Killing Machine (12 page)

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A TALE OF TWO SPEECHES

The notion of American exceptionalism is as old as the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, the first analyst to describe the United States’ significant differences from European states. He pointed to its love affair with liberty, its deep-seated commercialism, its revolutionary birth as a “new nation” and its zeal for technological modernization sitting alongside widespread religiosity
.

—Jonathan Steele,
Ghosts of Afghanistan

Lurking behind Obama’s Afghan surge speech at West Point was the problem of domestic support for a war that had dragged on in the shadow of Iraq for almost a decade. Back in February 2009 Obama had promised he would end the American military role in the Iraq War by bringing the troops home in a responsible fashion. But he also echoed Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address with its ringing message that America would pay any price to defend a friend or defeat a foe. His Afghan plan, said Obama in this early preview of his policy, was the best way to
increase
American influence across the region. “Every nation and every group must know—whether you wish America good or ill—that the end of the war in Iraq will enable a new era of American leadership and engagement in the Middle East. And that era has just begun.”
¹

One need not doubt every word insofar as he thought ending Iraq would free American power from its “imprisonment” in the Iraq debacle. But how did that vision square with his vow to start bringing the troops home from Afghanistan after eighteen months? It puzzled both supporters and critics. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general, rushed to the pages of the
Washington Post
to assure readers President Obama had “made clear to any
doubters that the United States is determined to do what it takes to finish the job.” NATO would do its part with an additional five thousand troops, he promised, but the strategic mission was to transfer responsibility to the Afghans themselves “as soon as possible,” not to build up an overwhelming force for a long-term occupation. Again, that sounded almost contradictory; but Rasmussen had an answer, even if it failed to convince skeptics: when citizens in the countries contributing these troops saw the transition happening, and when the Afghan people actually saw it as well, the progress would inspire the needed confidence “to continue to support this mission.”
²

Prior to assuming the NATO post, Rasmussen—almost a permanent fixture at NATO and its chief cheerleader—had been the center-right prime minister of Denmark. Obama had pushed him for the job over Turkish objections that his attitude toward Muslim concerns (a result of his support for the right of political cartoonists to caricature religious figures, an issue that had exploded with a Danish cartoonist’s portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad) had stirred some notice. But the most interesting thing about his commentary was that, try as he might, he was unable to acknowledge that citizens in NATO countries—including, of course, the United States—had serious doubts about not only the surge but the war itself. Aware of the pervasive skepticism, Rasmussen did not set a precise date for the transition to Afghan control, but asserted, “I’m confident we can start next year.” Yet Obama
had
put a date on his surge. American troops would start coming home in July 2011, he had promised at West Point, a pledge that quickly became the focus of intense debate and criticism. Indeed, Rasmussen’s op-ed piece triggered that debate with its closing sentence: “Next year we will start to see light at the end of the tunnel.”

Light at the end of the tunnel? Of all the images not to use about Afghanistan, surely that was number one with its Vietnam echo banging at the doors of policy makers who wanted to hear nothing that sounded like Pentagon press briefings from that era. Why in the world, one must ask, would Rasmussen bring up an echo of Vietnam and stir memories of the false promises about eventual military success? It is hard to understand how a politically experienced
person could have failed to see that this one sentence undermined his credibility—and damaged the president’s as well. Rasmussen’s denial that Obama’s speech in any way indicated an exit strategy was at the heart of his message, insisting on “transition” as the proper word to describe the strategy. But eighteen months? That deadline was hardly beyond the time the last of the surge troops would have arrived in Afghanistan and gotten unpacked for duty. Taliban spokesmen mocked Rasmussen’s “light at the end of the tunnel” optimism and the persistent reports of progress, noting, “If Rasmussen and all his allies leave Afghanistan completely then the attacks on them will reach zero, and he can propagate the notion even more and say that the number of Taliban attacks have fallen further.”
³

Before things completely went off track, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took the first opportunity they could, NBC’s
Meet the Press
, to back up Rasmussen—and back away from any deadline. Clinton: “We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop dead deadline. What we’re talking about is an assessment that in [July] 2011, we can begin a transition.” And Gates: “We’re not talking about an abrupt withdrawal. We’re talking about something that will take place over a period of time. . . .
Because we will have 100,000 troops there
. And they are not leaving in July of 2011.”
⁴

That figure was important. Obama had insisted at West Point that there were no valid parallels with Vietnam, especially because the Taliban lacked the popular support the Vietcong had enjoyed. But whether there would ever be enough troops to carry out a counterinsurgency strategy was the real question. Obama had also made it appear, abetted by Rasmussen’s one-man cheering section, that he had a grand alliance operating in Afghanistan, unlike George Bush’s cobbled-together “coalition of the willing” for Iraq, but the forty-three nations he claimed as partners had sent very few soldiers, some numbering barely above single digits. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, quickly rejected the idea of any more troops, even after Obama spoke with him at length for forty minutes on the telephone.
Instead, he told the American president, Paris would focus on an upcoming conference in London to discuss the whole problem. British prime minister Gordon Brown promised that his nation would send five hundred additional troops, bringing its force up to ten thousand.
⁵

But these numbers were far from the ten thousand the allies were supposed to send when Obama set the new number of American troops at thirty thousand. The Pentagon’s only idea about how it would all work out was that the Afghan “surge” would somehow replicate what had been achieved in Iraq when Petraeus took over in 2007. The first order of business then had been to secure Baghdad and work outward from there. Thus the plan was for Afghan surge troops to begin arriving in “opium rich” Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, in January 2010, followed by “a steady flow of tens of thousands” of American marines. But most of the troops would be sent to Kandahar: “With more forces we should be able to lock down the security in Kandahar and the surrounding areas of Kandahar.”
⁶

Something like Baghdad, redux, then. But there was something wrong with the math, for if tens of thousands of marines were headed to Helmand Province, not all that many would be left to lock down security in Kandahar. But that was hardly the only reason to be skeptical about the Pentagon’s vision of things to come in Afghanistan, or to believe that everyone in the administration was on the same page. It was plain to see that the military really did not believe it had signed off on any “transition” (read “withdrawal”) plan that was not “conditions based,” while others in the administration, led by Vice President Joe Biden, who had opposed the surge in the early White House debates, did not back down from statements that beginning in July 2011 there would be lots of troops coming home. What, then,
was
the president’s plan? And how did he hope to achieve it?

Obama’s West Point speech had touched on long-term problems beyond Afghanistan, if only in a glancing way, in a paragraph discussing the limits of his proposals.

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I don’t have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I’m mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who—in discussing our national security—said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

And yet he insisted failure in Afghanistan would be catastrophic.

I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat.

If the United States had a vital interest in protecting itself against attacks already being planned, how could one put any limits on the national response? Here again were the seeds of controversy. Another 9/11 was simply unthinkable, let alone the possibility of a terrorist nuclear attack—that seemed a real danger even to some in the administration. While critics focused on the “withdrawal” paragraphs of the speech, the president’s answer to the problem of “the epicenter of violent extremism” was in the process of solidifying around his concept of just-war theory, as he would develop it in his Nobel Peace Prize speech—and, unbeknownst to the public, drone warfare. Meanwhile, the president allowed the pundits to do some of the missing math in counterinsurgency for him, while he did other calculations.

The Pundits Weigh In

Parsing the West Point speech quickly occupied a surge of commentators. The highly quoted conservative pundit George Will titled his contribution “This Will Not End Well.” Obama had vowed to finish the job in Afghanistan, Will wrote, but his speech revealed
that he thought the job was to get out of the country as soon as he could—and that was “an unserious policy.” His readers might have expected that, as a conservative, he would criticize the president for not promising to stay on until the threat was eliminated once and for all. But Will surprised them. “A case can be made for a serious—meaning larger and more protracted—surge. A better case can be made for a radically reduced investment of resources and prestige in that forlorn country. Obama has not made a convincing case for his tentative surgelet.”
⁷
In fact, Will had earlier bailed out on Afghanistan as a winner and did not see anything in Obama’s speech to change his mind.

A few days later, former senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern warned that the West Point speech constituted “a sharp turn toward another Vietnam.” Remembered as the Democratic “peace candidate” who lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide, his reasoning was akin to Will’s conclusion: “Even if we had a good case for a war in Afghanistan, we simply cannot afford to wage it. With a $12 trillion debt and a serious economic recession, this is not a time for unnecessary wars abroad. We should bring our soldiers home before any more of them are killed or wounded—and before our national debt explodes.”
⁸

Then there was a very surprising comment from Eliot Cohen, one of the most influential proponents of the original surge in Iraq. It was surprising as much for what he did not say as what he said. He doubted that anything he had heard from either the president or the military indicated understanding of what it would take to mount a successful counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan. At the top of his list of missing ingredients was “deep knowledge of the other side.” That could be acquired only by long years of experience, like the efforts British colonial officers made to learn the ins and outs of Pashtun tribes in the nineteenth century. “In a world of rotating military and diplomatic assignments, three-month think tank projects and moving on to the next hot topic, it is difficult to develop that experience.”
⁹

Though Cohen seemed to be disparaging “think tank projects,” he had played a key role in the think tank projects and White
House brainstorming sessions that produced the Iraq surge that supposedly saved America’s skin when the war went bad. What he did not say in this article, however, was whether the United States could or even
should
attempt to emulate the British in what was now that “wild frontier,” as Obama had labeled the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands—the area where the surge would concentrate its efforts—in his 2007 speech.

Perhaps it was Niall Ferguson, the expat British expert on imperial fortunes and follies who held a chair at Harvard and was very worried about the fate of the American empire, who had the most interesting thing to say—even if it was not directly about the surge. The real issue, he said, was not wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the inevitable decline in money available for the military in budgets that were designed to trim the federal budget and in which cuts today would have a multiplier effect in future years. The culprits were entitlements—chiefly health care and social security—and inadequate tax revenues. Congress and the White House, regardless of party, had collaborated in creating a situation that inevitably spelled the decline of American power and, therefore, its ability to protect its influence over global affairs.
¹⁰

Obama’s emphasis on Pakistan in the West Point speech did not receive the attention it deserved in any of the comments quoted here, however, although it provided important clues about how the president expected things to turn out—because while supposedly tens of thousands of troops would be heading to Helmand Province and the rest to Kandahar, there were no troops going to Pakistan. Well, that was not quite true: Special Operations Command had launched Taliban-hunting raids into Pakistan’s border areas. But Obama had already become impressed with the possibilities of a long-term technological solution—and being infatuated by technology was a very common American trait that, as
Guardian
reporter Jonathan Steele points out, had always been inextricably linked to other historic zeals.