It is the most fateful decision of Barack Obama’s presidency, and the most consequential foreign policy question America faces.
Whether President Obama should escalate the US troop presence in Afghanistan is coming to a head this week on the eight-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.
And it is all playing out behind closed doors in the White House and the Pentagon and in the cool, air-conditioned offices behind razor wire in the U.S. Embassy compound in Kabul.
The choreography of power is under way with General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of forces in Afghanistan, entering the stage through a leaked memo and President Obama in the wings agonizing in indecision as he tries to formulate a policy.
The stuff of great tragedy.
McChrystal’s obvious lobbying in favor of a US troop increase of 40,000 over and above the 68,000 in country already has tested the patience of the Obama White House.
A speech McChrystal delivered in London earlier this week has raised many eye brows in the military-intelligence community and prompted Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration to suggest he broke the chain of command as an officer.
In the speech, McChrystal clearly tried to advance a position calling for more troops which contradicts the views of Vice President Joe Biden who favors a more modest troop presence and stepped up drone attacks.
I have been wondering for at least six months why CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus has been so conspicuously silent in this debate and why he has let McChrystal run roughshod.
And know we know the answer: General Petraeus has been undergoing radiation treatment for cancer. A statement by the military says he learned he had early-stage prostate cancer in February and for the last two months has been in treatment.
This might help to explain the chaos that has been enveloping the Obama administration’s military strategy in Afghanistan. Sometimes one man can make a difference and in the several opportunities I have had to interview General Petraeus I come away with the distinct impression that he is a game changer. He is the best mind on counter-insurgency in the American military, and we just haven’t heard much from him.
But the military insist that his doctors caught the cancer early and that the treatments have not significantly impacted his work schedule.
So perhaps the confusion runs deep in the White House as the administration scrambles to craft a coherent policy and a clear mission.
If the president were seeking advice – as if he doesn’t have enough already – there is an important consensus emerging among the counter-insurgency experts I know, including Andrew Bacevich, the Boston University professor of history and international relations. He is also a West Point graduate, a retired Army Colonel and his son, also named Andrew, was killed in action in Iraq. He speaks with the kind of authority that is shaped by experience and by loss.
Bacevich, who is widely respected for his insights on military strategy and who has been a persistent critic of the so-called “Bush doctrine,” is among those who believe a troop build up is ill-conceived and perilous, and that the continuing confusion about the mission in Afghanistan will prove disastrous for America and its allies.
The consensus is this: less is more.
There are already 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan and they need more training in the tactics of counter insurgency. They need to hit the books and study the field manual that Petraeus worked so hard to research and codify and which provides the playbook for counter-insurgency strategy in the post 9-11 era. Okay, it’s true the manual calls for troop ratios that would require a massive influx of US soldiers into Afghanistan. But even if McChrystal’s plan were put in place those ratios would still far off. So let’s put that argument aside.
The troops need to be taught much more about the culture and the politics and the religion of the people in the country where they are serving. That kind of education will make them more effective.
That’s what I learned this summer at the US military’s excellent counter-insurgency training center at a forward operating base outside Kabul. You can check that out in our special report on Afghanistan titled “Life, Death and the Taliban.”
An escalation of troops – more troops who don’t know enough about where they are – could potentially work against the US in Afghanistan by further alienating the local population rather than providing it more security. More troops can lose hearts and minds, if their mission is unclear and they are clumsy in carrying out counter-insurgency.
Similarly, the hydrant blast of US funding for development and military aid that is pouring into Afghanistan in the billions of dollars is also fraught with peril.
On face value, it would seem that giving the Afghans more and more money to create an infrastructure and build the institutions of governance that they will need could only serve to help a country that has been a basket case for so long, right?
Well, not all think so. Including some, like Andrew Wilder, who have spent a lifetime in third world development particularly in countries of conflict. Wilder has spent many years along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and speaks with great knowledge from the field.
“There is actually remarkably little evidence that aid has a stabilizing impact. Some argue that it has a destabilizing impact,” explained Wilder, who is now director of research at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University.
Wilder was commenting on a developing body of work on aid in Afghanistan by our Kabul correspondent Jean MacKenzie.
“The big contracts become faceless and open to corruption. We need to spend money in smaller amounts and in the right places where we have oversight capacity … We all bemoan corruption, but we don’t look at how we contribute to corruption by funneling aid in ways that are reckless and counter-productive,” said Wilder.
Her stories, which began in our special report “Life, Death and the Taliban,” document how the contracting process in Afghanistan is being manipulated by the Taliban and providing the insurgency with an estimated tens of millions of dollars in funding.
As MacKenzie has uncovered, the Taliban is shaking down Afghan subcontractors on huge US aid development projects and military procurement contracts through what amounts to a protection racket. Either you pay, or the people working on the project are in peril.
So what can be done about that aid going to the Taliban? The contracts should be smaller and better coordinated with a larger number of accountants and project managers keeping their eyes on where the money is going.
In other words, once again, less is more.
Back on October 7, 2001 when the US-led air strikes began. I was there among a group of correspondents who were in the country to cover the US retaliation for the September 11 attacks.
It was eight years ago, not that long really. But it’s still hard to remember just how traumatized America was back then, how scary it was to be on the frontlines with the Taliban still in power and Al Qaeda fighters literally arrayed on hillsides across the valley from us speaking in Arabic on two-way radios.
We all knew then, this would be a very long war.
But I don’t think any of us realized that eight years later America would be pondering an escalation of the conflict, or that the Taliban would be resurgent and in many areas taking control.
Back then an Afghan military commander who we had gotten to know said to me, “Welcome to the Great Game,” referring to the British empire’s long and ill-fated adventures in Afghanistan.
I wonder why our military leaders don’t simply look around in Afghanistan at the graveyards of empires past and realize that it is time to clarify the mission, assign the appropriate troop levels to carry it out and prepare as quickly as possible to leave the country in the hands of the Afghan people.
GroundTruth is written by Charles Sennott, the Executive Editor and co-founder of GlobalPost. The blog is a way for GlobalPost to let you know what our correspondents all over the world are covering every day. It is a place where Sennott highlights the best work in the field by a stellar team of correspondents . 