Trump's Frustration with "the Blob" Boils Over

Toward the end of his second term, President Obama and his closest advisers took to calling the foreign policy establishment/military industrial complex "the Blob." They were deeply frustrated that the "experts" refused to offer them any options to meaningfully reduce US involvement in foreign wars. Hence Obama's great satisfaction the one time he stood up to the Blobsters, refusing to order attacks after Assad crossed his "red line" in Syria.

And now Trump, it seems, shares his predecessor's frustrations. I of course think that withdrawing US troops from Syria and Afghanistan is a great idea. I do understand that it is better to work with one's generals in arranging these things rather than just announcing them over twitter, but sources are telling the Times that Trump tried to get the military to give him withdrawal timetables and they simply refused.

Some former Trump advisers attributed the sudden nature of the announcement to Mr. Trump’s frustration with generals who resisted him at every turn when he tried to set a timetable for getting out of Syria and Afghanistan — something, his supporters point out, that he had promised to do during the 2016 campaign.

“The apparatus slow-rolled him until he just said enough and did it himself,” said Stephen K. Bannon, who clashed with the generals over Afghanistan when he served as the president’s chief strategist in 2017. “Not pretty, but at least done.”

So there's one thing for Trump; he thinks that the President should set our military policy, not a lot of generals and ambassadors, and is willing to act on his convictions in a way that a more cautious and mainstream leader probably would not.

The Spy Who Came Home

Fascinating article by Ben Taub at the New Yorker about Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case office in the Middle East who quit and became a beat cop in his home town of Savannah:

He joined the agency during the early days of America’s war on terror, one of the darkest periods in its history, and spent almost a decade running assets in Afghanistan, Jordan, and Iraq. But over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.” In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise—the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad—was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

Of his time in Afghanistan he says,

Tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.

They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”

The assessments of field operatives carried little weight with officials in Washington. “They were telling us, ‘Too many people have died here for us just to leave,’ ” Skinner recalled. “ ‘But we don’t want to give the Taliban a timeline.’ So, forever? Is that what you’re going for? They fucking live there, dude.”

Skinner spent a year in Afghanistan, often under fire from Taliban positions, and returned several times in the next decade. He kept a note pinned to his ballistic vest that read “Tell my wife it was pointless.”

Ground Broken for the World's Most Dangerous Pipeline

The world's latest experiment in "pipeline diplomacy" is finally underway in Afghanistan, more than twenty years after it was first proposed. Groundbreaking took place this morning in Herat for the TAPI gas pipeline, so-called because it crosses Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. This route was originally envisioned because Russia kept cutting off shipments of gas from Turkmenistan through its pipelines, and the obvious route across Iran had its own share of political difficulties. (Especially that it would open a big hole in the sanctions then in place against Iran because of its nuclear program.)

But if you're wondering how a pipeline across Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas could possibly be safer and more reliable than any other imaginable route anywhere, well, a lot of people agree with you. Pressure has continued to build this line because the world would really like Afghanistan to have some economic alternative to opium poppies, because people would really like to do something for Afghanistan besides drop bombs on it, because peace factions in Pakistan and India really like the idea, because Turkmenistan really hates depending on Russia, and because India's potential demand for natural gas is enormous. Whether all of this will be enough to see the line through to completion remains to be seen.

And if it is built, what will happen to the $400 million a year in transit fees this is expected to earn for Afghanistan? Seems likely to me it will disappear into a nexus of corrupt dealing. But maybe that would actually help; I mean, it seems better to me for Kabul and the Taliban to make a back room deal dividing that money than to keep shooting and bombing each other. In the longer term this could lead to the development of smaller gas fields in Afghanistan itself, since both the proximity of the pipeline and the evidence that the warring factions can be bribed into partial peace would encourage investment.

I'm not especially hopeful, but when it comes to Afghanistan anything positive is worth cheering.

Trump Lets the Generals Have It

The latest leak from within the sieve of the Trump administration allowed NBC news to publish a remarkably detailed account of a top secret meeting of the National Security Council in mid July. It seems the point of the meeting was to get Trump to endorse the Pentagon's plan to send 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan and commit to years more of combat.

But Trump wasn't having it. He lambasted the generals for failing, saying "We're not winning, we're losing." He said that Gen. John Nicholson, currently in command in Afghanistan, should be fired.

Trump had recently spoken to some regular soldiers who told him the war was a disaster, and he compared Afghanistan to a troubled Manhattan restaurant where, he said, the waiters knew what was going on but the owners didn't have a clue.

I love this; one thing about Trump is that he is not afraid to say what he thinks to anybody. But can he actually have any impact on the situation? He may not like the Pentagon's plan, but does he have any clue what to do instead? Do any of his close advisers? In the end some decision has to be made, and if nobody can come up with an alternative to the Pentagon's strategy, that will be chosen by default.

Personally I would have pulled out of Afghanistan a decade ago, figuring that if the Afghans want a democracy they can damn well fight for it themselves. Keeping 10,000 Americans in country at great expense just seems to be prolonging the stalemate. I wonder what they really think in the Pentagon. Do they think that with some level of troops and planes they could finish off the Taliban and win the war? Do they wish they had 200,000 men but know they won't get them? Or would they rather walk away? It's puzzling, really. What do we think we are doing?

But I'm glad to see Trump calling bullshit on somebody.

Fraud and False Identity in Afghanistan, and Colonial North America

Amusing story in the Times about a man who posed as an Afghan government official so successfully that he got himself flown around the country in a government helicopter, protected by elite troops. Afghanistan, a place where most of whatever records there were have been blown up or burned in 30 years of war, has a huge problem with fraud and false identity. Sometimes this is tragic, as when men who claim to be Taliban peace emissaries turn out to be suicide bombers. Other times it is farce:

One shopkeeper made it as far as the presidential palace posing as the Taliban’s deputy leader and was rewarded with cash for a willingness to talk peace.

This reminds me of many stories I have read about colonial America. A whole string of Europeans showed up in the New World claiming to be everything from princes to doctors of philosophy, and how was anyone to check? If they could act the part, these men might find a willing reception in many corners of the colonies. A Swiss land speculator who called himself the Baron von Graffenried left a trail through the middle colonies, eventually earning a place in history as co-founder of New Bern, North Carolina. Some of the first German churches in America, from South Carolina to New Jersey, were taken in by a preacher who called himself Carl Rudolf and claimed to be the rightful Prince of Wuerttemberg, getting entertained by each German community along the road before stealing cash or jewelry and disappearing into the night, one step ahead of news about his crimes.

In a slow-moving traditional world identities are established by tight-knit communities where everybody knows everybody else's business. In the 20th century identities came to be established by governments, with records and passports and ID cards. But where there are neither stable communities nor rigorous bureaucracies, chaos and fraud often reign.

Corruption, Realism, and Rebuilding Afghanistan

I've seen several stories like this one over the past two or three years:

American officials received persistent, stark warnings that Afghanistan’s entrenched culture of official corruption would undermine their efforts to rebuild that country after the West’s military invasion 15 years ago, according to recently declassified diplomatic cables and internal government reports.

The diversion of Afghan resources and Western aid for private gain would, the public and private reports all said, drain vitally needed funds from the country’s reconstruction and alienate its citizenry. That would in turn fuel renewed public support for the West’s enemy—the Taliban, whose social brutality notoriously included draconian punishments for official corruption.

But the U.S. officials in charge of rebuilding the country largely failed to heed these alarms, according to their own assessments. “The ultimate point of failure for our efforts,” said Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador from 2011 to 2012, in a newly released interview with a team of official auditors, is Afghanistan’s corruption.

Suppose we all agree that corruption in Hamid Karzai's government and other Afghan power centers ultimately made it impossible to create a stable, more-or-less democratic Afghanistan.

What was any American supposed to do about it? Blaming American decision makers for "ignoring" Afghan corruption seems ridiculous to me. What else could they have done? The US put a huge effort into building Karzai up as Afghanistan's legitimate ruler, partly because there just wasn't anyone else available to fill that role. One reason Karzai had as much success as he did was that he was very much  plugged into the traditional Afghan power structure. And that power structure was and probably always has been corrupt. I have never seen any credible alternate scenario to going all-in with the only Afghan friends we had.

Various American agencies came up with various anti-corruption plans, which were never really implemented. They were never implemented because 1) Karzai refused to cooperate, and 2) implementing them would have meant taking serious action against the very people we needed to fight the Taliban. I am reminded of a point David has made several times in the comments here, that small client countries can be very skilled at manipulating their great power backers. Any time we tried to interfere in the way Karzai and his friends were operating, he went on a nationalist tear, delivering anti-US speeches and making it clear he would rather lose US support than accept American dictates. Maybe he was bluffing, but really our leverage was very limited. Ultimately we cared more about fighting the Taliban than Karzai did; he would be very happy to let them rule the southern half of the country and export as much opium and terrorism as they want in return for control of Kabul and the north.

The notion that we could have simultaneously fought the Taliban, built up an Afghan government friendly to our interests, and completely remade the political culture of Afghanistan is the worst kind of neocolonial hubris. Spare me this sort of armchair moralizing.

In Kabul, the Walls Have Eyes

Afghan artists have painted several walls in central Kabul with giant eyes and the words, in Dari and Pashto,

Corruption cannot be hidden from God or from the people.

A cool project, although I have to wonder if corruption at the level of Afghanistan can be fought by any sort of protest.

This is an important reminder to outsiders that Afghan politics looks different from inside. We see the Taliban as a regime of such pure evil that any alternative is better. But Afghans are focused on practical issues like corruption and the economy, and the U.S.-supported "democracy" is failing pretty badly by any such measure.

It is also worth noting that despite everything, Kabul still has a community of people who identify as artists and act politically through art.

The Islamic State vs. The Taliban

Today's confounding news from Afghanistan:

Throughout the month, fighters claiming allegiance to the Islamic State’s caliph had been attacking veteran Taliban units south and east of Jalalabad, the provincial capital. In one district, Islamic State loyalists have replaced the Taliban as the dominant insurgent power, and elsewhere they have begun making inroads in Taliban territory, one tribal elder, Mohammad Siddiq Mohmand, said in an interview. . . .

In places where militants in Afghanistan have adopted the Islamic State creed of embracing atrocity and ruling by fear, their strategy has been to aggressively attack the Taliban, just as in Syria where the group early on picked fights with more established units affiliated with Al Qaeda. And the evidence so far this spring suggests the influence of the Islamic State is growing. . . . Islamic State-inspired militants have created a significant shift: The Taliban insurgency, even as it advances against the Western-backed government, is having to wrestle with an insurgent threat of its own.

After more than a decade of remaining remarkably unified around the elusive figure of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban are splintering to a degree not seen before, as hundreds of insurgents have shifted their loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State and self-declared caliph of the Muslim world.

What are to to think of this? Celebrate that our enemies are fighting each other? Worry that if the Islamic State defeats the Taliban, they will be even worse? Worry, more existentially, that the only people who will stand up to Taliban fanatics are motivated by an even more extreme ideology? Scratch our heads and think about something else?

Robert Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar

88 Days to Kandahar: a CIA Diary (2015) shares its main fault with many other memoirs by public officials: the author comes across as such a wise, clever and disinterested hero that you have to wonder how much of it is really true. But even so it is a fascinating look at a remarkable series of events, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and then the slow dissipation of that victory. As Grenier's title reminds us, it was only 88 days from 9-11 to Hamid Karzai's triumphal entry into Kandahar on December 7, which put an end to the first phase of the Afghan war. This was a remarkable achievement that I and many others considered well-nigh impossible at the time, and Grenier had as big a part in it as any American, so his story is worth considering.

Grenier, a career CIA man, was head of the station in Islamabad, Pakistan from 1999 to 2002. This put him on the front lines of conflict as our efforts to catch Osama bin Laden steadily intensified over the course of 2000 and 2001 and then went into high gear after the towers came crashing down. Because he had already been trying for years to get the Taliban to give up bin Laden, or else to engineer their overthrow, Grenier had a clear idea of which would be required to do this. In his telling he actually wrote a cable that became the basis of the American war plan: let the many anti-Taliban Afghans do the main fighting, supported by US weapons, cash, and air power, sending in no US soldiers beyond special forces spotters needed to call in air strikes.

Of anti-Taliban Afghans, there were in Grenier's mind two kinds: those within the Taliban's own Pashtun ethnic group, by far the largest in Afghanistan, and those from the assortment of other ethnicities that dominate the northern part of the country. For a several years civil war had raged in Afghanistan between the Taliban and a group called the Northern Alliance, which by September 2001 clung to power only in the northern mountains. While many Americans wanted to make the Northern Alliance the center of our plans, Grenier was vehemently opposed to this. Because the Northern Alliance was made up almost entirely of non-Pashtuns, it would never be accepted as a legitimate government by Pashtuns, who made up 50 to 60 percent of Afghanistan's people. Also, the Northern Alliance had been supported for years by India and Iran, enemies of Pakistan. Pakistan had always been the main international supporter of the Taliban. Grenier did not believe the Taliban could be defeated if Pakistan did not help, and Pakistan would not help put clients of India and Iran into power.

Grenier could not stop the Pentagon from rushing support to the Northern Alliance, and with help from massive US bombing attacks they broke out of the mountains and began to advance on Kabul. Meanwhile Grenier and his CIA colleagues desperately tried to get some sort of revolt started among the Pashtuns. Some of this was quite farcical. Grenier had long conversations with one Taliban commander, trying to persuade him to overthrow Mullah Omar (the Taliban's blind leader) and drive the al Qaeda Arabs out of the country. The commander eventually said, "Your offer is very interesting, I will have to talk it over with Mullah Omar." Grenier realized, he says, that although the Taliban commanders were brave in battle they were terrified of facing a future without Omar's guidance, and the CIA was never able to induce any significant Taliban leader to turn against him. Of other Pashtun "leaders" willing to accept CIA aid there were very many, but most of them were useless boasters. Only two ended up having any significance, Hamid Karzai and Gul Agha, the former governor of Kandahar. Both of these men were allowed by the Pakistanis to enter Afghanistan at the head of perhaps a hundred armed followers each. Supported by US airstrikes, called in by special forces spotters, they advanced toward the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Karzai from the north and Gul Agha from the east. Grenier's account of these advances is bizarre. Neither commander ever had more than about 150 loyal soldiers, but as they advanced they were regularly joined by up to a thousand locals whose tribal sheikhs had decided to turn against the Taliban. Thus reinforced they would march on for a while until they entered a new district, at which one set of temporary followers would melt away -- taking with them new AK-47s supplied by the US and Pakistan -- and a new set would gather, necessitating a new shipment of guns. The Taliban, says Grenier, were paralyzed, unable to agree on a response. When they did manage to assemble a force they kept sending them into battle in tight columns of vehicles, easy prey for American planes.

Thus Karzai and Gul Agha drove the Taliban from their stronghold, overthrowing the rulers of a nation of 20 million people at the head of only a few hundred soldiers.

As to what happened later, Grenier has a very interesting take. He argues that the Taliban were not really completely defeated. They had simply suffered such severe losses in such a short time that they were willing to step aside. (This is the medieval attitude toward the role of violence in politics I wrote about here.) They handed their Arab friends over to the US and accepted Karzai as the national leader, but they did not expect to be punished for their past deeds. In fact they thought they would still be part of Afghanistan's power structure going forward. Most Pashtuns had never really loved the Taliban and were glad to see the backs of bin Laden's arrogant Arabs, but they had no particular loyalty to Karzai and wanted the Americans gone as soon as possible. However, the Americans and Karzai (who hated the Taliban for killing several members of his family) treated the Taliban as if they had been completely beaten. For example, several Taliban leaders were arrested by the Americans or the Pakistanis and spent years at Guantanamo; these included the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, who swears to this day that Karzai promised him immunity if he switched sides. George W. Bush promised in public many times that we would "never negotiate" with the Taliban, which made it all but impossible to integrate any Taliban elements into the new state.  Since the Taliban's organization was still largely intact and they were still heavily armed, this attempt to humiliate and exclude them led very quickly to the armed insurgency that continues. Many other Pashtuns found that in practice Karzai's government was no better than the Taliban's, so they had (and have) no interest in fighting for him and have tried to sit out the US-Taliban war.

The Afghan war was initially so successful, says Grenier, because its aims and methods were strictly limited. It failed because the US refused to accept that limited victory and pushed for something much more grand and complete:

Immediately after 9/11, in  decisions in which I played some role, we sensibly limited the means we would employ in pursuit of our goals those that would and could be achieved by Afghans, knowing that only those could be sustained. Our current abandonment of Afghanistan is the project of a subsequent colossal overreach, from 2005 onward, which ultimately saw the deployment of 100,000 American troops, supplemented by another 40,000 from NATO and allied nations, and the expenditure, at our peak of some $100 billion a year.

In the process, we overwhelmed a primitive country, with a largely illiterate population, a tiny agrarian economy, a tribal social structure, and nascent national institutions. We triggered massive corruption through our profligacy; convinced a substantial number of Afghans that we were, in fact, occupiers; and facilitated the resurgence of the Taliban. For all the billions spent and lives lot, there is little to show, and most of that will not long survive our departure. If there is a principal reason for that catastrophic lapse in collective judgment, it is that we decided, in typically American fashion, that failure was not an option. If Afghans were transparently unable to make of their country what we believed it needed to be in order to achieve our notion of victory, then by God we would do it for them.

Of course we did not. Revolutionizing Afghanistan proved beyond our capabilities, or at least beyond what we were willing to do on top of the even larger commitment to Iraq. (Like every other book I have read about the Afghan war, Grenier's emphasizes that once the invasion of Iraq got under way our efforts in Afghanistan were crippled by diversions of money, equipment, personnel, and especially attention.) This combination of overreach in our aims with failure of will, says Grenier, has been disastrous for Afghanistan and even more for Pakistan, which has suffered terribly from violence spilling across the border. As for our original goal of fighting terrorism, we have failed utterly; terrorism is a worse problem than ever, and terrorist safe havens multiply across the region.

The contrast between our initial rapid triumph in Afghanistan and the slow, sordid unraveling of that  victory is somber. The unraveling was accompanied by electoral politics in the US, controversies over torture (which Grenier makes a lame attempt to justify), war scares between India and Pakistan, bureaucratic infighting, and many other catastrophes. But ultimately it represents a failure to admit that the world is not ours to control.

Costs

The Marshall Plan cost $12.7 billion, and some people think that investment saved much of western Europe from communist or fascist uprisings and civil war. Adjusted for inflation this comes to about $115 billion in 2014 dollars.

So far we have spent $107.5 billion on the reconstruction of Afghanistan, and we are planning to keep spending billions a year.

What We Accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan

Retired Army lieutenant general Daniel Bolger, discussing his new book, Why We Lost:

“We’ve basically installed authoritarian dictators.” The U.S. wanted to keep about 10,000 troops in Iraq post-2011...and a similar sized force is being debated for Afghanistan once the U.S. combat role formally ends at the end of 2014. “You could have gone to that plan in 2002 in Afghanistan, and 2003 or ’04 in Iraq, and you wouldn’t have had an outcome much worse than what we’ve had,” Bolger says.

So, twelve years of fighting, a trillion dollars spent, 5,000 men lost, pretty much for nothing. I hate to mention it, but the most prominent person saying in 2003 that we should just install dictators and get out was Donald Rumsfeld. He was overruled by people who wanted to revolutionize Iraq and energize Arab democracy, but would his Ahmad Challabi plan have been any worse than what we ended up with?

Steve McCurry in Afghanistan

A wonderful slideshow at Yahoo. Above, Kuchi nomads at evening prayers, 1992.

The Hazrat Ali Mosque in Mazar i Sharif, 1992.

Mujahadeen in the Hindu Kush, 1985.

Farmer on a winding path, 2006. Many more here. Some of McCurry's most famous images here.

Voting in Afghanistan

I am not afraid of Taliban threats. We will die one day anyway. I want my vote to be a slap in the face of the Taliban.

--Leila Neyazi, 48-year-old Afghan housewife. (AFP)

When a War Drags on for Twelve Years. . . .

Back in 2001, just about everybody in America supported intervening in Afghanistan. My position at the time was that while I didn't expect it to go very well, I understood that it was inevitable -- the Taliban were sheltering people who had made war on America, and we were not going to stand for that. But when you let a war drag on for more than a decade with no resolution, even a war that started with clear and defensible motives, eventually even Americans will turn against it.

What we should have done, I think, is make some kind of big push in 2004-2005 to get the Taliban on the run and then "declare victory and get out." But we didn't, and now we are going to pull out of a nation on the edge of civil war, collapse, and a Taliban return to power.

Taliban Art Criticism, or, Pink Balloons as Weapons of Satan

Sometimes it all makes me wonder:

The official Taliban website has published an article criticising an art project in which 10,000 pink balloons were given away for free in Kabul, saying the event encouraged un-Islamic behaviour. Under the headline "Was it a balloon show or a mini-skirt show?", the piece said that the conceptual artwork was a trick to promote Western values among the young Afghan volunteers who helped hand out the balloons. "The West is using different techniques to promote their culture in Afghanistan, sometimes they do it in an undercover way," the author, Qari Habib, wrote in Pashto in the critique published on Sunday. "Some girls were without headscarves, with tight jeans and tops on, and even with mini-skirts on the streets. The boys were also dressed in Western-style outfits. "After distributing some balloons, they wandered around Kabul aiming to break the culture of hijab."

According to the artist, Yazmany Arboleda, the balloons were about peace. Which the Taliban probably think proves their point.

Why Doesn't America Fire Generals?

Reporter Tom Ricks investigates a major change in the US military since World War II: a strange reluctance to hold generals responsible for the combat performance of their men, and to reward those who succeed and fire those who fail. In World War II, dismissing or re-assigning officers who failed was almost routine:

Generalship in combat is extraordinarily difficult, and many seasoned officers fail at it. During World War II, senior American commanders typically were given a few months to succeed, or they’d be replaced. Sixteen out of the 155 officers who commanded Army divisions in combat were relieved for cause, along with at least five corps commanders.

Ricks describes the history of the 90th Infantry Division, which in the summer of 1944 went through three commanders in a matter of months; Omar Bradley told the third, "We’re going to make that division go, if we’ve got to can every senior officer in it." They pretty much did. Partly as a result, the 90th eventually emerged as a highly effective fighting force.

But not any more:

Since 9/11, the armed forces have played a central role in our national affairs, waging two long wars—each considerably longer than America’s involvement in World War II. Yet a major change in how our military operates has gone almost unnoticed. Relief of generals has become so rare that, as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling noted during the Iraq War, a private who loses his rifle is now punished more than a general who loses his part of a war. In the wars of the past decade, hundreds of Army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness. This change is arguably one of the most significant developments in our recent military history—and an important factor in the failure of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. . . .

Many Americans remember the Iraq War as a string of mistakes by the Bush administration—from overestimating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to underestimating the difficulty of occupying the country. While that perception is correct, it hardly tells the entire story. In 2007, Philip Zelikow, who had been the State Department’s counselor as the war in Iraq descended into chaos, told me, “I think the situation is worse than people realize, and the problems are primarily with the military.” Discussing American generalship in Iraq over the course of the war, he added: “I don’t think people realized how bad this was … The American people believe the problem is, the civilians didn’t listen to the generals. This is very unhealthy for the Army.” The U.S. Army in Iraq, Zelikow said, reminded him of the French army before World War I: “The military is venerated. It is the inheritor of Napoleon. The general is decorated with gold braid—but there’s no ‘there’ there. There is an aversion to deep thinking.”

Look back to the Civil War, and note how many generals Lincoln went through before he found one who could beat Robert E. Lee. And beating Lee, given the North's great superiority in every sort of resource, was not really that hard of a problem, certainly easier for a traditional military mind than defeating the Taliban. It cannot be said enough that commanding an army in combat is very, very hard. The few men who excel at it are remembered for as long as the record lasts, the great heroes of their age -- Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon. For an army to assume, as the US military now seems to assume, that every competent peacetime officer is up to the job is absolute madness.

Part of the problem, as Ricks notes, is the political vacuum within which these wars were fought. Nobody in the Bush administration had a clear idea of what we were doing in either Afghanistan or Iraq, so it was hard to know which officers were accomplishing the mission. But the bureaucratic attitude of the Army has become a major obstacle to our actually winning wars, and there should be a major rethink of our approach to combat command.

The Situation in Afghanistan

Fred Kaplan:

The latest news from Afghanistan only underscores what’s been clear for quite some time: that there is no light at the end of the tunnel in this war, no noble way out, not much point to staying in.

The First Rule of Politics

The first rule of politics is, don't invade Afghanistan.

--Harold Macmillan (1894-1986)

The State Does Not Live Here

So goes an old saw frequently repeated by the villagers of Istalif, Afghanistan, studied in a new book by American anthropologist Noah Coburn. Instead of clear lines of authority, Coburn found a confusing mass of negotiations and arrangements, with no one really in charge:

Local power brokers might possess wealth, honor, a reputation for piety, abundant weaponry or powerful allies, but they lacked the means or the will to convert those gifts into decisive authority. The maliks, or elders, made a big show of representing their communities’ interests in meetings with outsiders and serving their followers generous meals; each year they presided over festive villagewide “snow picnics,” where the children of Istalif playfully competed to wreck one another’s snow-and-ice dams on the terraced hills above the town. But for all their public visibility, the maliks were only as strong as their communities allowed them to be; they were not secure hereditary chieftains but anxious agents of the professions or neighborhoods or clans they served. . . . The mullahs, for their part, had little ability to intervene outside the mosque, and the village’s wealthy merchants had little sway since they lived primarily in Kabul and often came from the low-status weaver class. Aging commanders of the anti-Soviet jihad supplied money and guns to young men, who struck a menacing pose by wearing the “pakul” hat of the great Tajik fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, rather than the “karakul” hat favored by Hamid Karzai. While the commanders successfully extorted rent from local merchants who ran shops on public lands, they were unpopular and preferred to remain in the shadows, strenuously avoiding one another as well as any direct conflict with the state.

As always in traditional societies, there is great fear of anything that might upset the existing balance of power:

Coburn found that local leaders often achieved little by design. He watched in disbelief as they rejected a proposal to pave the main road connecting Istalif with the nearby highway leading to Kabul. The new road would have benefited the entire village by reducing the difficulty and cost of travel; but one malik objected that its construction would disproportionately assist another malik’s sector of the town, and the proposal was quietly tabled. In other words, to disturb the existing distribution of power was to risk reigniting too many local conflicts. And as in the American white-collar workplace, no one was eager to speak strongly on behalf of the idea for fear of losing face if it failed. In Istalif, it often seemed, politics meant convincing people you had power by forestalling any event that might reveal you didn’t.

Government is useless, the regional governor ignored by everyone. NATO soldiers are respected when they show up but forgotten as soon as they leave. Coburn is particularly scathing about NGOs, whose ignorance leads them to give gifts to people who cannot use them and needlessly stir up trouble. (Scorn toward NGOs seems to be a requirement for tough, in-the-know writers these days.) Attempts to create a modern democracy in such a society, it goes nearly without saying, are doomed to irrelevance.

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that much of the world lived in societies like this one as little as a century ago. Yet across North Africa and the Middle East, things have changed a great deal. I once read a book about tribal culture in Libya that was eerily like Coburn's portrayal of Afghanistan, but Libya has just experienced a very modern revolution and may soon have some sort of democracy. The changes that matter most are, it seems to me, are urbanization, education, and the spread of modern economic life (in which people have jobs with companies or the government, rather than working together with friends).

Of course, something is lost when a society moved from informal tribal arrangements to a modern state. But it is foolish to think that any society could have the benefits of modernity (women's rights, medical care, air conditioning, hot showers) without adapting bureaucratic, hierarchical power structure of modern governments and corporations. (Above, some of Istalif's modestly famous pottery.)

Mes Aynak

In Afghanistan, an international team of archaeologists is racing to uncover the ruins of a group of Buddhist monasteries dating to the Kushan Empire of the second to sixth centuries AD. The area, called Mes Aynak, will soon be the site of a giant open pit copper mine being developed by Chinese companies.

In this image of the ridge, you can see the enormous niche that once held a statue of the Buddha, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The other niches and caves are also human creations, some of them shrines, others copper mines, some copper mines that became shrines.

The Kushan Empire was a cultural crossroads whose wealth came from controlling the silk road and the other caravan routes of central Asia. In these statues you can see the lingering influence of the Greek Bactrian kingdom, left behind by Alexander the Great.

And this tiny idol in its niche shows the influence of India.

Much of the archaeological world is wringing its hands over this, but although I find this loss sad, I can't feel any anger about it. The Chinese are investing $3.5 billion in this mine, by far the largest ever foreign investment in Afghanistan -- unless you count the American and Soviet invasions. Right now the economy of Afghanistan consists essentially of US aid and opium smuggling. If the country is to survive after American troops leave, they have to find some other ways to make money, and right now mining and natural gas drilling seem to be about the only options. The Afghan government delayed the mine for a year to allow archaeology, and much has been uncovered, as you can see in these photographs.