Summary: Afghanistan was invisible during the campaign, but has surfaced again in the news. This time, so rare in modern America, we hear some truth about the war from our generals. They reveal why we have lost so much for so little gain, and why we continue paying in blood and money to get nothing. All that remains is for us to listen — and act.
Trump is a clown president, but he fills one role of a court jester by saying truths that are unspeakable in the Capital. As he did on a July 19 meeting in the White House with his military advisers (per NBC News).
“We aren’t winning. We are losing.“
That is refreshing honesty after 15 years and ten months of happy talk from both civilian and government officials. Perhaps Trump has read the long dirge of news from Afghanistan, such as “The war America can’t win: how the Taliban are regaining control in Afghanistan” by Sune Engel Rasmussen in The Guardian — “The Taliban control places like Helmand, where the US and UK troops fought their hardest battles, pushing the drive toward peace and progress into reverse.” Our military leaders did not respond well to this obvious truth, as awareness of the failure of their past plans implies skepticism about their shiny new plans. Their response to Trump’s words reveals much about why the war in Afghanistan has run for so long, at such great cost, for no gain to America. It deserves your attention.
“Trump is the third president to grapple with the war in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, two American troops were killed in Afghanistan when a convoy they were in came under attack. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
“Trump’s national security team has been trying for months to come up with a new strategy he can approve. Those advisers are set to meet again to discuss the issue on Thursday at the White House. The president is not currently scheduled to attend the meeting, though one official said that could change.
“Former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went through multiple strategies over the course of their presidencies to try to stabilize Afghanistan. What set Trump apart in the July meeting was his open questioning of the quality of the advice he was receiving. …At one point the president directed his frustration at Mattis, saying Trump had given the military authority months ago to make advances in Afghanistan and yet the U.S. was continuing to lose ground, the officials said. …
“One official said Trump pointed to maps showing the Taliban gaining ground, and that Mattis responded to the president by saying the U.S. is losing because it doesn’t have the strategy it needs. …
“‘If the president doesn’t listen to the generals, like Gen. Nicholson and he goes down the road that President Obama went, Afghanistan is going to collapse,’ Lindsey said. ‘Here’s my advice to the president — listen to people like Gen. Nicholson and McMaster and others who have been in the fight.’ …
“The president’s advisers went into the mid-July meeting hoping he would sign off on an Afghanistan strategy after months of delays, officials said. One official said the president’s team has coalesced around a strategy, though it had presented him with other options as well such as complete withdrawal. Trump, however, appeared to have been significantly influenced by a meeting he’d recently had with a group of veterans of the Afghanistan war, and he was unhappy with the options presented to him.”
“…The Trump administration has been grappling for months with devising a new strategy for the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary James Mattis promised to deliver one to Congress by mid-July, but nothing materialized.
“Gen. John Nicholson has been commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan since March 2016. Trump has not met Nicholson, and his military advisers reportedly offered to set up a meeting in order to help ease Trump’s concerns. In February, Nicholson was the first to call the war a stalemate and said he needed a few thousand more troops to break it. …
“Trump left the national security meeting without making a decision on a strategy. His advisers were stunned, administration officials and others briefed on the meeting said. Two Pentagon officials close to Mattis said he returned from the White House that morning visibly upset. Mattis often takes a walk when grappling with an issue. That afternoon, the walk took longer than usual, the officials said.
“Among those at the meeting were Trump’s senior White House advisers including Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and then chief-of-staff Reince Priebus, plus Mattis, Dunford, Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.”
“A core competence is a combination of complementary skills and knowledge bases embedded in a group or team that results in the ability to execute one or more critical processes to a world class standard.”
— From “Is your core competence A MIRAGE?“ by Kevin P. Coyne, Stephen J. D. Hall and Patricia G. Clifford in the McKinsey Quarterly (1997).
Our Generals might not know how to win wars — as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq demonstrate — but they manufacture industrial grade excuses. It is their core competence (as I wrote in 2007). The F-35 does not work as promised. We get great excuses. The supercarrier USS Ford was commissioned although not ready, 6 years late (2 years so far, probably 4 more it is until fully ready) and $3 billion over budget — and counting (details here). Instead we get wonderful excuses. Such as this from James Mattis (SecDef and USMC four-star general, retired), explaining why we have gotten so little from our Afghanistan War at such great cost in money and American blood.
“Mattis responded to the president by saying the U.S. is losing because it doesn’t have the strategy it needs.”
What could Mattis have learned after 17 years of war in Afghanistan that invalidates the many previous US strategies and revealed “what we need”?
Republican politicians worship the military (hence all those generals in Team Trump), adjusting their memories as needed to maintain the delusion of general’s infallibility. As in this from Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“If the president doesn’t listen to the generals, like General Nicholson and he goes down the road that President Obama went, Afghanistan is going to collapse. Here’s my advice to the president — listen to people like Generals Nicholson and McMaster and others who have been in the fight.”
That’s nonsense, awesome amnesia about how Presidents Bush Jr. and Obama relied on our generals to set strategy and methods for the war.
We can only guess at what the generals proposed to Trump, the latest “strategy”. Looking backwards, what the military calls “strategy” are usually tactics. The military has offer a variety of strategies, all mixtures of the US trinity of COIN.
Popular front militia (locals, usually minorities, fighting for us – like these in Afghanistan).
Firepower on civilians (e.g., Fallujah in Iraq, winning hearts and minds with artillery here and here, and Mosul this year).
Sweep and destroy missions (numbers beyond count, with thousands of US casualties for no gains).
They probably offered Trump a remix of these plus the usual demand for more troops. Which seems daft. We could not defeat the Taliban with 130,000 NATO troops in 2012, when they were weaker than they are today. There are 14,000 NATO troops there now. Even if we put 130,000 troops in Afghanistan, the same tried-and-failed COIN methods that have failed everybody since WWII will fail for us as well.
Why was Trump unhappy with the generals’ proposals?
We can only guess at this, since the journalists’ stories tell (as usual) present only the generals’ perspective. But the generals’ track record in this war is horrifically bad and their proposals were probably more of the same plus two wildly unacceptable choices (e.g., destroy Afghanistan or admit defeat and leave). See Daniel Ellsberg’s explanation how they play that game: Presidential decision-making about Vietnam and Afghanistan: “You have 3 choices, sir”.
Trump had ample reason for his unhappiness. To see why look at Slate’s article about the meeting by Philip Carter from the war-boosters at the Center for a New American Security. It was incoherent, alternating between silly criticisms of Trump (e.g., he was disrespectful to the generals, poor babies) and admissions that Trump was right to question them.
People are policy. Trump’s advisors come in two flavors. First, there are those who know none of this. Second, those who know all of this and will not tell him. The generals who staff his national security team (and his Chief of Staff) are, of course, in the latter group.
Trump might have an instinctive-like awareness that something is wrong with his general’s stale advice. But can Trump escape the box he has built around himself, acting contrary to the advice of his own team — against the advice of Republican leaders.
What are the odds of an effective war policy emerging from this stew? I’ll bet on “low” — and more US casualties, and many more dead in Afghanistan. To see what should happen, ask yourself How many generals would Lincoln have fired to win in Iraq & Afghanistan?
Update: another perspective on why we keep losing.
It’s not just a problem of our senior officers. I have been in countless discussions about our counter-insurgency wars (COIN) with US Marine and Army officer since 2003, both retired and active duty. I had one this morning about this article. It was, as usual, identical — almost word for word — with those from 2003. They even cite the same fake “successful COIN” wars (e.g., Kenya, Malaysia). They remain blind to the two kinds of counter-insurgencies, and how we are fighting the kind that almost always loses.
Most — almost all — have learned nothing from our 16 years of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lives of our dead and crippled troops are an expensive and wasted tuition.
What should we do?
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