Deciding the right strategy begins
with asking the right question. When the White House was waltzing
McChrystal around trying to find a way to talk him out of his request
for more troops, I questioned the wisdom of applying the Petraeus
counterinsurgency strategy which worked in Iraq -- temporarily -- to
Afghanistan. Where, because the nation is 50% bigger, and in there is
no significant Afghan uprising against the Taliban as there was in Iraq
against al-Quaida, the strategy couldn’t work.
Since then, it’s become clear that the White House will try to
compromise McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops in favor of a
smaller buildup or no buildup at all.
There is no course more dangerous to the lives of our troops -- and
our future security -- than to do what President Obama clearly wants to
do: apply Lyndon Johnson’s failed brand of indecisive warfare to
Afghanistan.
In the opening pages of
We Were Soldiers Once, and Young, Joe
Galloway and retired General Hal Moore tell the story of Gen. Harold K.
Johnson, then army chief of staff, who drove to the White House to
resign in protest of President Johnson’s order that the Airmobile
Division go to Vietnam, making it an American war.
General Johnson believed that the deployment -- without a declaration
of emergency that meant a full-scale national effort to win -- was,
according to the book, “an act of madness.†But at the White House
gate, the general’s resolve failed him. He pinned his stars back on
his shoulders and drove back to the Pentagon. As Galloway and Moore
wrote, the change of mind haunted him for the rest of his days.
If President Obama decides to pare back McChrystal’s request for
reinforcements and a new strategy -- focused on the Afghan population
in the classic counterinsurgency mold -- both General McChrystal and
his boss, General David H. Petraeus, will face the same moment that
Harold Johnson did on July 28, 1965.
I never knew Harold Johnson and do not know Stanley McChrystal. I have
met David Petraeus many times and -- though I don’t know him as one
would know a friend -- I believe him to be a man of principle who would
not participate in a strategy he knows is doomed to fail, wasting many
young American lives in the process.
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President Obama apparently knows this, and
for that reason has been avoiding a decision on Afghanistan. He sees
the stories about the climbing number of casualties in Afghanistan, one
in the Washington
Post proclaiming Afghanistan “Almost a Lost
Cause.†His administration has blocked Republican efforts to obtain
congressional testimony by McChrystal and Petraeus on the Afghanistan
situation.
Petraeus hasn’t openly endorsed McChrystal’s request for more
troops, but McChrystal wouldn’t have gone forward without his private
endorsement.
Obama will craft some sort of compromise designed to buy the
generals’ support. They apparently anticipate that he’ll offer
something such as the full number of troops McChrystal requests but
only for a short time, probably one year. That’s the time in which
McChrystal’s 30 August report says we may lose Afghanistan to the
Taliban if we don’t revise our strategy and provide the resources to
implement it.
But seeing this moment coming, Petraeus and McChrystal have been
preparing the media battlefield. Failing to gain the president’s
attention, McChrystal took his argument to CBS’ “Sixty Minutesâ€
and to a think tank speech in London. Answering whether he’d
compromise for a smaller troop increase, McChrystal said, “The short
answer is: no. You have to navigate from where you are, not where you
wish to be. A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable
position is probably a short-sighted strategy."
Petraeus, too, made a very unusual statement. Last week, America’s
most highly-respected general said that our goals in Afghanistan will
have to be changed -- meaning adjusted downward - if the president
rejects the strategy revisions and increased resources he and
McChrystal say are needed.
The prospect of either McChrystal or Petraeus (or both) resigning poses
an enormous problem for Obama. His spending spree, the continued rise
in unemployment and the Obamacare mess in congress is reflected in
slipping poll numbers and rising public doubts about his ability to
govern. If McChrystal resigns, it will be devastating. If Petraeus
joins McChrystal in resignation, Obama may have created an opponent who
could defeat him in 2012.
Obama and his team should study carefully the last incident in which an
American general resigned on principle.
July 27, 1997 was a very different day than July 28, 1965. Air Force
Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogelman asked the Secretary of the Air
Force Sheila Widnall to relieve him of his duty and allow him to retire
a year before he was scheduled to do so. Fogelman -- who many
remember for his courageous stand against the senate on the Kelly Flinn
matter -- resigned over the refusal of Secretary Widnall to promote
Brig. Gen. Terry Schwalier.
Flinn -- a female B-52 pilot -- had been fired for lying to her
commanding officer about a love affair she’d had with the husband of
an enlisted woman. Attacked in a senate hearing over the firing,
Fogelman stood up to then-Sen. Trent Lott and insisted that she was
fired not for being a woman or having an illicit affair but because she
lied to her commander. Fogelman won that one.
But he lost when he insisted that Schwalier -- the commander of the
Saudi facility at which the al-Quida bombing of the Khobar Towers
killed 19 American servicemen -- was denied promotion. Fogelman, after
an investigation, determined that Schwalier did everything a commander
could have done to prevent it, but Widnall insisted someone be held
accountable. She chose Schwalier.
In a 1997 interview, Fogelman talked about his many frustrations with
the civilian leadership, ranging from fact-defying decisions on force
structure to Flinn to Schwalier.
Widnall’s decision on Schwalier was the last straw. Fogelman said,
“As chief of staff of the United States Air Force, charged with
providing military advice to the civilian leadership that the civilian
leadership did not value for whatever reason, I had become ineffective
as a spokesman. This was a crowd that took any kind of military advice
that ran counter to administration policy or desires as a sign of
disloyalty on the part of the person providing the advice. That was one
element; the other was based on what I had seen and the way the Khobar
Towers tragedy had been handled. I simply lost respect and confidence
in the leadership that I was supposed to be following.â€
McChrystal and Petraeus are guilty only of trying to answer the wrong
question.
McChrystal’s strategy -- derived to meet the goals President Obama
has set -- will require many years, perhaps decades, of U.S. forces
deployed in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. It is the wrong strategy
not because we should abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, but because
it is another adventure in nation-building which leaves us on the
strategic defensive fighting only the surrogates of the principal
enemy, the nations that sponsor terrorism.
But having answered Obama’s question to the best of their ability,
they will be -- if Obama denies them the strategy changes and troop
increases they need to do the job he’s defined for them -- in
precisely the same situation Fogelman was when he determined that he
had lost the confidence and respect of the leaders they are supposed to
follow.
Will Fogelman or Harold Johnson be the model that Petraeus and
McChrystal follow?
Ronald Fogelman set a very high standard every American general should
meet. I have no reason to expect that either McChrystal or Petraeus
will fail in that.
Cartoon by Brett Noel.
