America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (54 page)

Although the president thereby avoided a war for which he had little appetite, critics took him to task for making a threat and then failing to follow through. Supporters of Israel felt the chill of their security blanket beginning to slip.
³³
Even former members of the president’s own administration complained. “When the president of the United States draws a red line,” said Leon Panetta, who had served Obama as both CIA director and defense secretary, “the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word.”
³⁴

Yet the issue at hand was not credibility, at best an elusive quality, but the difficulty of parsing the substantive U.S. interests at stake in Syria within the larger context of the Greater Middle East. How exactly did Syria matter?

Although U.S. officials had ample justification for calling Assad “a thug and a murderer,” his opponents were hardly paragons of virtue.
³⁵
The proportion of Jeffersonian democrats filling the ranks of the Syrian resistance decreased over time, their places taken by radical Islamists more interested in promoting violent jihad than liberal values. Although the administration made a show of trying to funnel assistance to “moderate rebels”—the phrase itself providing instant fodder for satirists—distinguishing moderates from those who were anything but posed a large challenge.
³⁶
So too did getting those moderates into fighting trim. As of late summer in 2015, a CENTCOM training program projected to yield several thousand anti-Assad fighters had graduated only fifty-four, of whom “four or five” actually remained in the field, an achievement entailing the expenditure of $500 million.
³⁷

In effect, Obama’s policy regarding Syria became one of limiting direct U.S. exposure while waiting to see who won and then dealing with the results. The problem was that neither side proved able to gain the upper hand. As a consequence of this impasse, the toll of lives lost and ruined continued to mount, as did the number of those forced to flee their homes. By the autumn of 2015, over two hundred thousand Syrians had been killed, with 4 million refugees having left the country and another 7.6 million internally displaced.
³⁸
As the conflict dragged on and on, Obama stood accused of remaining passive in the face of a vast humanitarian disaster.

Passivity did not describe Moscow’s response. American irresolution presented Vladimir Putin with an opening that he unhesitatingly exploited. From the outset of the Syrian crisis, Russia had been providing arms for Assad’s forces to misuse. Now in September 2015, Putin ordered a Russian expeditionary task force to take up positions near the Syrian port of Latakia. Post-Soviet Russia possessed only modest power projection capabilities. Even so, Putin’s deployment of even small numbers of combat aircraft, tanks, and artillery embarrassed Obama, emphasizing how little control Washington was able to exert over unfolding events. Soon enough Russian bombs were targeting Assad’s opponents. Like Israel’s Netanyahu, Putin saw the political advantage inherent in openly defying the American president.
³⁹

More to the point, the confused state of U.S. policy toward Syria—the yawning gap between high-sounding words and half-hearted action—testified to the larger disarray now enveloping Washington’s approach to the Greater Middle East. After Libya (not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan), it was impossible to sustain the illusion that eliminating this or that unsavory regime held the key to putting the region back together again. Syria presented Obama with a choice between plunging in and holding back—between a Libya do-over and taking a pass. Reluctant to compound past errors, he resisted—or tried to resist—calls to intervene further in the Syrian civil war.

By no means did this reticence apply across the board. Elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, notably in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Obama dove right in, going after anti-Western Islamists with a mix of drones and special operations forces. Yet the purpose of these attacks, surreptitiously conducted and announced after the fact (if at all), was merely to curb rather than to eliminate the threat. Here was the American equivalent of the Israeli concept of mowing the lawn.

In terms of scope, the largest of those mowing campaigns occurred in Pakistan. Ostensibly an ally of the United States, Pakistan maintained its own distinct set of interests and priorities, symbolized by its troubling possession of a large nuclear arsenal. Leaders of the Pakistani security establishment—the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI)—were the ultimate arbiters of Pakistani policy, intervening in politics as it suited them to do so. For its part, over the course of decades, Washington had given Pakistani generals good reason to view the United States as capricious and two-faced. This was not a relationship based on trust.
⁴⁰

Yet to sustain Operation Enduring Freedom, Washington needed Pakistan, if only because the principal supply routes into landlocked Afghanistan started at the Pakistani port of Karachi and then ran hundreds of miles overland toward Kabul and Kandahar. The United States also looked to Pakistan to deny the Taliban sanctuary in its vast border regions. For at least two reasons, this did not happen, however. First, Pakistani generals saw the Afghan Taliban as potential allies once the Americans inevitably withdrew. Second, preoccupied with other putative threats, above all India, they were unwilling to divert sufficient forces to police their own frontier. The problem was therefore Washington’s to address.

Much as President Nixon in his day had extended the ongoing Vietnam War into nominally neutral Laos and Cambodia, President Obama came into office predisposed to extend the ongoing war for Afghanistan into Pakistan. To capture this concept of an enlarged theater of operations, his administration coined the term “AfPak.”
⁴¹
In 1969, Nixon had unleashed the U.S. Air Force on Laos and Cambodia, a secret bombing campaign later denounced as illegal. By the time Obama unleashed missile-firing UAVs and commandos on Pakistan, few bothered to question the legality of secret attacks in countries with which the United States was not at war. Unless large numbers of U.S. ground troops were involved, the prerogatives enjoyed by the American commander in chief anywhere in the Greater Middle East had by now become pretty much limitless.

Granted, the use of drones to go after militants in Pakistan actually predated the Obama administration. The first such strike had occurred in 2004, during the presidency of George W. Bush. But under Obama the attacks intensified and, perhaps more importantly, became bureaucratically regularized. White House staffers, along with Defense Department and intelligence officials, managed a “disposition matrix” that the president and senior national security aides regularly reviewed, establishing targeting priorities and adding new names of persons to be killed or captured.
⁴²

Institutionalizing the “kill list” led directly to an increase in the number of UAV strike missions flown. Between 2004 and the day George W. Bush retired from office, the annual tally of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan reached double digits only once. During Obama’s first term, UAV attacks in that country averaged 76 per year, peaking at 128 in 2010. Estimates of resulting casualties varied, but during the Obama presidency drones operating over Pakistan killed at least two thousand and perhaps more than three thousand people.
⁴³
How many of those killed were militants as opposed to innocent bystanders was a matter of dispute, with U.S. officials insisting that the United States went to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties. Pakistanis unaccustomed to the presence of drones circling overhead along with the possibility of missiles slamming into their village without warning did not share that view.
⁴⁴

Much the same story occurred in Yemen and Somalia, the other two principal theaters in Obama’s drone war. Of the ninety-nine confirmed U.S. drone strikes in Yemen that occurred between 2002 and mid-2015, all but one occurred on Obama’s watch. With Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) the intended target, these strikes killed at least 450 and perhaps as many as 1,000 people.
⁴⁵
In Somalia, drone strikes began only in 2011, but U.S. special operators, sometimes employing C-130 Spectre gunships, had been active in that country since 2007, as they attempted to curb the activities of Al Shabab, another Al Qaeda–affiliated group.
⁴⁶

In each of these three countries (and in Libya following Gaddafi’s demise), commando raids supplemented the ongoing drone campaign. The purpose of these missions, typically involving brief insertions of small numbers of elite troops, varied. In some, the aim was to free hostages. Others were snatch-and-grab operations to capture high-value targets and collect intelligence. In others still, like the famous Abbottabad mission of May 2011 that finally ran Osama bin Laden to ground, the object of the exercise was assassination.
⁴⁷

Providing a thread of continuity linking these various operations, whether involving drones or forces on the ground, was a stubborn belief in the efficacy of decapitation. With the manifest failure of invade-and-occupy, targeting leaders seemed to offer some prospect of keeping at bay threats to the United States that flourished in the most disordered parts of the Greater Middle East.

Back in 2008–2009, enthusiasm for implementing COIN on a global scale had enjoyed a brief heyday. Now, just a handful of years later, Obama had embarked on a de facto experiment in globalizing counterterrorism techniques of the sort that Stanley McChrystal had made a centerpiece of the Third Gulf War. In American newspapers, the headline “U.S. Kills Militant Leader” now became the Obama-era equivalent of “U.S. Bombs Iraq” during the 1990s. Normalization became a form of concealment. The ho-hum noting of what had become a commonplace occurrence supplanted questions of effectiveness.

But questions of effectiveness haunted U.S. policy during the Obama era. What if U.S. drone strikes and special operations raids, even if tactically successful, were creating more anti-American jihadists than they were eliminating, as even some senior U.S. military officers believed?
⁴⁸
What if the leaders replacing those that U.S. forces killed turned out to be more vicious than their predecessors—if removing Mr. Bad merely paved the way for Mr. Worse?
⁴⁹
Or if liquidating those inattentive to the fundamentals of cybersecurity simply paved the way for tech-savvy terrorists—a Darwinian process serving to strengthen the species?
⁵⁰
These questions defied easy answers. Yet the absence of answers left Obama unable to explain when and how America’s War for the Greater Middle East was ever going to end.

Beyond unhappy attempts to depose regimes and inconclusive efforts to suppress terrorist organizations lay one final category of President Obama’s military program in the Greater Middle East. This involved experiments in crisis intervention before the source of crisis reached full maturity. In that regard, Africa, hitherto not a Pentagon priority, emerged as a focus of attention, with United States Africa Command, activated in 2008, the agency occupying center stage.

AFRICOM during the Age of Barack Obama compares with CENTCOM during the Age of Ronald Reagan. As an undercapitalized startup, AFRICOM faced real challenges. But with challenges came opportunities and a palpable sense of excitement. As U.S. military officers contemplated Africa, they would have been well served to compare it to the Arab Middle East or to the Indian subcontinent. Here was another locale where the detritus of European colonialism had left a deeply problematic legacy that further Western meddling was unlikely to repair. Instead, oblivious to history, American officers chose to see central and western Africa as virgin territory. In the twenty-first-century scramble for that continent, the United States needed to be a player, which necessarily meant that the U.S. military needed to make its presence felt. Here was an entirely new arena in which to wage America’s War for the Greater Middle East.

Yet in contrast to CENTCOM, created with an eye toward fighting the Soviet army in Iran’s Zagros Mountains, AFRICOM initially professed no expectation of fighting anyone. The command’s original mission statement contained no reference to combat, instead emphasizing “security engagement” undertaken to “promote a stable and secure African environment.”
⁵¹
At its founding, AFRICOM’s declared purpose was simply to nurture competent and professional indigenous forces, inculcating respect for human rights and civilian control, in each of the fifty-three African nations over which its four-star American commander claimed oversight.
⁵²

Whether genuine or not, this claim of benign purpose ran headlong into a different reality. By 2011, with its anti-Gaddafi bombing campaign, AFRICOM expanded its mandate to include killing and helping people kill. As one U.S. officer put it, Libya marked AFRICOM’s transition from a “more congenial combatant command to an actual war-fighting combatant command.”
⁵³
A duly revised mission statement now declared that AFRICOM “deters and defeats transnational threats in order to advance U.S. national interests”—boilerplate language broad enough to cover just about every contingency from treating disease-afflicted populations to mounting a full-fledged invasion.
⁵⁴
By 2013, Brigadier General James Linder, officially in charge of AFRICOM’s special operations troops but also an energetic proselytizer for the command, was touting Africa as “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”
⁵⁵