President Obama did what he had to do in relieving Gen. Stanley
McChrystal of command yesterday. But despite the appointment of
Gen. David H. Petraeus to succeed McChrystal, Obama did nothing
to clarify the strategy or make victory more likely in
Afghanistan.
Obama had to fire McChrystal because the general was a
repeat offender. Last October, when Obama was deliberating
McChrystal’s request for a troop surge into Afghanistan,
McChrystal made an unusual speech to the IISS think tank in
London, publicly — though not directly — pressuring the
president to accept his recommendations.
As a result of that speech, Obama ordered McChrystal to
join him on Air Force One, where he chewed the general out. After
the Rolling Stone article was leaked, Obama had to
either fire McChrystal or abdicate his control over the
Afghanistan conflict.
Announcing that he would replace McChrystal with Petraeus,
Obama insisted that this was a change in personnel not policy.
And taking a line from the Beatles, he called on his national
security team to come together. He said he welcomed debate on his
team but wouldn’t tolerate division among them. But he will
tolerate — even encourage — vagueness in what the goal in
Afghanistan is.
Obama himself is entirely vague. In his announcement of
McChrystal’s relief, he said, “We have a clear goal. We are going
to break the Taliban’s momentum. We are going to build Afghan
capacity. We are going to relentlessly apply pressure on Al Qaeda
and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan
and Pakistan to do the same.”
Gen. Petraeus, in his congressional testimony last week,
said that Obama’s plan to begin withdrawing troops from
Afghanistan in July of next year was “etched in stone” but seemed
to contradict himself in saying that the rate of withdrawal would
be dependent on “conditions on the ground.”
Petraeus was, along with McChrystal, the architect of
Obama’s nation-building plan. And, like McChrystal, he was
uncharacteristically vocal last year in pushing Obama into it.
Last September — while Obama was pondering McChrystal’s
recommendation — Petraeus said that our goals in
Afghanistan will have to be changed — meaning adjusted downward
— if the president rejected the strategy revisions and increased
resources he and McChrystal said were needed.
But after that, Obama decided on a “McChrystal lite”
strategy, granting the general 30,000 more troops, less than the
40-60,000 he’d asked for. And Obama imposed the timeline for
withdrawal. Now, in his speech yesterday, Obama seems to have —
as Petraeus predicted — adjusted our goals downward.
The goals Obama set for Afghanistan — like the jobs
“created or saved” by the Obama “stimulus” last year — are
meaningless. They are political, and not susceptible of objective
measurement. How can you “break the Taliban’s momentum” in a way
that they cannot recover it in a day, a month, or a year? You
can’t, because the Taliban — as McChrystal’s April report on the
war said — are supported by Iran and other Islamic nations. What
we “break” today, they repair tonight like the North Vietnamese
did a generation ago.
Obama has put Petraeus in an impossible position. As Sen.
Christopher Bond (R-Mo) said yesterday, “General Petraeus
is an outstanding military leader, but even he can’t win in
Afghanistan if the President continues to insist on an arbitrary
withdrawal date — a fact our enemies are counting on and our
allies fear.”
Though Petraeus has been involved with the Afghanistan
strategy from the outset, it was McChrystal who had the
relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the direct
command of daily operations for the counterinsurgency. Even
Petraeus will have to take some period of time to get up to
speed, making the “etched in stone” deadline of July 2011
impossible to meet.
And Obama didn’t solve the problems that drove McChrystal
to distraction. Special envoy Richard Holbrooke will still flit
in and out, as will Amb. Karl Eikenberry. Both reportedly have
awful relationships with Karzai and complicate the issues that
confound the inconstant operation of NATO troops in Afghanistan.
(Remember that McChrystal’s staff, in the Rolling Stone
piece, had some pointed comments about the ISAF force, saying the
acronym stands for “I Suck at Fighting” and “In Sandals and
Flip-flops.”)
Petraeus takes over at a time when the fight isn’t going
our way. The big operation in Marjah was — as McChrystal
characterized it — “a bleeding ulcer,” and the even larger
operation to drive the Taliban out of Kandahar city was delayed
by McChrystal until this fall to allow time to fix what’s going
wrong in Marjah.
At the same time, all of our allies — including Karzai —
may be losing faith in the fight. Less than two weeks ago, the
New York Times reported that Amrullah Saleh, now former
chief of Afghani intelligence, said that Karzai had lost faith in
America’s and NATO’s ability to prevail over the Taliban. Dutch
troops are withdrawing this summer and others will follow. New
British PM David Cameron has said that British troops won’t
remain there a day longer than necessary. That’s politically
necessary, not militarily.
Obama plans a major review of the Afghanistan effort in
December. That, unofficially, is Petraeus’s deadline to show what
McChrystal once called “irreversible momentum” toward success in
Afghanistan. But the only irreversible thing in war is time. And
time is very short for Gen. Petraeus.
It’s entirely likely that six months from now President
Obama will declare that the Taliban’s momentum has been broken,
and that the abilities to resist terrorism of the Afghan and
Pakistani governments have been strengthened. On that basis, he
may declare that the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan can be
accelerated.
The only question remaining then will be whether David
Petraeus will have the strength of character to resign rather
than become a party to such a lie. I’ve met Petraeus many times.
I believe he’s a better man than that.
