"Escalation in Afghanistan could do to Obama what the same thing in Vietnam did to Johnson (just substitute health care and energy legislation for the Great Society). That's the Vietnam analogy people in the Administration keep coming back to. I've long thought that Obama was more like J.F.K.: rational, coldly objective in the heat of events, unlikely to allow his advisers and his ego to destroy his Presidency by getting the country deeper into a war he never felt fully committed to. Obama has Kennedy's confidence in his own judgment, which Johnson tragically lacked. Gordon Goldstein's very good book "Lessons in Disaster," about McGeorge Bundy-national security adviser to both J.F.K. and L.B.J.-pretty much proves that Kennedy, if he'd lived, would not have committed ground troops to Vietnam at the start of his second term. After the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy stopped trusting his military advisers, and went on to overrule them during the Cuban missile crisis and, again and again, on Vietnam. Perhaps this is Obama's J.F.K. moment. We'll know in a few weeks. And if so, perhaps he would be right." Journalist George Packer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo.
George Packer writes: Reading the McChrystal Report on Afghanistan
September 23, 2009
Reading the McChrystal Report
It's not the Pentagon Papers. After all the noise and controversy, the assessment of the war in Afghanistan by General Stanley McChrystal that was leaked to the Post's Bob Woodward turns out to be a singularly unsurprising document. Its emphasis isn't on more troops (which is what all the discussion in Washington inevitably comes down to) but on a better approach to counterinsurgency. It's a distillation of all the recent discoveries and rediscoveries made by the military under General Petraeus, with the advice of experts like David Kilcullen. As I wrote in my new piece on Richard Holbrooke, these insights are now the lingua franca of the combat units in Afghanistan: make the population the center of effort, focus on politics and information at least as much as fighting, risk your own security more now in order to reduce the risk later. The only surprise is the impressiveness of McChrystal's analysis. I was wrong in May when I questioned the appointment of a special-operations man to run this war. McChrystal's report is written in plain English, it's self-critical, and it shows more understanding of the nature of the fight in Afghanistan than most journalism and academic work. The U.S. military now believes that the Afghan government is just as much a threat to success as the Taliban. That's a bold conclusion, one that our civilians have not been willing to reach, publicly at least. And the description of the different Taliban networks is as clarifying as it is disturbing.
So this is what the general whom Obama rushed into the field earlier this year has to tell his commander-in-chief: it will take time, it will take more resources, we will have to get smarter. Again, no surprise. The policy McChrystal is working within was set in March, by the President himself, and it called for a renewed counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in order to "dismantle," "disrupt," and "defeat" Al Qaeda. Obama's strategy-review team didn't want to go looking to get America deeper into the mess in Afghanistan-they looked at all the alternatives and decided that the narrower approaches wouldn't work against an Al Qaeda network that's so entrenched and interconnected with other groups in the region.
The White House is obviously beginning to have doubts about its policy, just six months after it was announced. There are good reasons for skepticism. The fraud-ridden Afghan election of August 20th made it clear that the government we're trying to support in Kabul is even less reliable and legitimate than most people thought. That could be a deal-breaker all by itself in a counterinsurgency, which is premised on the notion that the government wants outside help in improving governance. As Major General Burt Field, Holbrooke's military adviser, told me, "What if the premise is false?" The war has gone on for eight years, and the effort McChrystal wrote about would take years more, and the political will both here and over there to have American troops at the heart of the war is ebbing very fast. And the counterinsurgencies fought by American troops in living memory do not inspire confidence in success: Vietnam and Iraq.
In my piece I wrote about the fears within the Administration that escalation in Afghanistan could do to Obama what the same thing in Vietnam did to Johnson (just substitute health care and energy legislation for the Great Society). That's the Vietnam analogy people in the Administration keep coming back to. I've long thought that Obama was more like J.F.K.: rational, coldly objective in the heat of events, unlikely to allow his advisers and his ego to destroy his Presidency by getting the country deeper into a war he never felt fully committed to. Obama has Kennedy's confidence in his own judgment, which Johnson tragically lacked. Gordon Goldstein's very good book "Lessons in Disaster," about McGeorge Bundy-national security adviser to both J.F.K. and L.B.J.-pretty much proves that Kennedy, if he'd lived, would not have committed ground troops to Vietnam at the start of his second term. After the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy stopped trusting his military advisers, and went on to overrule them during the Cuban missile crisis and, again and again, on Vietnam. Perhaps this is Obama's J.F.K. moment. We'll know in a few weeks. And if so, perhaps he would be right.
Still, two things leave me unsettled, one of them unimportant, the other relevant. The McChrystal report is a shining example of intelligent military thinking-of the military's capacity for learning and self-transformation through the searing events of the past eight years. Its author or authors will have a right to feel a little bitter if it appears at the very moment when the political class has decided that it just doesn't work.
The second thing is this: the alternatives were already rejected by Obama's strategy review, and since then no one has made a persuasive case why they would work any better.
