After all that has been said about Afghan President Hamid Karzai
by U.S. military and civilian leaders, why did the Obama
administration remove Major General Peter Fuller, deputy commander
of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan?
Fuller, in an interview
with Politico published on November 3, was highly critical
of Karzai. He said, among other things, that he was upset with
Karzai’s remark that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan in any
war with the United States. He told Politico that Karzai
was erratic, adding, “Why don’t you just poke me in
the eye with a needle! You’ve got to be kidding me … I’m sorry, we
just gave you $11.6 billion and now you’re telling me, ‘I don’t
really care’?… When they are going to have a
presidential election, you hope they get a guy that’s more
articulate in public.”
Fuller also recounted a conversation with Afghan generals
who quite apparently don’t understand that America’s financing of
the war against the Taliban can’t go on forever: “I said,
‘You guys are isolated from reality.’ The reality is, the world
economy is having some significant hiccups. The U.S. is in this
[too],” Fuller told Politico, “If you’re in a very poor
country like Afghanistan, you think that America has roads paved in
gold, everybody lives in Hollywood. They don’t understand the
sacrifices that America is making to provide for their security.
And I think that’s part of my job to educate
‘em.”
Fuller was fired days later. He was impolitic toward the
Afghan generals and disrespectful of Karzai. But was this worthy of
removal?
Consider what else U.S. generals and diplomats have said
about Karzai and his government.
In Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, he quotes a
host of them.
Then overall Afghanistan force commander Gen. David
Petraeus is quoted as telling Vice President Biden and then-Defense
Secretary Gates, “We’re not going to defeat the Taliban,” and “I
understand the government is a criminal syndicate.”
Retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry, U.S. ambassador to
Afghanistan (and a Petraeus rival), is quoted — from the same
meeting — as telling Biden and Gates that we couldn’t make the
troop surge work in a year because we don’t have a reliable partner
in Karzai. Karzai, according to Eikenberry, is mercurial (a more
polite word than erratic). “He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds,”
Woodward quotes the ambassador as saying, referring to Karzai’s
reported depression and medical aids.
Before Fuller, Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal after
an
article in Rolling Stone proved too much for the
president. But that was different. McChrystal wasn’t dismissive of
Karzai, he was disrespectful of Biden, Eikenberry, Petraeus and
other American leaders. It added up to a level of insubordination
for which he had to be removed.
I will not defend Fuller. What he said weren’t things any
American general should say publicly. But Fuller’s situation is
different from McChrystal’s and troubling in a very different
way.
What Fuller said in the conference reported by
Politico could not have been spontaneous or original. He
was saying things he would have certainly spoken about to his boss,
Afghan Commander Gen. John Allen, as well as other peers as well as
his staff. His comments, blunt but honest, reveal much about how
our troops are thinking about the war they’re fighting.
There is a disease affecting our forces engaged in
counterinsurgency — the military term for “nation-building — in
Afghanistan. Call it “COIN fatigue.”
The symptoms of COIN fatigue are stress, doubt and
anxiety. The stress and doubt result from the looming withdrawal
and the knowledge that we have sacrificed much but achieved little.
Anxiety is the necessary result of the first two.
However you compute its length — from 9/11 or back to the
Iranian revolution of 1979 — the war in Afghanistan is part of the
longest war in U.S. history. Some of our troops have been deployed
to Iraq and Afghanistan nearly ten times in the ten years since
9/11. They go, willingly, and perform superbly. Their morale, to
all outside measurements, is still very high. So why the COIN
fatigue?
Americans had always fought for a clear purpose: to defeat
a defined enemy and end the threat he posed to our way of life. But
this war, and the way we have fought it, has never been clear. No
one can get away with telling our soldiers, sailors, airmen and
Marines that victory is just over the next hill. They would have
understood if they were told that we needed to remove Saddam and
set up a provisional government in Iraq. They would have understood
it if we’d said that if we got bin Laden and Mullah Omar, they
could leave Afghanistan and go home. But that’s not what they were
told.
They were told that we would leave Iraq stable,
independent and an ally. That didn’t happen. They were told the
same thing about Afghanistan and — looking around themselves —
they know that won’t happen either.
Our troops aren’t stupid: they’re better, smarter and
better-trained than ever before. What Fuller said must be a genuine
reflection of the beliefs of the men he worked for, worked with and
commanded. I remember a young army colonel telling me, six years
ago in Baghdad, “If you want to break this army, break your
promises to it.” And that’s the problem: too many promises, too
many inconsistencies, and too little for the troops to look at and
say, “We accomplished that.”
Which brings us back to Fuller’s words to the Afghan
generals. He’s obviously frustrated by their lack of understanding
of and apparent unconcern with America’s standpoint. He spoke as
the man in charge of training their forces and seeing to it that
those forces will be able to operate effectively and independently
when we leave. Which they are, perforce, not going to be. And as
clearly as Fuller saw it from his perch atop the training pyramid,
we have to understand that — in the grunt’s eye view — things can
only be worse.
There are only two cures for COIN fatigue: victory, or a
long period of recovery after a retreat. As Petraeus said, we’re
not going to defeat the Taliban.
The only historical comparison to Iraq/Afghanistan is
Vietnam. Our forces had fought a counterinsurgency and a part-time
war with the North though we never tried to topple the Hanoi
regime. They felt the same sort of COIN fatigue that Fuller’s words
exclaim.
It took thirty years for our military to recover from its
Vietnam fatigue. But in those years we fought a Cold War, not a
major hot one. This one won’t be close to over when we leave
Afghanistan. How long will it take to recover this time?
