Afghanistan Follow-Up: Civil War in the Obama Administration

Afghanistan Special: The Obama Administration Breaks Apart Over Military Escalation
Afghanistan Video: Obama Rejects “All Military Options”?

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UPDATE 1525 GMT: Spencer Ackerman has now retracted his original story that the anti-Eikenberry statement --- "he has a beef with McChrystal" --- came from a National Security Council staffer who was at the NSC meeting on Wednesday, although "my original source for the post stands by the account provided". Pity that Ackerman doesn't then ask the follow-up question: "How bad are relations within the White House over Afghanistan that officials are slinging mud by passing on 'information' from others who were in the high-level discussions?"

Yesterday we reported on the sudden emergence of the rift within the US Government over military escalation in Afghanistan. This was symbolised by the leaking of the call by the US Ambassador,  Karl Eikenberry, for no troop increase because of the instability of the Afghan Government and, more importantly, established by President Obama's reported "rejection" of all four proposals --- ranging from an escalation of 15,000 troops to a fulfilment of US commander Stanley McChrystal's request for 40,000 --- on the table.

24 hours later and the dispute rages on. The immediate reaction was an effort by pro-escalation forces to trash Eikenberry by claiming “he leaked his own cables” because “he has a beef with McChrystal" and alleging that the mess in Afghanistan occurred during Eikenberry's tenure as military commander between 2005 and 2007. Meanwhile, those inside the White House (note, not inside the US Embassy but inside the White House) are maintaining the pressure against an acceptance of any significant troop increase by criticising both sides of the Af-Pak strategy: "Do we have any assurances of what Pakistan will do? At least in Iraq, you had some functioning government there at the time of the surge. In Afghanistan, there is no government there."

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is trying to hold the Administration together with the insistence that a National Security meeting yesterday focused on progress rather than retribution: “I would say it was more, how can we combine some of the best features of several of the options to maximum good effect? So there is a little more work to do, but I think we’re getting toward the end of the process.” Yet Gates also hinted at the growing doubts about the Kabul Government that have first delayed and now jeopardised an acceptance of the McChrystal recommendations, “How do we signal resolve, and at the same time signal to the Afghans, as well as the American people, that this is not an open-ended commitment?”

In the coverage today, however, no one is coming back to the question: who leaked the Eikenberry objections? And no one is picking up on the significance of that leak and the disputes of this week.

The tensions between the White House, other agencies, and the US military have been present since Obama took office in January. Here's the difference now: those tensions may now have become the primary issue, overtaking any specific decision on troop levels in Afghanistan. If the President finally authorises the 40,000, he will be seen as caving in to the pressure of the military, disregarding not only advisors such as Eikenberry but sceptics within his White House. If he refuses escalation or offers only a token increase, he will incur the wrath of commanders who are willing to "spin" against him and their allies in the media ("Obama the ditherer"; "Obama the appeaser"). If he tries to split the difference, he will get the worst of both worlds --- loyalists like Gates will try to prop him up, but Obama will be facing objections (mainly through more leaks) from within the White House and within other departments.

That is why the most significant part of Gates's statement to the press yesterday was not his "Don't Worry, All is On Course for A Decision", but his warning to those out of line in the the Administration: “I have been appalled by the amount of leaking that has been going on in this process....A lot of different places are leaking...[and I am] confident that the Department of Defense is one of them....And frankly if I found out with high confidence anybody who was leaking in the Department of Defense, who that was, that would probably be a career ender.”

Which, in "normal" times, might be enough to put everyone and everything back in line. But Afghanistan --- in symbolism and in political reality --- is beyond normal, and this civil war is now beyond even an Enforcer like Gates.

The US in Afghanistan: "The Long War" Still Waits for a Strategy

Understanding “Mr Obama’s Wars”: Five Essential Analyses on Afghanistan and Pakistan

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Throughout our coverage of the US intervention in Afghanistan this year, there is a recurrent theme. As I wrote for an essay for The New Americanist, published as a separate entry in September:

In such a war [as that in Afghanistan and Pakistan], the strategic ends of not only a military "victory” for US forces but political, economic, and social resolution for the populaces in those countries are peripheral; the ongoing battle is an end in itself. “War” and “national security” take over, rationalised by a permanent fear.

Which is why, when asked in the Newsweek interview, “Can anything get you ready to be a war president?”, Obama could reduce “strategic issues” to an 18-word question:

I think that it certainly helps to know the broader strategic issues involved. I think that’s more important than understanding the tactics involved….The president has to make a decision: will the application of military force in this circumstance meet the broader national-security goals of the United States?

This week Spencer Ackerman published an outstanding and troubling article picking up on this lack of a US strategy in Afghanistan: "The truth is that an inability or unwillingness to define the ends of the Afghanistan conflict has been the rule in Washington for the last eight years":

Everything about the ballroom of the St Regis Hotel indicates Washington courtliness. The entranceway is filled with glittering chandeliers and polished marble, giving way to high ceilinged majesty. Located steps away from the White House, the hotel signals power, control and spectacle. So it was the natural venue for Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to unveil in August the dozen-member team he assembled to reverse the flagging civilian assistance efforts for the troubled region, at the moment this summer when the city began, for the first time, to question the wisdom of the war.

Holbrooke choreographed the event with his characteristic attention to atmospherics. It was moderated by John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff who ran Barack Obama’s presidential transition. Holbrooke was flanked by his team, which represented every significant US agency and department and even the British government. The dozens of journalists in the room might not have appreciated the policy details – about contesting Pakistani Taliban short-wave radio communications; microcredit programmes for Afghan agriculture; and supporting the forthcoming Afghan elections – but Holbrooke, who has decades of experience with the elite press, evidently gambled that the more their eyes glazed over, the more they would be likely to write that the Obama administration had gathered together an impressive and united civilian team to match the military effort.

And then Holbrooke stepped on his own script. Asked how he would know when he had achieved the ultimate endpoint of the entire enterprise he’d assembled hundreds of people at the St Regis to discuss, Holbrooke replied that it was like the famously vague test enunciated by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart for determining when an artwork was pornographic. “We’ll know it when we see it,” he said. There was little chance of the event’s elaborate stagecraft being remembered after that.

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The foreign-policy community in Washington is an entity powered by euphemism. As much as the fraternity of experts and analysts wishes to congratulate itself for its deep thinking and farsightedness, debate occurs within rigid boundaries that exist to make policymakers believe they can unlock every intractable problem of geopolitical management. Like all good boundaries, these both protect and corral: they insulate the members of the foreign policy establishment against embarrassment when disasters emerge, provided that no one admits a situation is indeed helpless.

Holbrooke’s awkward admission at the St Regis may have pierced this illusion of control, but the truth is that an inability or unwillingness to define the ends of the Afghanistan conflict has been the rule in Washington for the last eight years. There has never been a debate about when the United States will meet its goals in the region it entered after the September 11 attacks, just as there has never been a clarification of those goals. The Iraq war provided everyone with an alibi.

The Bush administration viewed Afghanistan as a nation-building sinkhole that distracted from the war it wanted to fight. Accordingly, the military prioritised Iraq, and so no talented officer had any incentive to innovate in Afghanistan. The Democratic Party, all the way up to Barack Obama, insisted that Afghanistan was the truly necessary war, and turned it into a cudgel to be used against the Iraq war. American Journalists made careers in Iraq and barely asked for embeds in Afghanistan; their editors ticked the box by running an annual short feature, usually about how Afghanistan was the “forgotten war”. There was no critical thought from anyone about arresting Afghanistan’s deterioration, and half-true clichés about a “Graveyard of Empires” accumulated. That was the brittle architecture underlying the national consensus about Afghanistan. Without the supporting wall of Iraq, it has now collapsed.

Out of its wreckage, Obama will make two critical decisions in the coming weeks: whether a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is suitable for the country’s woes; and whether a second troop increase in the span of a year is required to wage it. Obama’s advisers, military and civilian, are locked in a debate over how to provide an alternative to Holbrooke’s admission. Some, like Vice President Joseph Biden, contend that the complexities of counterinsurgency are both insurmountable and unmoored from the stated goal of removing al Qa’eda as a security threat. Others, like Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, contend that the United States has already spent eight years attacking al Qa’eda and senior Taliban leaders without regard for the conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan that the militants exploit to retain support.

But there is another debate layered on top of that one, both inside the administration and across the Washington foreign-policy community in general. That debate is about the meaning of the Afghanistan war and the scope of American commitment to it. But it is also about what lessons to draw from the Iraq war, and whether they can be exported to Afghanistan.

All of the ideological attention in Washington previously committed to Iraq is now flooding into Afghanistan – or at least to the simulacrum of Afghanistan that exists in Washington. That still-congealing ideology forms the prism through which Obama’s ultimate decisions will be viewed. What was once a relatively simple (though operationally complex) mission to avenge the September 11 attacks has since been overtaken by theories about how to establish lasting peace and stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If those theories are correct, the United States may endure a period of bloody hardship but reap the benefits of radically diminishing the threat of al Qa’eda. If not, it will court disaster.

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