30,000 More Troops To Afghanistan

Writing at the "Daily Beast," veteran foreign affairs watcher Leslie Gelb says he has the inside track on the Afghanistan moves President Obama will announce on Tuesday. Gen. Stanley McCrystal will get at least 30,000 more U.S. troops with an option for 10,000 more in a year if Obama is satisfied with our progress. Our goal will shift from destroying to "dismantling and degrading" al-Qaeda, with a diplomatic component of working more closely with all the nations in the region so that terrorists will have nowhere to hide and rebuild.

Gelb likes what he hears, though he has one big concern:

It’s unclear at the moment just how tough Obama will be with Pakistan. In effect, Islamabad has provided a safe haven for Afghan Taliban for more than a decade as a hedge against Indian encroachments into Afghanistan. As a result, Pakistan urges the United States to stay and fight in Afghanistan to keep the Indians out, but provides succor to the Taliban to hedge against an American withdrawal. So, the Pakistanis want us to stay in Afghanistan and help the Taliban to kill our troops. It’s hard to see how Obama’s new strategy can work unless Pakistan’s leaders are brought to see for themselves the terrible consequences (the strengthening of the Pakistani Taliban extremists) of pursuing this duplicitous course.

"Everybody Ought To Shut Up"

Though the Obama campaign was famous for its imperturbability and also its discipline when it came to dealings with the media, the Obama White House's private deliberations about an important national security question are essentially being conducted in public as weekly and sometimes daily stories are leaked purporting to represent the mind of the President and his advisers. If this is by design as far as the White House is concerned, it doesn't appeal to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and a former NSC adviser in his own right. On a flight to Wisconsin yesterday, Gates said he was appalled by the leaking and hinted he would fire Pentagon leakers if he finds them (Who you gonna call?: The Plumbers). He added, "Everybody ought to just shut up."

The New York Times, which reported Gates' outburst, is also carrying this story, in which we learn that the ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Army Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, sent a cable to Washington opposing sending more U.S. troops, as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for fear that the Afghan regime will become too dependent on the U.S. for security. It seems likely that Eikenberry, who has advanced degrees from Stanford and Harvard, is remembering the deepening of South Vietnam's dependency on the U.S. that occurred after President Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered with our acquiescence in 1962 and President Johnson massively escalated our military involvement in 1965.

As we already know, Vietnam is also on the mind of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The Times article hints that McChrystal took Eikenberry to the woodshed, getting him to soften his stance in subsequent cables. During a meeting in Kabul, according to the Times:

General McChrystal did not refer to the cable directly, but specifically challenged General Eikenberry’s conclusions, according to one official familiar with the meeting. General McChrystal, he said, said that no alternatives had been offered besides “the helicopter on the roof of the embassy,” a reference to the hasty American withdrawal from Saigon in 1975.

It's a pregnant analogy. It suggests that McChrystal fears another U.S. humiliation if we withdraw hastily and also, knowing the ruthlessness of the Taliban, that he has a pretty good idea of the fate that would likely befall anyone in Afghanistan associated with the U.S. intervention. Obviously Obama wants to avoid both that outcome as well as the kind of lavish, open-ended commitment that would essentially turn Afghanistan into a U.S. protectorate. All the news accounts make clear that this is the line he's trying to walk.

It's a fascinating challenge for a President: Believing he has the opportunity to make a discerning decision that takes Vietnam's lessons into account without being obsessed with them. One lesson he should not neglect is Lyndon Johnson's own unavailing efforts to control a fluid and unpredictable military and political environment by his daily micromanagement of the Vietnam war. Once Obama finishes agonizing, he had better get out of the way.

As I've said before, I'm glad Obama is taking his time on the policy reappraisal. But Gates is right about the leaks. They are beginning to make the President look silly and even weak. For instance:

At a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday...Mr. Obama picked up on General Eikenberry’s arguments about growing Afghan dependence, according to a senior official. The president, he said, was far more assertive than in previous sessions, pressing his advisers about the wisdom of four proposals for adding troops. The change in his tone, from listening to challenging, was palpable, officials said.

Next they'll be counting the number of times he arches his eyebrows. This sounds like a Biden dove trying to demonstrate to the press and public that the Clinton hawks are losing favor with the prince. Once I would've thought that someone authoritative was trying to signal what the President was really thinking, but it appears that the White House may just be incompetent, at least in this area. While Obama takes his responsibilities in this weightiest of matters seriously, those around him may not take them seriously enough to enable him to do his deciding, undeciding, and redeciding (as Ray Price used to say about RN) in private. For Presidents, Hamlet is not a good paradigm.

Drinking Deep At McSorley's

The imperative of making the right decision in Afghanistan is contributing to a surprising new look by experts at the endgame in Vietnam from 1973-75 -- that, plus the attention that Gen. Stanley McChrystal and other Pentagon officials are giving Lewis Sorley's book A Better War. Sorley argues that, thanks to the gains we made under President Nixon, South Vietnam might have survived if only Congress hadn't slashed non-personnel aid while it pursued Nixon over Vietnam. Sorley's book gets a respectful hearing this week from Evan Thomas in "Newsweek":

Not until Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced Gen. William Westmoreland as U.S. commander in 1968 did the Americans smarten up and begin to fight a true counterinsurgency, focusing on protecting the population by a strategy of "clear and hold." Instead of shoving aside the South Vietnamese Army, Abrams built up the local forces until they could stand and fight largely on their own-as they did in 1972, repulsing North Vietnam's Easter Offensive with the aid of American airstrikes.

But by then, as Sorley laments...it was too late. American public opinion had turned. In 1973, President Nixon and the North Vietnamese signed a peace treaty that allowed Hanoi to keep 150,000 troops in South Vietnam, just waiting on orders to march. In 1974, breaking Nixon's promises of continued support to Saigon, the U.S. Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Without logistical support or air cover, the South Vietnamese Army collapsed in 1975 and the communists swept into Saigon. Sorley quotes one of General Abrams's closest colleagues, Gen. Bruce Palmer, as saying that Abrams "died [of cancer in 1974] feeling that we could have won the war. He felt we were on top of it in 1971, then lost our way." Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador to Saigon who worked with Abrams to turn the war around, felt the same: "We eventually defeated ourselves," Bunker said.

Of course those May 1972 air strikes didn't materialize out of the thin air over Hanoi. They were ordered at considerable political risk by Richard Nixon. He did it again as peace talks faltered in December, generating heat among congressional opponents that made the Watergate firestorm the following year burn hotter than it would have otherwise. As Thomas notes, some historians dispute whether Nixon and Abrams could really have saved South Vietnam if Watergate hadn't occurred or Congress hadn't interfered. But does anyone really think the U.S. and South Vietnam couldn't have defeated Hanoi under any circumstances? Evans writes:

[T]he revisionists' view of Vietnam does shed some light on the issues facing Obama about war leadership. The most surprising guidance Vietnam may have to offer is not that wars of this kind are unwinnable-which is clearly the common wisdom in America-but that they can produce victories if presidents resist the temptation to fight wars halfway or on the cheap. As President Eisenhower liked to say, if you fight, "you must fight to win."

In an accompanying "Newsweek" article, Sen. John Kerry, former head of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, firmly rebukes the revisionists, though even he adds, with a nod in Sorley's direction:

Yes, we adopted smarter tactics near the end, but by then the die was cast.

From grudging concessions such as these may well come a new appreciation of Richard Nixon as commander-in-chief.

The Soldier's Way

A general's son, John Eisenhower, believes it is meet and right that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has been "gently chastised" for speaking out on Afghanistan.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 24

From one of Andrew Sullivan's correspondents, writing about Obama administration war councils that the writer thinks don't include enough insights from Gen. McChrystal and others with direct experience with conditions on the ground in Afghanistan:

I just have an uneasy feeling that this is too similar to the policy discussions Johnson went through, except those were mainly out of public view and these are not. The whole notion that we can speed up the training of the Afghan armed forces and this will do the job is unrealistic—another numbers game. I guess not being in the meetings puncturing balloons is what is really frustrating me. That and the fact that nobody seems to factor in our moral obligation to the Afghan people. We abandoned them twice. Will this be the third time? What does that say about us? It seems more convenient to equate [President] Karzai with the Afghan people. Maybe it will all come out for the best—but the process, and what I see from the outside being discussed so far, doesn’t pass my gut check.

The outcome of the Afghan struggle is ultimately going to be determined not by our unilateral actions or geopolitical moves, but by whom the Afghan people wind up supporting, even reluctantly. Vietnam—Lesson One.

I'm having difficulty discovering my sense of our moral obligation to the Afghan people above and beyond the obligation all wealthy, powerful peoples have toward those who aren't. We're at war because Afghanistan's Taliban government nurtured and empowered a terrorist movement that mounted a devastating attack against the United States. President Bush's 2001 intervention was for our sake, not Afghanistan's. If we had focused more single-mindedly on the Taliban rather than going to war in Iraq as well, the situation might be better today, or perhaps not. Afghans are famously resistant to foreign influence and manipulation. As President Bush once understood, nation- and democracy-building should not be the goal of U.S. military and foreign policy. As far as I'm concerned, Obama should have just one question for his panel of experts, whoever they are: "What's the best way to decrease the chances that another terrorist movement or attack against us or our interests emanates from Afghanistan?"

MacChrystal?

David Greenberg on those who compare Gen. McChrystal's public dialogue with President Obama to Douglas MacArthur's confrontation with Harry Truman:

Like most historical analogies bandied about in the media, this one is overdrawn. As serious as it is, the war in Afghanistan hardly approaches the Korean War in its magnitude or impact. McChrystal, for his part, has nothing like MacArthur's prestige, and his testing of Obama's supremacy falls well short of MacArthur's defiance. Yet the story of Truman and MacArthur remains useful to remember—not because it directly mirrors today's but because it created a dynamic in which subsequent presidents felt unduly constrained by the prospect of military commanders undermining them.