Cordesman Announces Death of a Strategy in Afghanistan

by Peter J. Munson

SWJ Blog Post |

CSIS's Anthony Cordesman argues that the strategy embarked upon by Gen Stanley McChrystal is now dead and that the U.S. and its allies must construct and resource a strategy to transition to an Afghan "muddle through" that doesn't greatly jeopardize U.S. interests.  While I'm not sure that there has ever been a strategy in Afghanistan, or how to state it, Cordesman argues that four threats have been killing any such strategy from the beginning. (h/t Nathan Finney)

The key reasons shaping uncertainty as to whether the mission could be accomplished—whether it would be possible to create an Afghanistan that could largely stand on its own and be free of any major enclaves of terrorists or violent extremists—went far beyond the problems created by the insurgents.

It was clear that there were four roughly equal threats to success, of which the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar were only the first. The second was the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government. The third was the role of Pakistan and its tolerance and support of insurgent sanctuaries. The fourth was the United States and its allies.

I highly recommend that you also see Jim Sleeper's "How the Debacle in Afghanistan Disgraced its Cheerleaders" at the Huffington Post, h/t anonymous you know who you are.

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Tags : Afghanistan, COIN, strategy

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by carl | March 1, 2012 - 12:57pm

I don't why you recommended the Huff Post piece. It is mostly a confused "I told you so" using failure in Afghanistan to argue in favor of an American welfare state.

by Peter J. Munson | March 2, 2012 - 5:21am

I recommended it because I knew it would make people squirmy and huffy. You miss the point of the article, or at least the point I got out of it. You huff against an argument in favor of an American welfare state, but the point is that we want to do welfare state shiny happy projects in Afghanistan when we don't do the very same here. What is more, the very people who argue for these projects there are the ones who think they are an anathema here. Conservatives expect these liberal projects to succeed in an incredibly tortured, pre-modern state, but are abhorred by the idea of social programs in their own country. There is a significant element of cognitive dissonance in the policies advocated over the previous decade that makes people uncomfortable and even incapable of reconciling their own views.

by carl | March 2, 2012 - 10:57am

Peter:

Very good point and you present it much more clearly and cogently that the article did. You are right. But maybe it goes even farther than that. There seems to be an advanced case of groupthink inside the beltway. No matter what the basic domestic or general political philosophy people start out with, when they think about Afghanistan or Iraq for the matter, they all end up in the same big centralized state place.

Perhaps a good specific example of that is that here in the US, almost all policing is local or state. We don't do national police and would object strongly if somebody tried to inflict that on us. Yet, that is what we insist the Afghans do in a country with far greater local differences than we have. Good point you made.

I will point out though, Mr. Munson; I don't huff. I merely politely point out what others don't seem to see with the laser sharp clarity that I do. My duty to humanity you see.

by Madhu | March 2, 2012 - 8:13am

And the same people who see the flaw in armed development tend not to see the flaw in other forms of foreign aid in difficult political environments. This one belongs to a lot of people, sadly.

First, triple non-security aid, to $1.5 billion annually. For at least a decade. This aid would be unconditioned: it's our pledge to the Pakistani people. Instead of funding military hardware, it would build schools, clinics, and roads.
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Second, condition security aid on performance. We should base our security aid on clear results. We're now spending well over $1 billion annually, and it's not clear we're getting our money's worth. I'd spend more if we get better returns -- and less if we don't.
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Third, help Pakistan enjoy a "democracy dividend." The first year of democratic rule should bring an additional $1 billion -- above the $1.5 billion non-security aid baseline. And I would tie future non-security aid -- again, above the guaranteed baseline -- to Pakistan's progress in developing democratic institutions and meeting good-governance norms.

Joe Biden, Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-biden/a-new-approach-to-pakista_b_7173...

Couple this with the "surge," (be it Bush/Biden-CT or Obama pop--COIN) and you get the following:

This isn’t Vietnam because, unlike in Vietnam, we are supporting Diem (Karzai), building ARVN (ANA) and at the same time we are financing and arming the DRV (Pakistan), financing the Vietcong (Taliban), paying for the PAVN (Pakistani Army), and pretending that the country which is providing sanctuary to the VC (Pakistan) is our "ally." We have been paying for both sides of the same war at the same time, while getting our own people shot on one side of it. If there is a strategic "most stupid" scenario, that may be it. If it were only as bad as Vietnam, it would be progress.

- commenter "Lexington Green," zenpundit.

Below, I highlighted pre-2008 problems with our "strategy." I would use the word "understanding," really, because decades of the on again/off again (and it was much more on than many people realize, even in the 90s) with Pakistan in that part of the world led to many of our approaches to Afghanistan.

This tells me that President Obama, Secretary Gates, and Gen. Petraeus are as serious as a heart attack about a shift in strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was ruthless, and they were not about to do the George Casey thing whereby a commander is left in the theater long after he is considered to have grown ineffective.
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The sad truth of the matter is that people have been calling for McKiernan's head for some time now. Many of the people with whom I have spoken do not think that McKiernan "gets" the war in Afghanistan -- or counterinsurgency warfare in general. There was very little confidence that -- with McKiernan in charge in Afghanistan -- we the United States had the varsity squad on the field.

- Abu Muqawama

http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/12/mckiernan_out_mcchryst...

The big official secret of the NRO deal, brokered by the United States between then President Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, has been revealed in full detail by its sponsor, the former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in her memoirs published here.
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She admits everything and reveals all. In graphic detail, Condi has disclosed in her book, “No Higher Honor”, how she toiled for many sleepless nights to bring Musharraf and Benazir together in 2007.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=10996&Cat=13#

For young people and students reading, to understand the West and its many errors in "South Asia," a person needs to go back to the beginning. The very beginning. 1947. And by that I mean the US picking up the British mantle and its attitudes and building on them during the Cold War. Plus, please don't believe the deluded souls who say, "if only we in the West had prioritized Kashmir," because that's part of how we got here in the first place. Immigrant lobbies gaming UK and US academics and their hubris at thinking we can solve things.

I think that's what happened, anyway. I'd love to see a proper study. Nice discussion. The links worked for that, I guess :)

by Madhu | February 29, 2012 - 10:33am

A link to the 2009 "Afpak" white paper which laid out our current strategy. Who was involved in crafting this white paper and the subsequent strategies? It wasn't just McChrystal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/politics/27text-whitepaper.html?pag...

Hillary Clinton is regularly briefed on all of these policy areas -- and contributes at the Principals meeting to the policy discussion. The envoys brief Clinton as does Deputy Secretary of State for Policy James Steinberg - who is constantly coordinating and working well with the National Security Council's Deputy Tom Donilon.
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Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton hosted a small dinner of Iran experts organized by Policy Planning Staff Director Anne-Marie Slaughter. Richard Holbrooke, Dennis Ross, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns participated in the dinner with a number of outside experts who were queried by Clinton and others in what was essentially a roundtable briefing for the Secretary. Slaughter has done a number of such briefing dinners, including one on Afghanistan/Pakistan.

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/09/hillary_clinton_14/

I've got a million of these folks, and they include quotes from Bush administration officials, Clinton administration officials, Obama administration officials, think tankers and bloggers, right, left, up, down, you name it.

This isn't conspiracy. It's an intellectual misunderstanding of gigantic--almost delusional-- proportions. As blogger Pundita once wrote (paraphrasing), the Cold War ended and we woke up to a world that didn't look anything like our old narratives. And this includes everyone, progressives, conservatives, civilian and military alike.

Let's not get this forensic intellectual study wrong. It's too important to relegate to the normal election year nonsense.

You might want to look into the archives of your own journal and to what former contributors wrote, to include Abu Muqawama.

I wish no one any harm. I respect different points of view. I'm not out to demonize anyone. This one belongs to a lot of people, including my own immigrant community that never really learned how to talk to people outside of it, and to communicate what we thought we knew about SA.

by Madhu | February 29, 2012 - 10:34am

I find the Huffington Post article incomplete, frankly.

The "cheerleaders," were many and don't fit neatly into domestic political categories. The cheerleaders included the American public. Remember Dexter Filkins book "The Forgotten War," and the political rhetoric around 2008? Let's not talk cheerleading, let's talk crafters of policy and strategy; policies based on decades of thinking about the South Asian periphery of the Cold War.

Every shibboleth of American foreign policy resulted in the confused approach. To make it easier to read, I'll blockquote my OWN thinking:

1. Old Cold War blocs including NATO and our Saudi-Pakistan alliance against Iran (one reason among many we continued to cultivate the military dictatorship of Musharraf, even when we knew that Al Q's Taliban hosts were a creation of Pakistan's government).
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2. The Bush administration's Cold War "habit as policy." We had always worked with Islamabad and Rawalpindi in that part of the world. We assumed if we paid enough, they would do our job and we could invade Iraq. It's not a surprise given that many in the Bush administration, to include Sec. Gates, were formerly members of the Nixon administration.
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3. The continued ignoring of Saudi Arabia's role in 9-11, even as we cultivate Qatar as a "baby" Saudi.
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4. Western modernization and developmental theory leading to pop-COIN.
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5. 90s neomercantalism as strategy and policy.
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6. Centcom's desire to have its old South Asian military relationships back?
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7. The Obama administration's desire to have good relations with "the Muslim" world, as if such a large and complicated world could be understood with childish and patronizing theorizing. We are not talking children, here, but adults.
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8. A think tank and PhD community that had never questioned its own status quo thinking about Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the prominent defense sales lobby, to include other DC institutions hungering for more funding, include Pakistan and Afghanistan program funds.

....and so forth. On this subject, I am confident because that has been my study around here. I haven't been studying Afghanistan. I've been studying "you," to include the foreign policy establishment of DC.

by Ken White | February 28, 2012 - 10:32pm

Cordesman is saying the same thing many of us were saying almost precisely nine years ago. Good to know that an adviser of one sort or another that helped develop or certainly aided in the development of the so-called 'strategy' has realized that it was an error. As I recall, his trip to support the McChrystal review resulted in his announcing on return to CONUS that many more Troops were needed. Heh, aside from the fact that none were available, he seems to now realize that had they been it would have made little difference.

He writes:

"It was clear that there were four roughly equal threats to success, of which the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar were only the first. The second was the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government. The third was the role of Pakistan and its tolerance and support of insurgent sanctuaries. The fourth was the United States and its allies."

He then amplifies this and again makes the "more troops" plea but I submit he has the threats in the wrong order. In the first place, the US and its allies believing they could affect Afghan culture and 'fix the problems' was the greatest error and thus threat to to the endeavor. Conceit is a terrible thing...

Conceit is also a curious thing. I do not disagree with Peter J. Munson's linked article by one Jim Sleeper "How the Debacle in Aghanistan Disgraced its Cheerleaders." Sleeper is correct and it did disgrace them -- and all of us. However, he wrote:

"The biggest obstacle was the delusion that Americans could do for Kabul and Kunduz what we refuse to do for New Orleans or Detroit."

Fascinating conceit that. Anyone who believes that we have the capability to do 'something' about Detroit and / or New Orleans is in fantasy land. We do not. No more than we had or have the capability to do something about Afghanistan. We, the US, have been trying in one way or another to do 'something' about those cities and others for years. Better focus, more people or more money won't fix those either...

The problem is not Cheerleaders of any ideological or 'strategic' persuasion but Cheerleaders generally. They do little but make a lot of noise. Usually noise that has little to no effect on events transpiring on or in the field yet noise that spurs the unthinking on to repeat failed efforts again and again. Cheerleaders want to 'win' yet have no clue about the realities of the situations they wish to affect -- or the sweaty, dirty players or people for whom they are nominally cheering. Most do not really even know the rules of the game -- and it shows.

Cheerleaders sell self esteem. What's needed is self confidence as that leads to effective self analysis.

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