No Guts, No Glory
| by Franklin C. Spinney
( January 1, 2012, Washington DC, Sri Lanka
Guardian) One of the most pressing problems facing the incoming Secretary of
Defense is posed by our denouement in Afghanistan. For reasons explained by Paul Sperry in an
excellent 30 December op-ed in the New York Post, extricating ourselves from
this quagmire is now taking on dangerous overtones, and the need to leave may
be approaching at warp speed. The
implications for the nature of the American withdrawal may be ominous, but they
should not be unexpected. It is now
virtually certain that managing a coherent withdrawal will present a major
challenge for the incoming defense secretary.
President Obama’s 2009 surge strategy for what he
and Democrats liked to portray as the “good war” in Afghanistan was premised
upon the assumption that the US could quickly build up and train large Afghan
National Security Forces (ANSF), including army and police forces. Obama and the Pentagon sold this
counterinsurgency strategy to the American people by promising a surge in
American forces would quickly weaken the Taliban. The emasculation of the Taliban would permit
a rapid expansion of the Afghan security zones controlled by the Kabul government,
while the rapid build up of the ANSF would stabilize and grow these zones even
further, and thereby set the stage for a quick exit of US combat forces
beginning eighteen months from the date of the surge.
Despite its central premise of quickly building up
an effective ANSF, the surge-based counterinsurgency plan produced by the
Afghan theater commander General Stanley McChrystal did not provide a realistic
analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing Afghan army and police
forces. Yet these forces were the
foundation for the both the expansion and the promised sequence of developments
that would enable our quick withdrawal.
McChrystal’s grotesque oversight became obvious well
before the plan’s approval, when his plan was leaked in the early fall of 2009
(as I explained here). The limitations
of this plan were again brought dramatically to the President’s attention by
Ambassador Eikenberry in cables that were leaked immediately before the plan’s approval
in January 2010 (summarized here).
Nevertheless, the President pressed on and approved the fatally flawed
plan after an agonizing public debate during the fall and winter of 2009-10.
General McChrystal’s omission was both logically and
empirically unforgivable, especially given (1) the contemporaneously emerging
awareness of the counterproductive strategic effects of President Bush’s surge
in Iraq, (2) the Soviet’s clear failure to build up an effective Afghan army in
the 1980s as part of its exit strategy and (3) our own spectacular failure to
build up an effective South Vietnamese army (i.e., Vietnamization), which was a
central premise of President Nixon’s Vietnam exit strategy.
While hardly unique in its content, Sperry’s op-ed
piece provides an excellent summary of how the easily foreseeable consequences
of McChrystal’s oversight are now rapidly coming to a head. The problem is not
just a strategic one of extracting our forces with dignity; nor is it a
political one of fingering who is to blame, although there is plenty of blame to
go around. It stems from deep institutional roots that reveal a need for reform
in our military bureaucracies and particularly our leadership selection
policies.
That is because the next Secretary of Defense must
deal with the consequences of a strategic oversight that was made by and
approved at the highest professional levels of the American military
establishment — a plan which it then imposed on its weak and insecure political
leaders. This suggests a question: Will
the new defense secretary succumb to business as usual by sweeping the
dysfunctional institutional causes of the Afghan debacle under the rug or have
the courage and wisdom to use this sorry affair as a reason to clean out the
Pentagon’s Augean Stables?
If past is prologue, the former is far more probable
than the latter. The Vietnam catastrophe
resulted cosmetic reforms, the most lasting of which dealt with improving the
military’s capacity to manipulate press coverage to preserve its institutional
prerogatives — a capability that became apparent in the First Iraq War, Kosovo,
the Second Iraq War, and initially in Afghanistan, and the press’s fawning
coverage of these wars.
But managing the Afghan denouement is not even the largest challenge facing the
new defense secretary.
A far more significant challenge will be posed by
the need to sort out the programmatic chaos in the Pentagon’s hugely bloated
defense budget, which, while not unrelated to the Afghan debacle, is caused
primarily by out-of-control institutional prerogatives and bureaucratic game
playing. Notwithstanding its bloat, the
current defense budget plan cannot modernize the military’s weapons inventories on a timely
basis; nor can it insure our shrinking, aging equipment will be maintained in a
state of combat readiness, while providing sufficient funds for training
troops. Most importantly, the Pentagon’s
accounting systems are a shambles. The
Pentagon’s budget and program planning books they can even pass the most basic
constitutional requirements for accountability, much less provide the
management information needed to fix the aforementioned modernization, force
structure, and readiness problems.
As I explained here and here, these dysfunctional
problems are connected and have deep behavioral roots. Fixing these problems will require
harmonizing and reigning in the disparate factions making up the dysfunctional
political-economy of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — the
heretofore intractable problem President Eisenhower first warned America about
in his farewell address in January 1961 (note: the reference to Congress was
included in the first draft of his speech but subsequently dropped).
What I find depressing is that not one of these
pressing issues has been the subject of speculations about the choice of a new
defense secretary. Au contraire, the
press has been obsessed with the lobbying concerns of the discredited neocons
on the right who helped to create Afghan and Iraqi messes, proponents of
continuing American empire in the middle (who are now promoting our
intervention in Syria and the budget busting pivot to the Pacific), and gender
balancers on the left.
Perhaps such divagations of the public mind are a
necessary diversion. After all, reigning in the out of control defense program
has been declared a non problem by placing it off limits in the hypocritical
fiscal cliff negotiations, where the President has chosen put social security
payments on the block, even though social security is fully funded by its own
earmarked payroll deduction tax (President Obama proposed cutting payments by
adopting the chained consumer price index to lower the future inflation
adjustments to these payments).
The bottom line, Mr./Ms. Incoming Secretary: SNAFU
in Versailles on the Potomac raises the question: Do you want to be part of the
problem … or part of a solution?
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military
analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the
Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He be reached at
chuck_spinney@mac.com
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