Grim Honesty Among the Ground-Pounders
For grim honesty, skip those metaphor-wielding commanding generals so deeply invested in a war that they can neither admit to losing nor contemplate leaving. Look instead to the ground-pounders, the plain-speaking corporals and captains who have met that war face to face, up close and personal. Consider, for instance, a 2010 HBO documentary, The Battle for Marjah. Seven years ago, in a much larger military effort than the one presently being contemplated, U.S. troops joined with Afghan forces to secure the town of Marjah in Helmand Province in the opium-growing heart of the country.
The documentary followed a U.S. Marine unit, which fought valiantly to clear that town of the Taliban in accordance with the counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine then experiencing a revival under Petraeus and McChrystal. The goal was to rebuild its institutions and infrastructure so U.S. troops could ultimately leave. As usual, the Marines kicked ass: they cleared the town. But the price of holding it proved dear, while efforts to build a local Afghan government to replace them failed. Today, as much as 80% of Helmand Province is under Taliban control.
The documentary's harshest lessons come almost as visual asides. While Taliban insurgents fought with spirit, Afghan government forces, then as now, fought reluctantly. U.S. troops had to force them to enter and clear buildings. In one case, a Marine takes a rifle away from an Afghan soldier because the latter keeps pointing the muzzle at "friendly" forces. We witness Afghan troops holding a half-hearted ceremony to salute their government's flag after Marjah is "liberated." Meanwhile, the faces of ordinary Afghans alternate between beleaguered stoicism and thinly veiled hostility. Few appear to welcome their foreign liberators, whether U.S. or Afghan. (The Afghan government units, hailing from the north, were ethnically different and spoke another language.) An Afghan shown working with the Marines was assassinated soon after the U.S. withdrawal.
A tired Marine corporal put it all in perspective: for him, the Afghan War was a "mind-f*ck." At least he rotated out sooner or later. The Afghan people have had no such luck. To mix metaphors and wars, they were stuck in the big muddy of their "petri dish."
Let's turn to another ground-pounding Marine of more recent vintage, Captain Joshua Waddell. A decorated combat veteran of the war, he penned an article for this month's Marine Corps Gazette in which he lambastes the U.S. military for its "self-delusion." He writes:
"It is time that we, as professional military officers, accept the fact that we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Objective analysis of the U.S. military's effectiveness in these wars can only conclude that we were unable to translate tactical victory into operational and strategic success."
Supporting Waddell's "lost war" conclusion is General Nicholson's own testimony, which cited the same old problems in the Afghan military: too many "ghost" (fake) soldiers -- others, often commanders, pocket their salaries -- indicating widespread and endemic corruption; unmotivated leadership, made worse by crippling shortages of skilled junior officers and noncommissioned officers; and too many unmanned Afghan checkpoints. (Those "ghost" soldiers, so good at funneling money to their creators, turn out to be bad indeed at securing checkpoints.)
Seeing Only What We Want to See
Given such a grim assessment, what difference, you might wonder, would just a few thousand more American troops make, when it comes to tipping the Afghan "stalemate" in Washington's favor? In fact, General Nicholson's humble request is undoubtedly only an opening wedge in the Trumpian door through which future, far higher troop requests are then likely to enter.
Asked by Senator Lindsey Graham whether he could do the job in Afghanistan with 50,000 troops, which would quadruple coalition forces there, Nicholson answered with a "yes"; when asked about 30,000 U.S. and other NATO troops, he was less sure. With that 50,000 number now out there in Washington, does anyone doubt that Nicholson or his successor(s) will sooner or later press the president to launch the next Afghan surge? How else to counter all those terrorist strands in that petri dish? (This, of course, represents de'j vu all over again, given the Obama surge that added 30,000 troops to 70,000 already in Afghanistan and yet failed to yield sustainable results.)
That a few thousand troops could somehow reverse the present situation and ensure progress toward victory is obviously a fantasy of the first order, one that barely papers over the reality of these last years: that Washington has been losing the war in Afghanistan and will continue to do so, no matter how it fiddles with troop levels.
Whether Soviet or American, whether touting communism or democracy, outside troops to Afghan eyes are certainly just that: outsiders, foreigners. They represent an invasive presence. For many Afghans, the "terrorist strands" in the petri dish are not only the Taliban or other Islamist sects; they are us. We are among those who must be avoided or placated in the struggle to stay alive -- along with government forces, seen by some Afghans as collaborators to the occupiers (that's us again). In short, we and our putative Afghan allies are in that same petri dish, thrashing about and causing harm, driving the very convergence of terrorist forces we say we are seeking to avoid.
All the metaphors and images do, however, suggest one thing -- that Afghanistan isn't real to American leaders, much as Vietnam wasn't to an earlier generation of them. It's not grasped as a sophisticated culture with a long and rich history. Those in charge see it and its people only through the reductive and distorting lens of their never-ending war and then reduce what little they see to terms that play well to politicians and the public back home. Stalemate? We can break it. Platform? We can firm it up and launch attacks from it. Petri dish? We can contain it, then control it, and finally eradicate it with our lethal medicines. What they refuse to do, however, is widen that lens, deepen their vision, and see the Afghan people as a richly complex society that Washington will never (and should never try to) dominate and reshape into our image of a country.
The question now is what President Donald (we're going to win!) Trump will do. If past is prologue, he will end up approving Nicholson's request, in part because his leading generals, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, are so psychically and professionally linked to the Afghan War. (Mattis oversaw that war while serving as head of U.S. Central Command, McMaster held a command post in Kabul, and Kelly's son was killed there while on patrol.)
Yet if Trump gives Nicholson the troops he wants -- and then more of the same -- he will merely be echoing the failed policies of his predecessors, while prolonging a war that will prove endless as long as foreign forces continue to meddle in Afghan affairs. His will then be a fate foretold in a war in which Washington's greatest foe has always been self-deception.
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