Getting right on the war with "good-enough" politics
Yesterday, Rachel Maddow completed her trifecta on Afghanistan. First, she was the only one who understood that McChrystal wasn't the problem--the policy was. Then she went to Afghanistan, and got Brigadier General Ben Hodges to admit onscreen that there is no "plan B" for Afghanistan. Finally, last night, she wrapped up her reporting back from her trip with a powerful summation, revisiting her interview with General Hodges, and concluding that continuing the war would be "a moral outrage": [emphasis added]
That's what we're doing -- trying to give them the best chance they've ever had. And they may not take it. And our troops staying there may not make them more likely to take it. To recognize that is not to accept military defeat. Frankly, establishing a government in a foreign country isn't a military objective. It just isn't. Counterinsurgency theory be damned. It's a civilian, development objective, in this case with military support.
A military objective is winning a war. War is destructive, not constructive. We send men into war with guns, not with shields. It is not to accept military defeat to recognize that the 82nd Airborne can do many things but it can't make the governor of Nangarhar Province not corrupt. If we think there is a future in which the Afghan government is real and it runs and controls that country to the exclusion of the Taliban, and it's there because we've made that possible, then there is an American national security interest in us still being there. But if that's not possible. No matter what we do. If no matter HOW MUCH WE WANT for that to happen, we can't make that happen....
If we can't make the outcome we want come to fruition, then we should fund and train and support the Afghan government all we can. But each additional American life sacrificed to a goal we know we won't reach is a moral outrage -- a moral disaster -- that we have a responsibility, in this life during wartime, to stop.
Dollars, yes. Lives? LIVES? No. Not for a romantic wish. Not for something we want but know we won't get. Dollars, OK. Lives, NO. If you believe our actions -- our American actions -- in 2010 can make it more likely that there's a real government in Afghanistan, then asking Americans to die in Afghanistan, is asking them to die for something that is in the national security interests of the United States. Which is what American kids sign up for when they enlist. But if you believe that our actions -- our American actions -- in 2010 canNOT make it more likely that there's a real government in Afghanistan, then asking Americans to die in Afghanistan is wrong. It's over. Development... training... support, OK. But lives? No.
No.
That's the choice. It's not partisan. It's not even passionate. It's rational. Horribly, horribly rational.
Goodnight.
Now, I don't share Maddow's overall perspective on foreign policy. I'm much more of a Mark Twain/William James anti-imperialist than she is. But I was part of the Vietnam Anti-war Movement, and we encompassed a wide diversity of different views, while all agreeing on one thing: The war had to end. Although I always strived for more and deeper agreement, the bottom line was that agreeing on that one point was good enough for me.
Saving lives, and restoring a minimum level of sanity was good enough then, and it's good enough now. What does it mean to be "good enough"? I understood it intuitively then, but there's an actual science to it, I've since learned...
Last Tuesday, Rachel Maddow reported from Aghanistan:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MADDOW: If the police efforts, the policing effort, security efforts don't combine to create enough space for Afghan government to step up in a way that is working, I don't get the sense there's a plan B. Is there a plan B?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: We'll have more with the American general in charge of southern Afghanistan, Brigadier General Ben Hodges, in just a moment.
When she talked to General Hodges, he tacitly admitted it: No plan B.
But Afghanistan isn't the exception. It's the rule. The lack of a plan B isn't the problem--it's just one aspect of the larger problem of systematically bad thinking that repeatedly leads to bad results.
The very next day, Paul Krugman blogged about the Obama Administration's failure to foresee how bad things would get with unemployment, and their consequent undersizing of the stimulus. Here's a chart he reproduced showing what they thought would happen:
Krugman said, in part:
based on public reporting, like the Ryan Lizza article on Larry Summers - which reads rather differently now that we know how things are really working out, or more accurately not working out - it looks as if top advisers convinced themselves that even in the absence of stimulus the slump would be nasty, brutish, but not too long. That's the assumption embedded in the now infamous Romer-Bernstein chart, above. So all policy needed to do was meliorate the worst, while we waited for the economy to recover spontaneously. From the Lizza article:
Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure."
I don't know why Summers etc. believed this. Even before the severity of the financial crisis was fully apparent, the recent history of recessions suggested that the jobs picture would continue to worsen long after the recession was technically over. And by the winter of 2008-2009, it was obvious that this was the Big One...
In short, there was every reason to think that things could be worse than anticipated. But the problem wasn't simply that they got their estimate wrong. It's how they got it wrong, and even more seriously how they failed to think about what might happen if they turned out to be wrong. "Failure is not an option" they were thinking, just like BushCo, and so they didn't think about it, and thus they blindly plunged into it. No worst-case planning. No Plan B.
A little more detail from Liazza's article (including the passage Krugman quotes) makes this even clearer:
"Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."...
"It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan."
Of course there were heads exploding on the GOP side. What else is new? This is what they signed on for when they decided they had to have a black RNC Chair, no matter what--just another bit of proof that racism makes you stupid. But consider what's happened on the Democratic/progressive side. As Glenn Greenwald points out, there's been far too much aping of Bush/Rovism.
Yes, it's true that we already were in Afghanistan. But it was still Obama's war of choice. It was up to Obama, and he freely chose to make Afghanistan the new focus of the GWOT, rather than calling the whole thing off as the counter-productive delusion--ala fighting fire with gasoline--that it actually is. It is Obama's war of choice, and it is historically idiotic--though by a few more thousand years than Steele seems to realize. So Steele was actually right on two counts.
It was, after all, Obama who proudly proclaimed that he was against "dumb wars", remember? And what could be dumber than going to war in the country where empires go to die? And so when Obama started saying that Iraq was the wrong war, and Afghanistan the right one, plenty of people were justifiably confused. And being confused--plus with John McCain looking to start WWIII with Russia (fergodsakes!)--most folks didn't try to figure things out too hard. Most simply assumed it was campaign window dressing, a defense against being called "weak", a promise easily morphed into something more sensible once he got into office, etc., etc., etc.
Well, of course, it turned out that Obama was even less of a progressive on foreign policy than just about anything else (on civil liberties, call it a tie). So, here to remind folks of what a real progressive alternative might look like, on the flip, I'm republishing a diary I first published at My Left Wing in 2005, and that I republished here on January 4, 2009, as "Crafting A Democratic Plan To Win The War On Terror".
As you read it, one thing should be abundantly clear: Unlike Obama's "plan" (whatever that may be), it's a plan based on ideas, not a self-defeating defensive posture of trying to not look weak. Real toughness lies in standing up for sound and moral ideas, rather than running away and/or pandering. As Greenwald wrote:
Generally, when progressives demand that Democrats be "tougher," what they mean is in defense of progressive policies, not in defense of endless war in Afghanistan. It'd be one thing if the DNC came out this forcefully in attacking Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, or legal immunity for torture, or cutting Social Security while maintaining bloated defense spending, or a failure to stimulate the economy sufficiently, etc. But here, they're acting "tough" in order to stigmatize war opposition and equate questioning of American wars with cowardice and Troop disrespect. I don't quite think that's what progressives have in mind when they urge the Party to be more aggressive.
What should we be fighting for? My answer from 2005 is on the flip.
[T]he 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....
[The strategy is:] 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.
....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.
How is it that Rachel Maddow zeroed in on this obvious point, and everyone else pretty much seemed to miss it, the way that Rip Van Winkle missed the Revolutionary War? Maddow's lonely grasp of the central contradiction in the McChrystal affair staring us right in the face shows once again how totally and utterly clueless the entire Versailles establishment really is.
Of course no one can look at the central contradiction here, because if they did, then the entire strategy would have to be abandoned. The DFHs would win. Russ Feingold would win. David Obey would win. Dennis Kucinich would win. The whole 1970s anti-military love-in crowd, as President Obama so contemptuously referred to them--people just like his own mother would win! Ewwww! We can't have that!
Blindness! Of course! That's infinitely preferrable.
First, we need to take note of how meticulously Maddow laid out her case, using McChrystal's own words to describe the doctrine and its logic. Then we need to think a bit about the devastating evidence that the strategy is totally doomed, and was totally doomed from long before the beginning.
So, to begin with, here's an extended excerpt from Maddow's transcript, showing how carefully and methodically she proceeds:
President Obama will give his first State of the Union address on Wednesday night at 9 p.m. Eastern. Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan campaign wants to make sure this isn't just a time to sit and watch, but a time to get together with our friends and push back against the expanding Afghanistan war.
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
--"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"
Dylan:
And here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
--"(Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The) Memphis Blues Again"
Buffy:
"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school."
--"After Life," Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
LBJ was a tragic figure. Barack Obama is a farcical one--and the joke's on you if you still don't realize that after his second mass escalation of the war in Afghanistan. As Robert Mann makes powerfully clear in his 2000 book, A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam, Johnson had been traumatized by the Democrat's sweeping losses as a result of the Korean War. The Democrats had held the Senate majority since FDR became President in 1932, and looked like they would hold it forever until Truman was caught flat-footed by the outbreak of the Korean War. Johnson did incredible work first winning back the majority, then engineering a massive landslide victory in 1958. He was petrified of the prospect of doing that again, and determined not to let it happen.. It was a deeply flawed decision--a tragic one--but at least LBJ had the excuse that it hadn't been tried before and found wanting.
Barack Obama has no such excuse. But he's not just repeating LBJ's mistake of trying to have guns and butter at the same time. He's repeatedly made clear that the butter has to go, no matter what. The only question is when. Unlike the GOP, when Obama talks about cutting budget deficits, we have every reason to believe that he's dead serious. Both Social Security and Medicare are in serious peril under Obama, no matter what happens in Afghanistan.
I am deeply saddened on so many different levels by the President's speech last night, and his Afghanistan policy in general. Steady escalation is not the answer to this godawful complicated mess. It's all well and good to keep making the argument as to why this is not another Vietnam, although it sure does feel that way to a lot of us, but the big question in terms of comparisons is how this is different than Britain or Russia's experience in Afghanistan itself.
I am also deeply anguished as someone who has a much broader agenda than just this war or even foreign policy and national security in general. The money we will spend, and the political capital that will be burnt, by this war are a horrible price to pay- and for what goal? Will this surge defeat Al Queda and the Taliban once and for all? Will they make Afghanistan and Pakistan safe places for the long run? It just doesn't seem very likely.
This is at its core also bad politics on so many different levels. History is very clear on this topic. Two of our last three Democratic Presidents have had their presidencies broken and sunk on the rocks of a terrible relationship with the progressive base: Jimmy Carter over economics, and LBJ over a wrong- headed land war in Asia. With this escalation, and with Geithner and Summers running Obama's economic policy, this President seems like he wants to pick fights with us in both areas. It truly is heart breaking.
There is one of ray of hope in this announcement, and that is the announcement of an actual timeline for an exit. Giving us an exit plan with an actual timeline is extremely important politically, and does give me some comfort. The scary thing is that we know almost for sure that the generals and their allies in congress will start clamoring about a year from now that "conditions on the ground" show that we can't get things done under Obama's timeline, and that he needs to change his plan. The big question at that point is just how much gumption Obama has, whether he will stand up to the significant political pressure that will be raining down on him. But for now, let's absolutely give him credit for getting at least this part of the strategy right. He is calling the surgers' bluff: they say they need these troops for a short term burst of activity to uproot the Taliban's strength once and for all. Obama is giving it to them, but telling them they have only 18 months to prove their case. We must hope, for the country's sake and for his own sake, that when these folks come back to him and say "Whoops, we can't get this taken care of in the short term" (because we all know they will), that Obama stands up to them and says no.
A dear friend of mine is a Marine officer who was recently deployed to Afghanistan, on a week's notice, after 2 tours of duty in Iraq. For him, and for all his brothers and sisters in arms, my anguish and worry about this newest escalation is intense. For him, and all the rest of America's soldiers in Afghanistan, I hope that Obama sticks to his exit strategy. It could not come a moment too soon.
It's my belief that it's no longer in doubt: Barack Obama is not a progressive, even a moderate or cautious one. On virtually every issue imaginable, we've seen nearly a year of bending over backwards to mollify conservative and reactionary forces-with a singular lack of success-while repeatedly rebuffing or attacking progressives, even when all they are doing is trying to support his agenda,
Behind all the various different examples one could point to, I believe that there's a common thread of underlying continuity and accommodation with the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Bush era ideology, rather than fundamental change. Put simply, as revealed during the campaign, at a fundamental level Barack Obama believes that Reagan's criticism of the New Deal is true. Which is why he is aligned with conservadems who want to gut Social Security and Medicare. He also believes that Reagan's style of blind, unquestioning, authoritarian patriotism is not just legitimate, but superior to the progressive, democratic-republican alternative that is actually founded on living out the political philosophy on which our nation was founded.
All that is quite a mouthful, but what it comes down to is that Obama does not believe in the critical/prophetic patriotism professed by Martin Luther King, and carried on, however imperfectly, by his own long-time minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The incidents used to drive a wedge between the two were actually superficial to their underlying differences. Obama is, above all, a symbol of black assimilation. After centuries of always being on the bottom, trampled underfoot by any recent arrival, with Obama's ascension to the Oval Office, black America could finally say it had arrived , it had been integrated into America's polity at the highest level.
On The Flip: Martin Luther King had never been an apostle of mere integration...
In "Why Not A Progressive Foreign Policy? Part 1: The Military ", I wrote about a better way of combatting terrorism than bringing war to Afghanistan, and continuing to kill innocent civilians--a way much more consistent with the main thrust of Obama's speech in Cairo. In the transition between laying out the problem, and presenting that better way, I wrote:
But before we turn to what that better way is, I just want to take note of former Democracy Now producer Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers Journal last night, sketching out some of what's going wrong right now. I'll be looking at what he talked about more closely in a followup diary, which will serve to underscore just how much is at stake if we don't get serious about crafting a progressive alternative. Scahill discusses the continuation of military privatization under Obama, and the dangerous direction it threatens to lead us
It's now time to take a closer look at what's at stake, at what we risk if we do not adopt a more progressive military policy. The future is never certain, of course. But closing our eyes to foreseeable risks only makes it more uncertain, more threatening, more potentially dangerous.
Here's something everyone in Congress needs to see as they consider President Obama's $83.4 billion supplemental war funding bill. National Priorities Project (NPP) just released The Cost of War in Afghanistan, a report examining the exorbitant human and economic costs of this rapidly expanding war, which estimates the war has currently cost taxpayers over $172 billion. When you factor in the projected costs of long-term military occupation, interest, and veterans' benefits, we're talking about a war that will cost close to $1 trillion. "All told," the report concludes, "this is more than the size of the recent bailout of Wall Street and rivals the historic economic stimulus bill just passed by Congress."
NPP is tracking the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq using an individual cost of war counter, calculating the state-level numbers and trade-offs of supplemental war spending. In my home state of Pennsylvania, for instance, taxpayers will have to pay $2.9 billion of the proposed $83.4 billion tab. Want to know what $2.9 billion could do instead of fund more war? NPP claims it could provide:
725,689 People with Health Care for One Year OR
3,533,713 Homes with Renewable Electricity for One Year OR
29,863 Affordable Housing Units OR
460,546 Head Start Places for Children for One Year OR
46,575 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR
The list goes on and on. The fact is not nearly enough members of Congress are seriously considering the cost and impact of more troops, both in the U.S. and Afghanistan. According to NPP Executive Director Jo Comerford, "The purpose of this resource is to help people across the United States reflect on the current Afghanistan war and its proposed expansion."
"Can more be done to create more of a coalition so that the U.S. isn't burdened with bearing the cost in lives and treasure alone?"
"Since over half of the citizens of Afghanistan are female, shouldn't we ask them what kind of help they want from us, if any?"
"What would happen if we pulled out military troops and replaced them with agricultural experts, economic development experts, Peace Corps volunteers, medical corps, and specialists to help in development of strong governmental structures and other "helpers" to help Afghans obtain an improved quality of life?"
"Why don't we try diplomatic negotiation with all involved parties, including The Taliban FIRST?"
These are some of the questions we all should be asking right now about the war in Afghanistan. They are a sampling from over 460 viewer-submitted questions Brave New Foundation received for their upcoming series of three debates between Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress and The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel. Clearly, people are starting to see that regardless of whether you oppose the war in Afghanistan, substantive debates from experts on both sides of the issues would benefit everyone. That's why Korb, who favors more troops and resources, will go head-to-head with vanden Heuvel, who calls for regional diplomacy and military withdrawal. They will debate whether military escalation is the best method to combat terrorism, and the effect more troops will have on an already unstable Pakistan; Korb and vanden Heuvel will agree upon a third topic chosen from the hundreds of submitted questions like the ones above.
Though this war continues to intensify, we still don't know the answers to some of the most basic questions, which is why the ultimate goal of Rethink Afghanistan and debates like these is an educational one. Raising public awareness and fostering discussion will prompt Congress to hold substantive oversight hearings that bring in experts to explain policy and offer answers.
Every single aspect of the war in Afghanistan must be opened up to debate, especially considering the fact that over 172 billion of our tax dollars have gone to this war to date. That means we should be talking about the staggering costs, about exit strategy, about the rights of Afghan women, and whether diplomacy can win over hearts and minds. And we should be ranking the importance of these issues for Congress, which you can now do with this new voting tool where you also can submit your own written questions.
This is republished from the April 2 edition of Random Lengths News.
Afghanistan: Obama's Vietnam?
Less New Thinking and More Old Mistakes
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
On October 2, 2002, Barack Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, gave a speech opposing going to war in Iraq. That speech, at that time, would prove crucial to his election, first as a US Senator two years later, and then as President, four years after that. Democrats who equivocated were a dime a dozen. Obama stood out, because he stood up when others did not, and said, "This is wrong."
He did not oppose all wars. He cited the Civil War and World War II as specific examples of necessary ones. But, he said, "I'm opposed to dumb wars." Yet, on January 23, his third full day as President, Obama ordered two separate air strikes in Pakistan, killing 14 civilians, along with four suspected terrorists. One strike killed six civilians along with four suspected terrorists staying in their home, the other simply hit the wrong target, the home of a pro-government tribal elder, Malik Deen Faraz in the Gangikhel area of South Waziristan, killing him, his three sons and a grandson, along with three others.
Now President Obama has made it official. In addition to another 17,000 troops promised early, he made an additional pledge of 4,000 more on Friday, March 27. It was reportedly a 'carefully calibrated' decision, these would be trainers not combat troops, we were told. But Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran, whose career included long stretches preparing security briefs for Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., was not impressed with such fine distinctions.
This is such an explosive headline, I couldn't resist using it, even though this post is about much more than military escalation. This is the title of part one of Brave New Foundation's new full-length documentary (think Uncovered: The War on Iraq and Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers), which they began releasing online for free today. Their documentary campaign, Rethink Afghanistan, tackles issues like the costs of war and troop buildup--the subject of part one--featuring experts like Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Kinzer, Anand Gopal, and Dr. Ramaza Bashardost, Afghanistan's Independent candidate in their upcoming Presidential Election. It's worth checking out to hear what those experts have to say alone, and the fact that it's free is always an incentive!
But what I want to talk about is the ultimate goal of the Rethink Afghanistan campaign, which is to push for congressional oversight hearings. As I wrote last week, oversight has been a cornerstone of government accountability throughout our country's history, particularly in wartime. And some of the best oversight has not only been bipartisan, but it's come when the President's own party is debating his policies. Take the joint committee investigations during the Civil War, Senator Truman's Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program during WWII, and the Fulbright hearings during Vietnam. The same oversight needs to be applied today, especially after we saw this system of checks and balances shattered during the Iraq war under the Bush administration.
"We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which has the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war. We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now."
Those were the emotional words of a 27-year-old John Kerry, dressed in green fatigues, Silver Star, and Purple Heart ribbons as he shocked the country with his antiwar testimony before a crowded Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1971. Kerry's fiery thirty-minute condemnation of the war became instantly legendary for questioning the reasons our military was in Vietnam; revealing the fact that the nation had turned its back on veterans; and slamming President Nixon for refusing to pull out.
It was a definitive moment for the antiwar movement made possible because chairman William Fulbright called Kerry to testify. Thirty-eight years later, Senator Kerry now sits in Fulbright's seat. Along with Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Kerry has the power to focus the national spotlight on a similar quagmire, the war in Afghanistan. And as the Obama administration just committed an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $775,000 per soldier every year, oversight hearings can't come soon enough.
There is no "end game" strategy for the war in Afghanistan. That is what a military official told President Obama last week, according to an NBC report cited by Think Progress' Faiz Shakir yesterday. In other words, the ultimate outcome for our military presence in Afghanistan is unclear, not just to the activists and bloggers who have been wrestling with this war at Get Afghanistan Right, but to those inside the Pentagon as well. If we have any chance of avoiding further catastrophe in the region, we better make damn sure we Rethink Afghanistan.
That is exactly what Brave New Foundation is calling for in a new campaign launched today. They will hold a series of debates on the issues surrounding this war in the coming weeks, and currently they're asking everyone to sign the petition urging Congressional oversight hearings like those held in 2007 regarding the Iraq war. Vice President Biden, who orchestrated the Iraq hearings as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said, "No foreign policy can be sustained in this country without the informed consent of the American people." Isn't informed public consent what we need now before committing more troops to Afghanistan?
