[MADDOW:] So, if there were two decisions the president had to make today, the first one: whether or not to remove General McChrystal from his position in Afghanistan-the first one was the more straightforward of the two. The more important and more complex decision was whether or not General McChrystal's firing also means that what the general stood for in terms of U.S. war strategy would also fundamentally be reconsidered.
The president made clear today that it would not. The general who personifies the strategy was fired. The strategy itself is retained.
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OBAMA: Let me say to the American people: this is a change in personnel, but it is not a change in policy. We have a clear goal. We are going to break the Taliban's momentum. We are going to build Afghan capacity. We're going to relentlessly apply pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same.
That's a strategy that we agreed to last fall. That is the policy that we're carrying out in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: This is a change in personnel, not a change in policy.
It is hard to believe that a war, a grand strategy involving the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers and millions of civilians, a military doctrine should rise or fall with the fate of one man. The tales of military history and heroism so often do center on the fate and the decisions of just one man for a reason. Leaders and their behavior matter.
In this case, the behavior of General McChrystal captured by a reporter with unfettered access to him did not just show indiscipline or insubordination, they called into question the military doctrine that General McChrystal championed.
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GEN. STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL, U.S. ARMY: The favorite saying of, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We can't operate that way. We can't walk with only hammer in our hands.
This is something that takes a tremendous amount of understanding. What I'm really telling people is: the greatest risk we can accept is to lose the support of the people here. If the people are against us, we cannot be successful.
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MADDOW: What is counterinsurgency, COIN as they call it, right? What is the strategy that General McChrystal is just describing there?
It's essentially the explosion of military objectives so that they include all sorts of thing we don't usually considered to be military thing things that you can't usually achieve through military means. It means, as General McChrystal says, that you can't kill your way out of a place like Afghanistan. You can't kill your way to victory. Instead, the goal is to secure population centers, set up Afghan governance, set up governance that itself keeps insurgents in check even after the military campaign is over.
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OBAMA: We are going to break the Taliban's momentum. We are going to build Afghan capacity. We're going to relentlessly apply pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Building Afghan capacity, strengthening the capacity of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to keep their own pressure on al Qaeda, standing up in a civil society and structures of governance as our war goals. Think about that for a second.
In the recent U.S. offensive in Marjah, which was seen as an important test case for this strategy, General McChrystal explained that the initial military operation was only to create enough calm, secure space to open up a, quote, "government in a box," to set up a local government in Marjah that would replace and crowd out the insurgency there. That would be the measure of success.
So, you need not just infantrymen, you need city councilmen, you need magistrates, you need a court system, you need experts in agriculture and waste water treatment and education and economics-you need all of this stuff or the war can't be won. It's not like a war and development, they're altogether. You can't win the war without all those things working, too.
That's the basic idea of counterinsurgency. Not just people with guns but people with all sorts of things to offer. And if all you get right, if all of you do well is the guns part, you fail, you lose the war.
That is the big story of what came crashing down on General McChrystal when he agreed to talk openly with Michael Hastings from "Rolling Stone," because if General McChrystal, if he is the guy responsible for that strategy and preaching that strategy that requires unity of effort between the military and all of these non-military people who are needed to win a war like this, you can't both be that guy and be the guy who's talking smack about all of the non-military people who even you say are essential to your mission. You can't be the guy who says that's necessary and the guy who talks all that smack.
Having that destructive and derisive an attitude not only towards civilian leadership in Washington but also towards every non-military resource and asset that you're supposed to be bringing to bear on your military objectives, means that you can talk all you want about the beauty and elegance of counterinsurgency theory, but you, sir, probably don't believe in it. General McChrystal says he believes in it, but he showed in his words and actions that he doesn't.
And so, the president had a decision to make. Now that the guy who was promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn't believe in it, do you scrap the strategy altogether or do you replace General McChrystal with another true believer? President Obama chose the latter option. He chose to not change the policy but instead to just change the personnel.
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OBAMA: General Petraeus fully participated in our review last fall. And he both supported and helped design the strategy that we have in place.
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MADDOW: Today in Afghanistan, military officials announced six more NATO soldiers were killed, including three Americans. That makes 76 international forces killed this month alone, among them 46 Americans killed.
The proponents of counterinsurgency, the COINdinistas, the people who really believe in this doctrine, warned us a year ago, longer, that this would be about the time we would see increased casualties. This is all expected, all part of the plan. It is one thing to ask us as a nation to endure these casualties as part of an overall plan. It is another thing to ask us to believe that the plan itself makes any sense.
There are at least three distinct levels on which the plan makes no sense.
Level One: The most obvious reason that the plan makes no sense is that it has never made any sense. Counter-insurgency doctrine failed in Vietnam, failed in Algeria, failed virtually everywhere it has been tried. It's supposed to have succeeded in Iraq--all hail the Surge and The Man Called Petraeus!--but it actually only succeeded in winding down the violence after America's main adversaries had achieved what they were after. With "victories" like that, who needs defeats?
Level Two: But even if counter-insurgency doctrine didn't have a terrible track record in and of itself, Afghanistan would be the last place on earth to try to make it work, since (a) Afghanistan has never had a strong, competent, central government freely supported by its people, but (b) Afghans have always persisted in resisting outside political domination.
Level Three: And even if the failed counter-insurgency doctrine did magically work in the least likely place on earth for it to succeed, that would still make no difference whatsover, since al Qaeda has virtually no presence in Afghanistan anyway--and hasn't for several years, at least. Nasty as the Taliban may be, they are not the folks who attacked us on 9/11.
So that's three different levels on which the plan makes no sense. But Maddow is pointing to a fourth one: It makes no sense because the very person who was supposed to be spearheading it very clearly did not believe in it.
What's more, given that the doctrine calls for a preponderance of civilian effort over military effort, it seems quite obvious from the resources committed that Barack Obama doesn't believe in the doctrine any more than McChrystal did.
Counter-insurgency doctrine is nothing but an official Versailles fairy tale used to drown out the unanswerable questions of the DFHs. That's it's only real purpose, the only thing about it that's not riddled with internal contradictions.
Consider Steve Kornacki's recounting of political history at Salon, Obama's original sin on Afghanistan. As Kornacki runs it down, it's all political history--of the particularly narrow presidential electoral kind. And it's pretty darned hard to argue that anything more substantial than the myths of Versailles had anything to do with it... except of course for the naivite of Obama primary supporters.
to really understand where Obama went wrong, you have to go back to his decision as a candidate to make a strong distinction between the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq.
When he hit the campaign trail in 2006 and 2007, this made for brilliant political strategy. The Iraq war had become broadly unpopular and the Democratic base was still seething over the assist so many of its leaders had given President Bush in launching it. In the primaries, it was a no-brainer for Obama to contrast his early opposition to Iraq with Hillary Clinton's vote to authorize it.
But Obama also feared that the "peacenik" label could hurt him in the fall. So Afghanistan, then not nearly as unpopular a venture as it now is, became a useful tool. He could embrace Afghanistan, prove he wasn't scared of war, and frame his difference with hawks as one of judgment -- not toughness. So it was that Obama was able to spend the fall of 2008 taunting his Republican opponent, a war hero who touted foreign policy wisdom as one of his chief assets, for foolishly believing that the "central front" in the war on terror was Iraq, when it was obviously in Afghanistan (and Pakistan).
Of course, the pious hope of those who weren't completely brain dead was that Obama wasn't completely brain dead, either, and that once he got in office he'd craft some sort of development-heavy approach in Afghanistan while shifting into more of an intelligence- and cultural reconciliation-centered approach to the "war on terror" itself.
His speech in Cairo gave folks real hope that this was, indeed, precisely what he intended to do. But, of course we were utterly wrong, all of us who even just dared to hope that his Cairo speech meant anything at all. Speeches mean nothing. Political appointments mean everything.
The path that Obama has taken--that of only and aggressively keeping his most brain-dead promises of the 2008 campaign--is one so utterly foolish that even fairly critical supporters such as myself could not really believe that he'd act as stupidly as he has chosen to. I expected him to act foolishly enough, but I didn't count on how deeply attached he would be to his folly, how doggedly he would remain committed to accepting, embracing, and re-affirming the basic Nixon-Reagan-Bush framework of thinking.
As Kornacki goes on to explain, Obama was merely reflecting the same brain-dead mentality of the entire Democratic establishment. He stumbled into his faux anti-war stance completely by accident, and then adroitly made the most of it. But it was never more than a situational campaign gimmick to help him stand out in a crowded field of unknown candidates. First Kornacki refreshes us on the Democratic Party groupthink:
The irony is that this strategy reeked of the same basic calculation that Clinton (and countless other Democrats) were guilty of in backing the Iraq invasion. The Democrats who stood with Bush in 2002 and 2003 were haunted by the memories of 1990 and 1991, when their party had largely stood against the first Gulf War -- only to watch George H.W. Bush bask in near universal popularity after quickly expelling Iraq from Kuwait.
That war, it was said, shook America out of its Vietnam syndrome. In the 1992 Democratic primaries, Bill Clinton bragged that he'd been one of the few Democrats to back the war (in truth, he'd simply avoided taking a clear position until it was over) -- one of the reasons Democrats saw him as potentially electable against Bush. And it was Al Gore's status as one of the few Senate Democrats to vote for the war that helped make him attractive to Clinton as a running mate.
When the time came to vote on the second Gulf War a decade later, Democrats -- especially those interested in running for president in 2004 -- remembered the Clinton example. Wars in the Middle East were easy -- hadn't Desert Storm proven that? -- so where was the political upside to opposing a venture that was likely to be quick, painless and popular? They climbed on board the bandwagon, only to flee (with all sorts of excuses and rationalizations for their initial cheerleading) when the occupation turned ugly.
Note the total lack of any mention about how utterly stupid it was to go to war with someone who was both the sworn enemy of bin Laden and Iran. Brain cells not engaged. Not even remotely part of the picture.
Then he turns to Obama's faux difference:
Obama, of course, opposed Iraq from the beginning. But his thought process wasn't much different. What's most important to understand is that in 2002 and 2003, he was a largely anonymous state legislator trying madly to stand out in a crowded Democratic Senate primary field in Illinois. Speaking out against the war offered him a chance to stand out with the activist wing of his party. So what if it might expose him to GOP attacks in the 2004 general election? It would be a minor miracle for him to even get that far. So he ran as an antiwar candidate, got lucky when scandal sank the Democratic front-runner, won the nomination, got luckier still when scandal took down his Republican foe (who was then replaced by the utterly unelectable Alan Keyes) and coasted to the Senate. By the time he was sworn in in January 2005, his early opposition to Iraq looked prescient -- and antiwar Democrats across the country had their candidate for 2008.
But, just like all the Democrats who buckled in 2002, he wasn't interested in being the antiwar candidate. Instead of challenging misguided popular sentiments about the wisdom of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, Obama chose to cater to them. This right war/wrong war distinction made for great politics in 2008. But as policy in 2010, it just doesn't work. The question is whether it will be too late before he admits it.
For Obama to admit that he made a mistake about Afghanistan would take far more character than he has ever shown in his entire life. Could it still happen? Sure, anything is possible. (A 3-day tennis match at Wimbledon? If that can happen, then anything can.) But make no mistake about what a momentous change this would be. There is nothing in Obama's history to provide a foundation for such a profound act on his part.
Heck, forget character issues. It would require the use of neural circuits that there is absolutely no evidence Obama even has.
Not to mention advisors that also simply don't exist.
It's like the Emperor's New Clothes, only much, much worse. Even after Rachel Maddow has pointed out the obvious, the total folly of the Afghan War remains incomprehensibe and unseeable to the courtiers of Versailles.
Reality doesn't have a chance. Political "cleverness" is all that there is. And there is nothing quite as stupid as political cleverness Versailles style. |
