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I imagine few of you know that at a similar decision point President John Kennedy faced with respect to Vietnam, he sent the commandant of the Marines, Gen. David Shoup, to Vietnam with instructions "to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him." Kennedy placed more trust in Shoup than in his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to give him the straight scoop, so to speak.
When he returned, Gen. Shoup reportedly told Kennedy that, unless he was prepared to use a million men in a major drive, the U.S. should pull out before the war got beyond control. Kenned had already started to do so when he was killed.
You may have noticed that another Marine, Gen. Charles Krulak, who served as commandant from 1995 to 1999, recently expressed "total agreement" with columnist George Will's assessment in his recent op-ed, "Time to get out of Afghanistan."
Sounding very much like his commandant predecessor, Gen. Shoup, Gen. Krulak emphasized that effective counterinsurgency operations would require "hundreds of thousands" additional troops and that our military could not support such a "surge."
Speaking more generally, Gen. Krulak, asked, "What in Afghanistan is deemed in our nation's vital interest"Who is the enemy?" Krulak added that "No desired end state has ever been clearly articulated and no strategy formulated that would lead us to achieve even an ill defined end state."
Gen. Krulak's points are well taken. I have come to see that my speechwriter's clever alliteration "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda" falls far short of an actual strategy for Afghanistan--the more so, inasmuch as most of what is left of al-Qaeda's local leadership is now in Pakistan.
We'll Know Our Goal When We See It
Also troubling is the public reply given by special envoy Richard Holbrooke a few weeks ago, when he was asked at a friendly think tank about our specific goal in Afghanistan.
Holbrooke answered, "We'll know it when we see it." With that kind of goal, I guess I should not have been surprised that Holbrooke also was unable to deliver on my promise on March 27 that there would be "metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable."
This is not satisfactory. So I am sending in a Marine. I am asking Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was CENTCOM commander from 1997 to 2000, to do what President Kennedy asked Gen. Shoup to do--not in Vietnam, this time, but in Afghanistan.
Will he, like Shoup, say a million men will be needed to accomplish anything useful? I will know when Gen. Zinni reports back to me next month. Meanwhile, as you will understand, I will not approve any escalation in Afghanistan or the sending of any additional troops there.
You will hear loud complaints that my reluctance to go the route of foolish consistency will make our country less safe. To that I say simply that this is not what our intelligence is telling me. The adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have made our country less, not more safe.
I do not wish to follow the example of my predecessor who attempted to make a virtue of never changing his mind.
Wooden Heads
In her classic book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, historian Barbara Tuchman described this mindset:
"Wooden-headedness assesses a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs " acting according to the wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts."
