite years of experience in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military hasn't mastered counterinsurgency, and the "surge'' of American
civilian experts to help train police, farmers and government officials hasn't fully materialized.

That leaves field commanders scrambling to fill the gaps. At Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern
Afghanistan, Col. Howard made sure I noticed that in his top-secret daily briefings, two civilians sit with him
as joint commanders of the fight: a State Department diplomat and an official of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. "They don't just sit there – they are in charge of things and make decisions,'' Howard told me last
month.

But his frustration was clear. "Protecting the population – it's easy to throw that term around but it's hard to
turn it into an operation,'' Howard told me. "Does it mean putting all the people in a corral and putting soldiers
around them? No. It means doing a lot of things we've been doing already: going after people planting IEDs,
disrupting infiltration routes across the border from Pakistan, partnering with police so they can secure the
streets, working with the governors so they make good decisions ... all that's protecting the population. It's
almost a mentality versus a single operation.''

Yet Howard lacks the manpower and other resources to do that quickly enough to arrest the downward slide.
"Are we getting there? Yes. Are we getting there fast enough? No, I don't think we are,'' he said.

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There are, of course, reports of friction between senior military officers eager to get moving with a new
strategy and more resources, and civilian policymakers who insist on more meetings. McChrystal is conveying
a real sense of urgency. "Real progress must be demonstrated in the near future,'' he told the White House.

But at least one insider contends the issues are being fought out professionally. "Both sides are respectful of
the other and interacting with each other,'' insists Steven Biddle, who served this summer on McChrystal's
strategic reassessment team in Afghanistan and remains engaged in the strategic review process. "But at the
end of the day the civilians have the legal responsibility, not just the right, to make decisions and to be held
accountable for the results.''

Given the stakes, Biddle said, "it is appropriate for the commander in chief to be aggressively challenging
what he's told by anybody.''

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