Privatizing the Afghan War

Feasible Exit Strategy or Prescription for Perpetual War?

President Obama told Congress and the American people in his SoU address that the American combat mission in Afghanistan is over, but as the attached report shows, that claim is a bit disingenuous, to put it charitably.  

To be sure, the military presence has been reduced, and only 9,800 troops remain in Afghanistan. However, in response to a question posed during his confirmation hearing, the incoming Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, already indicated a willingness to slow down or possibility reverse the ongoing drawdown, should security conditions “degrade."  

As the attached report in The Nation by Tom Shorrock indicates, there is a ample potential for security conditions to degrade.  Almost 40,000 private contractors remain in Afghanistan.  These contractors have a twofold mission:  

First, they will train, support, and assist the Afghan security forces in its anti-Taliban and anti-drug operations.  The United States has already poured over $65 billion into this project with limited results and much corruption.  

Second, the contractors will run an un-auditable program known as Business Stability Operations, which is aimed at convincing private investors to exploit Afghanistan’s mineral wealth (how such an exploitation will be interpreted by distrustful Afghans is an open question: but given the levels of corruption to date, a worst case assumption would be prudent).  

In short, these contractors will be lucrative targets for xenophobic Afghan guerrillas.

Readers longing for a little light at the end of the Afghan tunnel should also remember that the Obama Administration signed a bilateral security agreement that allows US troops to remain in Afghanistan until at least 2024 — and its language does not preclude these troops from engaging in combat operations. 

The Afghanistan War Is Still Raging—but This Time It's Being Waged by Contractors

Tim Shorrock, The Nation, February 4, 2015 - 11:05AM ET

http://m.thenation.com/blog/197057-afghanistan-war-still-raging-time-its-being-waged-contractors

The killing of three US Pentagon contractors at the hands of a uniformed Afghani Army soldier in Kabul last week casts considerable doubt on President Obama's recent proclamation that America's "combat mission in Afghanistan is over."

The US-trained Afghani security forces have now "taken the lead" in the 14-year-old war, Mr. Obama told Congress in his State of the Union address on January 20.

But after digging into the contractors involved and the circumstances behind their untimely deaths, it's apparent that the US-led war against the Taliban is still in full swing, and that Americans—along with many Afghans—will continue to die.  (continued)

A Letter from an Afghan Patriot Raises a Question for the Next Secretary of Defense:

Why Do Domestic Politics Trump Foreign Policy?

Note: A version of this essay appeared in the Counterpunch (Weekend Edition 11-13 January 2013) and in Time (Battleland, 14 January 2013)


Introduction and Background

I have an Afghan friend, Hashim, who lives in Europe.  We correspond frequently on the situation in Afghanistan.  He comes from an old distinguished Pashtun family; he has multiple degrees from the UK’s finest universities, knows Afghan (and world) history; and he admires the United States immensely, having lived here for a number of years as a young man.  

Hashim is an Afghan patriot, and while he is a realist, he understandably tends to see things in a hopeful light for his beloved country.  This is especially true with regard to his hope that President Obama will correct the gross errors of his predecessor.  Hashim recently sent me an email (see below) describing his reactions to  two closely related wire service reports issued on 9 January¹, in which U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes revealed that the White House was considering an option for a total withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end 2014.  

Rhodes said the White House was considering the so-called ‘zero option’  in addition to the more widely reported options for maintaining a limited troop presence 3,000 and 9,000 troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014.  In contrast, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, is lobbying for an enduring presence 6,000 to 15,000. There are currently about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.  With one year to go, it is therefore clear that big changes are coming.

Rhodes made clear that Obama’s final decision will not be made for several months, and he emphasized will be based on the twin U.S. security objectives of (1) denying the so-called counterterrorism strategy of denying a safe haven to al Qaeda (read: a continuing targeted assassination strategy by special forces and drones) and (2) ensuring that Afghan forces are trained and equipped to maintain internal security (read: ensuring that Afghan forces can neutralize the Taliban). 

Rhodes’s words, predictably (perhaps deliberately), created a firestorm of reaction among the neocons and advocates of empire in the U.S. as well as among those in Afghanistan who have benefitted from the U.S. presence. Members of the Afghan government, in harmony with the despairing cries of the neocon armchair warriors in the U.S., predicted that the zero option would be equivalent to a U.S. admission of defeat; that it would precipitate another a civil war, like that of the 1990s; and that it would leave the 350,000 man ill-trained Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) unable to provide internal security. While the Taliban had no comment, a spokesman reiterated its 5 January call for the immediate removal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan.

Hashim’s Take on the Zero Option

My Afghan friend did not think much of these reactions.  On 10 Jan 2013, he wrote:

“This [i.e. Rhodes’ zero option] is more to do with negotiating with the insurgency leaders than it is about ensuring the future survival of the despised Karzai criminal clique — a smart strategy, and an appropriate answer to thugs who say, ‘You need U.S. more than we need you.’”

“The foundations of normal U.S.-Afghan relations are finally being laid by people concerned with the U.S.’s national interests, rather than by dubious. armchair warriors, rabid ideologues, and self-serving vested interests – long may it continue!”
“The cries of fear and despair, from the less than 1% of Afghans who’ve grown obscenely rich, courtesy of the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, are to be expected – they are the supporters of the thugs who thought that the U.S. could be blackmailed into expending blood and treasure ad infinitum, no matter what these gangsters said or did, because of their ‘you need U.S. more than we need you’ mantra.”

“The statements will be welcomed by the young village-based insurgent commanders inside the country, but will leave the ‘old’ Taliban leaders who still have  political ambitions in a quandary: No one will accept their leadership if they agree to join the Karzai criminal cooperative, nor will they continue the fight until the ‘Islamic Emirate’ is re-installed in Kabul.  What the majority of the insurgents want is an end to the ‘occupation,' and a truly representative government of competent ‘good Muslims’ in Kabul.”

“Similarly, Karzai and his gang have been put on notice, that they’re not the ‘indispensable’ puppets they had assumed themselves to be. Moreover, the U.S. statements will cause the ranks of their supporters to diminish dramatically, and decrease their ability to act as rejectionists or spoilers of any agreement reached with the Taliban insurgency.”

“Doubtless, matters will come into better focus in coming weeks. So, my comments are really ‘hazarded guesses.’”
Hashim

While Hashim’s analysis makes sense and suggests a realistic sense of foresight on the part of the U.S. government, it triggered uncertainties in my mind about what other political factors might be driving our foreign policy in Afghanistan. 

Here is My Response

Dear Hashim ... I hope  you are right, and as usual, you certainly raise insightful issues.  But that said, I think there are several very powerful domestic political factors also in play, and these factors may well be taking precedence in the decisions shaping our Afghan policy. Consider please the following:

In the U.S., as in most countries, the exigencies of domestic politics almost always trump the logical needs of foreign policy. This is particularly the case when a government is changing policy direction, as is the case of Afghanistan today.  A good, if somewhat dated, general introduction to the history of how the exigencies of domestic politics influence  American foreign policy can be found in Robert Dallek’s, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs. 

Here is what I think is now happening -- to be sure what follows is speculation, but it is based over thirty years of experience of closely observing the pathological machinations of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex, hereafter referred to as the MICC:

1. It is pretty clear Obama wants out of Afghanistan.  My own suspicion is that Mr. Obama understands he was railroaded into approving the fatally flawed surge by the MICC and cabal of neocons in 2009. Whether or not this is indeed the case, and it is not clear whether Generals Petraeus and McChrystal “played” Obama or Obama was a willing part of the game; one thing is clear: Mr. Obama set himself up to become enmeshed in the Afghan quagmire via opportunistic political maneuvering during the 2008 election campaign to contrast Afghanistan as a “good war” as opposed to the “bad war” in Iraq.  His obvious intent was the usual Democratic effort to protect his right flank from being attacked by Republicans as being soft on defense.  So, consciously or not, Obama entrapped himself in a quagmire by succumbing to the exigencies of domestic politics in a foreign policy question of supreme importance.  Now, like all politicians, he does not want to look like a fool as he walks along the exit tightrope from the Afghan debacle.  Score 1 for domestic politics trumping foreign policy.

2. More importantly, Obama’s opportunistic behavior is a symptom of  deeper problems created by more powerful domestic political exigencies:  It is now clear the MICC also wants out of Afghanistan, but the MICC’s players also must walk a tightrope: Its players must extricate themselves from the Afghan quagmire without jeopardizing their future budget prospects.  

The MICC’s players — in the Pentagon, in industry, and in the Congress —  are terrified of a so-called “peace dividend,” and the potential for cutbacks is looming, either in the form of a loss of $80 billion annually in supplemental budgets to cover projected war spending, or the loss of $50 billion through a budget sequester or some kind of fiscal deal, or some combination of both. The brass hats in the military also know they are losing the Afghan war, and they probably fear that sooner or later their defeat will become understood by the voters and create a PR problems that could adversely affect their future budgets for an extended period.  To date, the military has dodged that bullet, but how long will that last?  The generals and defense industrialists must therefore understand that time is not on their side. 

The generals and politicians also know that a larger majority of Americans now oppose the Afghan war than opposed the Vietnam war.  To be sure, it is now clear ending the draft and “professionalizing” the military has successfully has muted popular opposition to the war.  Ending the draft successfully prepared the ground for a mercenary U.S. military and the entire MICC to engage in constant war so long as its intensity does not breach certain thresholds.  But how long will the public indifference to the pain of war last, particularly if, as is now likely, there are cut backs in spending for social safety net programs during a sluggish recovery and/or the austerity economics trigger another recession?  

The bottom line is that the political economy of the MICC is beginning to gag on Afghanistan.  In its structural and logical aspects, this has created a political situation not unlike that faced by President Nixon in 1969, although political emotions are still far more muted today.

Now, with this background in mind, consider the White House’s so-called exit strategy.  It is based on the reported personnel options ranging from complete withdrawal (the zero option) to keeping 15,000 troops in Afghanistan, with their responsibilities divided up between a counter-terrorist operations (read targeted assassination with drones and special forces and all that implies) and the self-evidently absurd idea that there is still enough time remaining for a tiny cohort of U.S. trainers to solve the intractable training problem posed by the ineffectiveness of the hugely corrupt 350,000 man Afghan army.  Nixon’s Vietnamization policy was far more substantial than that being proposed by the White House, but it is the same game: Afghanizing the war is more designed for domestic consumption in the U.S., in the hope that the President can preserve his credibility by spinning what is really retreat and defeat into an achievement of objectives.  The real aim, of course, is to protect business as usual in the MICC and stave off the domestic opponents of empire  in both parties.  Score 2 for domestic politics trumping foreign policy.

3.  Consider how the ‘porkbarrelling’ stage is being set to ease the pain of any budgetary reductions accompanying the Afghan exit strategy.  Obama is easing the pain to defense contractors by unleashing foreign military sales (FMS) of U.S. first line weapons to third world nations rich enough to pay for them.  This is exactly what President Nixon did when he announced the so-called Nixon Doctrine in summer of 1969 as being at center of his Vietnam exit strategy. Obama has already played his first big card in this game by sharply ramping up FMS to record levels of at least $68 billion² in Fiscal Year 2012 (which began in October 2011) -- that is, in the year leading up to his re-election in November 2012.  Score 3 for the exigencies of domestic politics trumping the rational needs of a foreign policy.

4. There are some differences in the Nixon comparison, but they are also revealing: In 1969, President Nixon did have one “exigency” advantage over Mr. Obama in the domestic politics of catering to the MICC: the Cold War.  Nixon and his successors could refocus the defense budget on the Soviet threat in Europe and the nuclear threat to the United States and hype these threats to pump up the long-term budgetary prospects for the MICC.  

So, while Nixon was reducing the defense budget as he exited Vietnam in the early 1970s, he augmented the political buyoffs of the Nixon Doctrine by planting the seed money to start a large number  of R&D programs (e.g., F-14, F-15, B-1, AV-8B, AWACs, SSN-688 submarine, M-1 tank, etc) for a new generation of even higher cost weapons to be bought in the late 1970s and the 1980s  Like an insurance policy, these R&D programs, coupled with increased FMS, protected and pacified the MICC’s constituencies while building a huge head of programmatic steam.  In the Pentagon the mushrooming costs of all these new programs became known as the "bow wave.”  The bow wave prepared the political ground for the emergence of ‘requirements’ for far larger procurement budgets and the eventual growing of defense budgets in late 1970s and culminated in the explosion of defense budgets under Ronald Reagon.  In retrospect, it is quite clear that the Reagan spending spree was actually launched during the Carter Administration by seeds planted in the Nixon Administration.  A similar bow wave was planted in the aftermath of the Cold War during the last years of the first Bush Administration and the first term of the Clinton Administration — as I explained in my 1996 paper Defense Budget Time Bomb, the budget explosion after 1998 was inevitable.  As well be seen below, Osama bin Laden merely iced the budgetary cake.

President Carter was a prisoner of the bow wave of new programs created by his predecessors’ cynical decisions.³  But Obama may be end up being far more culpable that Carter, because whether Obama knows it or not, he is not repeating Nixon's strategy of refocusing on an existing, if exaggerated, superpower “threat.” Obama is taking the scam one step further: He is laying the seeds for a new and entirely unnecessary Cold War by approving the MICC’s  the reckless plan to "pivot" to a grossly exaggerated, non-superpower threat posed by China.  The China "pivot" will placate the MICC by providing the needed justification to maintain high defense budgets far into the future, backed up, of course, by the budget requirements of Obama’s never ending war on terror.  Score game, set, and match for the exigencies of domestic politics trumping the rationale needs of a foreign policy.

MICC Über Alles

The long-term budget implications of Obama’s “China pivot” are stunningly clear in the following figure: Despite the fact that the United States is exiting Afghanistan and the fact that President has called for cutbacks in so-called entitlement programs while protecting most of Bush’s ill conceived tax give aways in the middle of a so-call fiscal crisis, President Obama is also calling for huge defense budgets into the future as far as the eye can see. The audacity of this hope is mind boggling.

The figure below depicts the Defense Department’s budget authority in terms of the four year totals of each presidential administration, beginning with that of Harry Truman in 1949-1952.  DoD Budget Authority is the new money Congress appropriates each year to fill up the Pentagon’s annual checkbook. The four year totals appropriated during Democratic administrations are portrayed in blue and those for Republican administrations are portrayed in red.  Note that the effects of inflation have been removed from the data portrayed below. 

If Mr. Obama’s plan unfolds as predicted, his eight years of defense spending (i.e., in the non-war base budget) will exceed any comparable eight year period (including the wars) of his predecessors except for that of Ronald Reagan.  The chart also makes it clear that, notwithstanding Secretary Panetta’s claims of deep, savage, and arbitrary cuts to the defense budget, the new five year budget totals in the White House’s and Pentagon’s  budget computers project totals out to 2017 that would be much higher-than-average cold war budgets, and would, in effect, outspend President Bush’s FY 2001-08 “base budget” spending spree. And remember, unlike previous wars in Vietnam and Korea, the war on terror has been funded on a pay-as-you-go, add-on basis via the legislative scam of appropriating supplemental budgets. This policy is equivalent to that of a fire department telling the mayor that its annual budget will support its equipment, but it will need extra money if it has to put out fires.  Be careful to note how the figure separates the war budgets since 2001 from the non-war related base budget.  My comparisons do not include the war budgets which are portrayed by lighter shaded boxes on top of the columns 

Note also how this chart depicts the four year total for the future defense budgets Mr. Obama approved for his second term (labeled Obama2 highlighted in yellow) for last February.  This plan has been slightly reduced over the last year, and while the new budget total will not be available until the long range plan is released by Obama in about six weeks, my sources tell me that the much ballyhooed cuts in the new plan will reduce the inflation adjusted four-year budget total only to the level indicated by the point of the yellow arrow on the right. Bear in mind, the chart unrealistically assumes supplementals for the war on terror will cease to exist as of FY 14, which certainly will not the case.

Several other points implicit in the chart are worth pointing out: (1) A level of $1.6-1.7 trillion over 4 years appears  to be a floor to which budgets used to drop, when they declined during the Eisenhower, Ford/Carter, and Clinton periods. This “floor” — which appears quaintly low today — was the level that caused President Eisenhower to warn the nation about the excessive influence of military-industrial complex in the halls of government (note: he actually included “congressional” in his first draft of the speech, but the reference was subsequently dropped). (2) The size of the military combat force supported by these budgets has shrunk sharply over time, but even with today’s high budgets, old equipment is being replaced by new equipment at decreasing rates, and consequently, the average age of our weapons is always increasing, creating a perpetual modernization crisis (as I explained in the Defense Budget Time Bomb paper referenced above). (3) Even if his detailed spending plans unfold perfectly, Obama’s new budget plan projects even more force shrinkage and equipment aging as we move into the future.  The shrinking/aging trends will once again create the conditions for domestic political pressures to shovel more money to the MICC. (4) The Pentagon’s accounting systems are a shambles, making it impossible to sort out where the money is going, much less where it should be going.  Put bluntly, feeding the MICC monster increases its voracity.

Will Chuck Hegel be able to control the domestic political exigencies posed by the MICC and realign its efforts to match the logical requirements of a salutary foreign policy?  Personally, I doubt it.  Superficially, Hegel appears to be a reformer.  He has made some skeptical statements about our stupid foreign policy over the years since 2001.  But as a senator, did he vote in accordance with his vocal skepticism?  Not against Iraq, not against Afghanistan, not against Israel, although to his credit, he did vote against some sanctions in Iran.  Even worse, to my thinking, he called for a ground invasion of Kosovo in 1999, which was exceedingly reckless, because the Serbian Army was little damaged  by the NATO bombing campaign, and was spoiling for a fight, and a ground war was opposed by our own military.   Moreover Hegel's record of supporting  unnecessary and bloated cold-war pork programs like ballistic missile defense suggests he will support the ‘pivot’ and what it  implies for high-tech boondoggles. Also, you must bear in mind the way Washington works: politicians must be "for" something -- and a hyped Chinese threat, like the nonexistent bomber and missile gaps of the Cold War, fills that bill perfectly. 

So, the stage is being set for defense to remain off the budget negotiating table while Obama cuts back on social programs and protects the Bush era tax cuts to the wealthy.

In conclusion, I think domestic politics is poised to trump the entirely reasonable foreign policy hopes raised in your email.  I am afraid we are about to sweep Afghanistan under the rug like we did in Iraq and Vietnam. 

While I see this as yet another immoral evasion of responsibility, given the extent to which we contributed to Afghanistan's misery since the Brzezinski caper in the summer of 1979 (also confirmed in Robert Gates memoir, here) that provoked the Soviets to invade six months later, in December of 1979, it is unfortunately the way American politics has worked ever since Vietnam. 

American politics continues to repeat the practice of buying domestic power by inflicting misery and destruction on third world nations.  In my view, Obama’s own contribution to statecraft in this regard has been his ability to lobotomize almost the entire Democratic base. The same people who were screaming about Bush’s illegal wars, unconstitutional surveillance, lack of due process, etc., are now silent or singing Obama’s greatness. 

Even when Democrats can see how Mr. Obama has disappointed them, the insanity of Republican politicians provides the Democrats a ready rationale to excuse Obama. (By the way, does anyone notice that if Hagel is confirmed it means two of Obama’s three SecDefs will have been Republicans?)  

The Republican party, with a few exceptions, is so visibly crazy that they have become an indispensable foil that permits Obama to govern as he does.  The conventional wisdom of liberals is that Obama’s heart is in the right place, but he is conflict averse and therefore must govern as a centrist (really a center-rightist), because the GOP is crazy and intransigent. But in reality, Obama actually is a center-rightist who uses his image as a diffident compromiser as a cloak to hide his pro-corporatocracy given aways.  And because most people prefer center-right governance to out-and-out fascism, the GOP plays an essential role as a “bad cop” to the center-right “good cop,” which is why Democrats went along with  Obama’s plan to enshrine the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 99.3%, and a huge giveaway on the estate tax, in perpetuity. My fear is that, in the same way, Democrats will go along with Obama’s inflated defense budgets and his permanent conflict foreign policy. 

Anyway, that is the view of one clapped out retiree from the cheap seats in Versailles on the Potomac.

Chuck

--------------------------

¹ “Afghans say total U.S. pullout would trigger disaster” (Reuters) and “Obama administration considers leaving no US troops in Afghanistan after combat ends in 2014” (AP)

² The $68 billion understates the size of the foreign market because the FMS category does not include all sales; for example, it does not include the money received in partnering agreements for the development and production of new equipment, like the Joint Strike Fighter.

³ While it would be unfair to blame Jerry Ford for these decisions, he did nothing to undo the pressures created during the Nixon Administration.

No Guts, No Glory

The Real Challenges Facing the Next Secretary of Defense

FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY,
This essay appeared in Counterpunch (31 Dec 2012) and Time's Battleland (3 Jan 2013)

One of the most pressing problems facing the incoming Secretary of Defense is posed by our denouement in Afghanistan.  For reasons explained by Paul Sperry in an excellent 30 December op-ed in the New York Post, extricating ourselves from this quagmire is now taking on dangerous overtones, and the need to leave may be approaching at warp speed.  The implications for the nature of the American withdrawal may be ominous, but they should not be unexpected.  It is now virtually certain that managing a coherent withdrawal will present a major challenge for the incoming defense secretary.

President Obama’s 2009 surge strategy for what he and Democrats liked to portray as the “good war” in Afghanistan was premised upon the assumption that the US could quickly build up and train large Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), including army and police forces.  Obama and the Pentagon sold this counterinsurgency strategy to the American people by promising a surge in American forces would quickly weaken the Taliban.  The emasculation of the Taliban would permit a rapid expansion of the Afghan security zones controlled by the Kabul government, while the rapid build up of the ANSF would stabilize and grow these zones even further, and thereby set the stage for a quick exit of US combat forces beginning eighteen months from the date of the surge.

Despite its central premise of quickly building up an effective ANSF, the surge-based counterinsurgency plan produced by the Afghan theater commander General Stanley McChrystal did not provide a realistic analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing Afghan army and police forces.  Yet these forces were the foundation for the both the expansion and the promised sequence of developments that would enable our quick withdrawal.

McChrystal’s grotesque oversight became obvious well before the plan’s approval, when his plan was leaked in the early fall of 2009 (as I explained here).    The limitations of this plan were again brought dramatically to the President’s attention by Ambassador Eikenberry in cables that were leaked immediately before the plan’s approval in January 2010 (summarized here).  Nevertheless, the President pressed on and approved the fatally flawed plan after an agonizing public debate during the fall and winter of 2009-10.

General McChrystal’s omission was both logically and empirically unforgivable, especially given (1) the contemporaneously emerging awareness of the counterproductive strategic effects of President Bush’s surge in Iraq, (2) the Soviet’s clear failure to build up an effective Afghan army in the 1980s as part of its exit strategy and (3) our own spectacular failure to build up an effective South Vietnamese army (i.e., Vietnamization), which was a central premise of President Nixon’s Vietnam exit strategy.

While hardly unique in its content, Sperry’s op-ed piece provides an excellent summary of how the easily foreseeable consequences of McChrystal’s oversight are now rapidly coming to a head. The problem is not just a strategic one of extracting our forces with dignity; nor is it a political one of fingering who is to blame, although there is plenty of blame to go around. It stems from deep institutional roots that reveal a need for reform in our military bureaucracies and particularly our leadership selection policies.

That is because the next Secretary of Defense must deal with the consequences of a strategic oversight that was made by and approved at the highest professional levels of the American military establishment — a plan which it then imposed on its weak and insecure political leaders.  This suggests a question: Will the new defense secretary succumb to business as usual by sweeping the dysfunctional institutional causes of the Afghan debacle under the rug or have the courage and wisdom to use this sorry affair as a reason to clean out the Pentagon’s Augean Stables?

If past is prologue, the former is far more probable than the latter.  The Vietnam catastrophe resulted cosmetic reforms, the most lasting of which dealt with improving the military’s capacity to manipulate press coverage to preserve its institutional prerogatives — a capability that became apparent in the First Iraq War, Kosovo, the Second Iraq War, and initially in Afghanistan, and the press’s fawning coverage of these wars.

But managing the Afghan denouement  is not even the largest challenge facing the new defense secretary.

A far more significant challenge will be posed by the need to sort out the programmatic chaos in the Pentagon’s hugely bloated defense budget, which, while not unrelated to the Afghan debacle, is caused primarily by out-of-control institutional prerogatives and bureaucratic game playing.  Notwithstanding its bloat, the current defense budget plan cannot modernize the  military’s weapons inventories on a timely basis; nor can it insure our shrinking, aging equipment will be maintained in a state of combat readiness, while providing sufficient funds for training troops.  Most importantly, the Pentagon’s accounting systems are a shambles.  The Pentagon’s budget and program planning books can not even pass the most basic constitutional requirements for accountability, much less provide the management information needed to fix the aforementioned modernization, force structure, and readiness problems.

As I explained here and here, these dysfunctional problems are connected and have deep behavioral roots.  Fixing these problems will require harmonizing and reining in the disparate factions making up the dysfunctional political-economy of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — a heretofore intractable problem President Eisenhower first warned America about in his farewell address in January 1961 (note: the reference to Congress was included in the first draft of his speech but subsequently dropped).

What I find depressing is that not one of these pressing issues has been the subject of speculations about the choice of a new defense secretary.  Au contraire, the press has been obsessed with the lobbying concerns of the discredited neocons on the right who helped to create Afghan and Iraqi messes, proponents of continuing American empire in the middle (who are now promoting our intervention in Syria and the budget busting pivot to the Pacific), and gender balancers on the left.

Perhaps such divagations of the public mind are a necessary diversion. After all, reining in the out of control defense program has been declared a non problem by placing it off limits in the hypocritical fiscal cliff negotiations, where the President has chosen put social security payments on the block, even though social security is fully funded by its own earmarked payroll deduction tax (President Obama proposed cutting payments by adopting the chained consumer price index to lower the future inflation adjustments to these payments).

The bottom line, Mr./Ms. Incoming Secretary: SNAFU in Versailles on the Potomac raises the question: Do you want to be part of the problem … or part of a solution?

The Good, the Bizarre and the Ugly

AF-PAK Sitrep

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, Weedend Edition November 25-27, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/25/af-pak-sitrep/

It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States.  To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”

To those readers who disagree with my opening line, I urge you to study Anthony Cordersman’s most recent situation report on the AF-PAK War, THE AFGHANISTAN- PAKISTAN WAR AT THE END OF 2011: Strategic Failure? Talk Without Hope? Tactical Success? Spend Not Build (And Then Stop Spending)?  It was issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on November 15.  Reading the report is heavy slogging but I urge readers to download and examine it — at the very least, take a few minutes  to read the executive summary.

Now compare Cordesman’s systematic, detailed, and workmanlike analysis to the bizarre obscurantism peddled one week later, on 22 November, co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings Institution) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (American Enterprise Institute) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled Defining Victory in Afghanistan.

O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz posit the bizarre thesis that the admittedly less than successful outcome against the FARC guerrillas in Columbia is a favorable model for justifying continuing business as usual in Afghanistan. Viewed through the refractions of their Columbian lens, O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz conclude, “Our current exit strategy of reducing American troops to 68,000 by the end of next summer and transferring full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014 is working. In a war where the U.S. has demonstrated remarkable strategic patience, we need to stay patient and resolute.”

Are O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz living on the same planet as Cordesman or do they live in some kind of parallel universe?

I submit it is latter. Here’s why -

Einstein showed how reasoning by analogy can be a very creative way of thinking, but it is also very dangerous, because bad analogies, if not rigorously tested against reality, can capture the imagination and cause one to see what one wants to see.  This problem has been particularly evident in the case of understanding the highly evolved complex tribal cultures of Afghanistan, as Jonathan Steele shows in his just released book, Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground (Counterpoint, Berkeley, October 2011).  Steele explains how one of the enduring features of America’s 30 year adventure in Afghanistan is a policy-making decision cycle, [ i.e., what military reformers refer to as the collective Observation - Orientation - Decision Action (OODA) Loop], grounded in an outlook [i.e., Orientation] that is shaped by false assumptions and mythical beliefs.  The distorted Orientation causes decision makers and policy wonks to filter information in a way that causes them see what they want to see.  When this happens, as I explained here, decisions and actions become progressively disconnected from reality and decision-makers become overloaded by confusion and disorder — a process we in the Pentagon used to call incestuous amplification.

The only innoculation against incestuous amplification is to destroy the “model” shaping the orientation with a blunt dose of cold reality, like the Cordesman Report — yet as O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz have so convincingly demonstrated, the minds of some people are beyond saving.  A problem, of course, is that more people will read silly fantasies peddled in the Wall Street Journal than heavy tomes produced by serious analysts.

Cordesman’s report is also important for another reason.  Notwithstanding the last ditch fantasies of O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz, an atmosphere of gloom is descending on Versailles, and the inevitable hunt for scapegoats to blame for the looming failure is in the offing.  While Cordesman is unlikely to be a part of any finger pointing game, analyses like his (and others like Steele’s) will add fuel to the fire heating up the emerging political debate over “who lost Iraq and AFPAK?”  We can expect that debate to go from the bizarre (like the O’Hanlon/Wolfowitz thesis) to the really ugly, given the unscrupulous know-nothing scorched-earth atmosphere currently so much in evidence in our contemporary politics.

Polls suggest withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan are more in tune with the majority wishes of the American public, which after ten years of costly futile war is understandably tired and is turning inward because of economic troubles at home. Yet polls also suggest the military is now the most “respected” institution of government–far more so than it was in the early 1970s; this is true despite (1) the fact that DoD is now the only federal agency that cannot pass at least part of the annual audit required explicitly by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and implicitly by the Constitution and (2) that after ten years, its wars are sputtering aimlessly into an morass.

On the other hand, the military — really the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex or MICC — is also far more politicized and influential in domestic politics than it was in the 1970s; its PR machine, abetted by ubiquitous advertisements by defense contractors in the printed and electronic media, is also far more sophisticated today than it was 40 years ago, and militarism has insinuated itself far more deeply into our popular culture. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, Eisenhower’s nightmare is upon us.

To wit: the recent debate over deficit reduction effectively took serious reductions in defense spending off the table.  In fact, even though the Super Committee on deficit reduction just collapsed as many predicted it would, Pentagon officials have refused to even make contingency plans to cope with defense cutbacks caused by a sequester, and have decided instead to push back on Congress, in effect passing the pain onto social programs and Social Security and Medicare.  Evidence is mounting that defense spending and “no tax increases” are now eclipsing Social Security and Medicare as third rails in American politics.

My advice, dear reader, is to get ready for another Vietnam-like “stab in the back” argument like that of the late 1970s when the generals blamed their strategic/grand-strategic defeat in Vietnam on politicians at home.  That drumbeat in the 1970s, abetted by phony claims that budget cuts after Vietnam created a “hollow military,” when in fact the hollowness was a self-inflicted wound [1]⁠1, together with fantastical promises that new technologies would revolutionize the nature of war, plus the spreading of contracts to more and more congressional districts, fueled a political atmosphere that unleashed the huge and wasteful spending spree of the 1980s.

This time, a re-run of the stab-in-the-back argument is also likely to be abetted by an unstated racist undertone of being ‘stabbed by a black socialist president,’ (a totally phony charge) fueled discretely behind the scenes by the MICC.  This kind of inuendo will very likely to gain traction, particularly among the Limbaugh/Beck crowd on the hard right, but more generally among angry blue collar white men who have seen their standard of living stagnate or decline and their social status diminish.

Obama and the Democrats will be targeted for the bulk of blame, although in the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama certainly bears a major part of the responsibility for Afghanistan, given his reckless decision to escalate the ground and air war in 2009.  But the problems cited in Cordesman’s report did not build up in just three years, and its information helps us understand why blaming Obama and Democrats for ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’ is a phony charge — there is plenty of blame to go around.  Nevertheless, it is a almost certain this charge will be a campaign plank of the Republicans in 2012.

Combine the likely intensification of the MICC’s ‘stab-in-the-back politics with the growing popular rage against austerity economics in the US and Europe, the increasing prospect of a double dip global recession or even a debt-driven deflation, and 2012 is shaping up to be a very dangerous year for the United States — particularly if Israel tries to take advantage of this mess by attacking Iran in the middle of an election year.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He be reached atchuck_spinney@mac.com

Notes

1 As I explained in my 1980 report, Defense Facts of Life (see  Part I of Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch, Westview Press 1985) the so-called “hollow military” was a self inflicted wound caused by explicit internal decisions to cutback on readiness inorder to pay for modernization with increasingly costly and complex weapons.  My report proved this point by showing how the Air Force’s tactical fighter force suffered from the same readiness problems as the rest of  the military, even though the budget for the tactical fighter mission area increased dramatically in inflation adjusted terms after 1975.

Surging Tit for Tat in Afghanistan

[Reprinted with permission of editors]

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January 12, 2011

Why Mine Warfare is Good for Protracted War

Surging Tit for Tat in Afghanistan

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney01122011.html

President Obama's ballyhooed surge of US forces in Afghanistan added 17,000 troops in early 2009 plus an additional 30,000 by 2010, in effect doubling the number of troops in Afghanistan (not to mention the concomitant surge in the camp-follower contractor force). The Taliban may not have doubled its troop strength, but as Tom Vanden Brook reports in the 10 January issue of USA Today, the insurgents have doubled the the total number of casualties inflicted by mines in just the last two years of the nine year war. [See graphic]

Of course, as any veteran of Vietnam (or Algeria) will tell you, mines and booby traps are favorite weapons of guerrilla fighters.

Mine warfare is extremely cost-effective for the guerrilla. It is dirt cheap, yet it creates a powerful hidden menace that slows down the adversary's battlefield decision cycle. That is because the real or imagined presence of mines increases uncertainty and fear, which turn the focus of a soldier's attention inward on self-protection, as opposed to maintaining a mental state focused outward on neutralizing the enemy. Defeating the mine becomes the objective, but the presence of mines and booby traps fix soldiers' attention and make them more vulnerable to the blind-side effects of enemy initiatives, like sudden hit and run attacks or ambushes. That combined-arms effect is why force protection has become such a obsession in Afghanistan.

Ask any soldier what it is like to be been stuck in a minefield in any war, and he will tell you the dominant psychological effect is a sense of paralyzing fear and vulnerability.

Put abstractly, the uncertainty and menace posed by the real or imagined presence of mines creates an intense psychological pressure that builds up a reactive emotional mindset that strains the body, saps initiative, and slows down decisions and action. In a relative sense, this effect on one side of a conflict increases the freedom of action for the other, in this case, the guerrilla.

Despite the land mine's long indisputable history of high effectiveness, the US military was caught flat footed by the sudden appearance of this threat after the U.S. militarized its response to 9-11 with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, the Pentagon coined a revealing new mechanistic term of art to describe the mine threat: "improvised explosive device (IED)." The very wording of the term implies the battlefield booby traps in Iraq and Afghanistan were something new and unexpected to the planners in the Pentagon and strategists in the field. Despite the subsequent expenditure of billions of dollars to neutralize this threat, much of it wasted on high tech boondoggles and bizarre robotic gimmicks that benefitted program managers in the Pentagon, defense contractors, and the Congressmen whose districts benefited from the torrent of dollars, the combat effectiveness of the mine threat in Afghanistan has surged in parallel with President Obama's troop surge, according to the Pentagon's own casualty data.

Now look at some of the rationalizations used to explain the increase in casualties as given to Vanden Brook by his sources:

1. A relatively mild winter enabled freer Taliban movements (presumably enabling Taliban guerrillas to deploy more mines in more places).

2. Increased mine-inflicted casualties are the result of added US troops forcing the Taliban to fight back.

3. Al Qaeda is directing the Taliban to return to areas they were pushed out of and to fight back.

4. Despite increased casualties caused by mines, the military says progress is being made against the mine threat.

5. Wounded troops are less likely to die because of improvements in battlefield medicine.

Rationalization #1 may be true. So what?

Rationalization #4 is vapid Pentagon-speak for justifying its continued expenditure of billions of dollars on hi-tech gizmos to defeat a primitive mine threat it failed to foresee, while it indulged itself by continuing to waste money on cold-war inspired turkeys after the cold war ended (Star Wars, F-22, SSN-21, Future Combat System, etc).

Rationalization #5 has nothing to do with the total number of casualties from mines, i.e., killed plus wounded. Indeed, from the guerrilla's perspective, it is often better to wound an adversary than to kill him, because wounding triggers rescue operations that shift decision-making focus inward toward self protection and ties up more manpower and material resources in high-cost extraction/medical operations. Paradoxically, the increase in the wounded to killed ratio, while welcome to our side in the sense that it reduces US deaths, may even suggest that the relative effectiveness of mine warfare for the guerrilla is growing, because it is increasing its strain of our ever more costly efforts to wage an increasingly expensive and frustrating war is a distant land (we have now spent as much in Afghanistan, measured in inflation adjusted dollars, as we spent in much larger, albeit shorter wars in Korea and WWI and almost half as much as was spent in Vietnam).

Rationalization #s 2 & 3 at least relate to the question of the effectiveness in coping with the mine threat, but they reflect a somewhat bizarre mindset when viewed in terms of our counterinsurgency doctrine. The idea of measuring success by forcing the Taliban to stand and fight suggests we have reverted to a Vietnam-style attrition strategy (which implies greater firepower, focus on bodycounts, and more unintended death and destruction to civilians), as opposed to the counter-guerrilla oil-spot strategy of winning hearts and minds of locals that the surge was originally premised upon. This weird aspect was reinforced by John Nagl, an oft-quoted "expert" on guerrilla warfare and president the Center for New American Security (a pro-interventionist thinktank), when he said "We'll know a lot more about how effectively we've been able to put pressure on the enemy based on who comes out to fight in the spring."

By implication, Nagl is saying if that the Taliban don't come out to fight next spring, it is a sign that we are winning. Nagl is forgetting that the Taleban have disappeared before. In the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a triumphal President Bush and Pentagon mistook a strategic dispersal into the Hindu Kush for a rout and declared victory. Now, nine years later we are still fighting the Taleban, which in fact have expanded their areas of control. Yet Nagl would have us believe another disappearance, by itself, would be a sign of success.

T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), would have different take on Nagl's disappearing hypothesis, arguing instead that guerrillas may not choose to cooperate by standing and fighting, because the art of guerrilla war is "tip and run, not pushes but strokes", with "use of the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place" and "never being on the defense except by accident or error." Lawrence is saying the name of the game for the guerrilla is to wear the adversary down by stretching out the war. Mine warfare fits this game like a hand in a glove.

Lawrence is certainly not alone in this kind of thinking. Nagl and his fellow counter-guerrilla travellers in the Pentagon would do well to study William E. Polk's profoundly important book, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (Harper Perennial, 2008), because Polk explains quite clearly why the only combatants to benefit strategically from protracted war of insurrection are the guerrillas who are trying to expel foreign invaders — and mine warfare is good for protracted war.

Is the Global War in Terror Creating More Problems than it is Solving?

The late historian Chalmers Johnson popularized the term "blowback" to describe the unintended grand-strategic consequences resulting from interventionist foreign policies and military actions.  The term blowback dates to the CIA's internal history of the US’s 1953 Iranian coup that threw out the Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (a progressive social reformer who wanted to nationalize the oil industry among other things) and replaced him with the tyrannical American puppet Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi.  No one can doubt that contemporary problems with Iran today are rooted in resentments dating back to the 1953 coup. 

The United States reacted to the murder of 3,000 Americans on 9-11 by declaring a Global War on Terror (GWOT) and militarizing its response to what was in fact a heinous crime committed by a conspiracy of Moslem fanatics and nut cases.  Treating this criminal conspiracy as an act of war has justified the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as unilateral attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere, as well as a suspension of constitutional rights at home.  Moreover, like the notorious Phoenix program rising from its Vietnam ashes, military strategy in the GWOT has devolved into the targeted killing and assassination of what the Pentagon likes to call "high value" targets.  In the process, hundreds of thousands of innocent Moslems have met their deaths, either as direct or indirect consequences of our reaction to 9-11, and millions of Moslems have become convinced the US is engaged in a religious war with Islam itself.  That these are unintended effects of a targeted killing strategy aimed at the Al Qaeda conspiracy and its fellow travelers is quite beside the point as far as the spreading anti-American Islamic rage is concerned.  

Nowhere is the danger of blowback greater than in nuclear-armed Pakistan -- a multi-ethnic Islamic nation of 180 million people that is now in the cross hairs of our killing strategy in the  GWOT.   

President Obama may forbid the use of term "Global War on Terror," but his "whack-a-mole" attacks on "high value" targets inside Afghanistan's and Pakistan's predominantly Pashtun territories is indistinguishable logically as a military strategy from that of his predecessor. Moreover, Mr. Obama has chosen to massively escalate the "targeted-killing" drone strikes inside Pakistan, despite mounting evidence that these strikes are fueling anti-America rage and the recruitment of Pakistani Jihadis.  According to a data base maintained by the New America Foundation, President Bush launched 33 drone strikes in five years between 2004 and 2008.   In the two years since  he took office, President Obama has launched 174 drone strikes.

Unfortunately, as I indicated an earlier blaster, Mr. Obama's strategic review turned inward on itself and failed account for the five crucial grand-strategic criteria by which any military strategy should be judged.  The attached op-ed in the Observer explains why  a continuation of business as usual in Afghanistan and Pakistan could blow back on itself in Pakistan as well and push that nuclear-armed state into chaos.

Chuck Spinney

Pakistan will implode if the US does not leave Afghanistan

The continuing US presence in Afghanistan fuels extremism in neighbouring Pakistan

Imran Khan

The Observer, Sunday 9 January 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/09/pakistan-implode-america-leave-afghanistan

The assassination of Salmaan Taseer has shown only too clearly the growing extremism in Pakistan, the radicalisation of its society and the polarisation that is taking hold. This is not just between the religious and the secular, but also the polarisation that the "war on terror" has caused between the various religious sects.

There were no Pakistanis involved in 9/11 and al-Qaida was then based in Afghanistan. The only militancy we were suffering was among the tribal groups who had fought against the Soviets and whose idea of jihad was a war against foreign occupation. Yes, there was sectarian violence, but suicide bombers were unheard of.

So after 9/11, when General Musharraf chose to ally with the Americans in the "war on terror", it was a fundamental blunder. Overnight he turned the jihadi groups created to fight foreign occupation from supporters into enemies, people prepared to fight the Pakistani army because of its support for the US invasion.

Musharraf then made a second mistake in sending the army into the tribal areas. Our own tribespeople immediately rose up in revolt. Rather than co-opting these people – and, remember, every man is armed – we made new enemies. Then along came the American drones to kill more of our people. Soon, the American "war on terror" was seen as a war on Islam by the majority of Pakistanis and certainly by the Pashtuns in the tribal areas. Terror and extremism intensified.

Every year extremism gets worse, our society becomes more radicalised and the bloodshed grows. This is how you must see the context of this assassination. Society is now so polarised that because Taseer criticised the blasphemy law he was seen as criticising Islam. But that was not what he said. This assassination would not have happened before the "war on terror".

Imams of different sects are being killed now, and mosques and churches bombed. The fanaticism keeps getting worse. As disturbing as Taseer's assassination is, just as disturbing is the way his assassin has become a hero. That is why this whole thing is so dangerous, it shows where we are headed.

I have been predicting this from day one. There is no military solution in Afghanistan, only dialogue, so the supreme irony is that in siding with the Americans all we have done is send the levels of violence up in Pakistan. The "war on terror" has weakened the state and then, thanks to the George Bush-sponsored National Reconciliation Ordinance in 2007, which allowed an amnesty for all the biggest political crooks, we now have the most corrupt government in our history. The "war on terror" is destroying Pakistan.

Clemenceau once said: "War is too important to be left to the generals." He was right; for us it has been a disaster. There is incredible anti-American sentiment here, and the drone attacks only fuel that hatred. We need a change of strategy, otherwise the worst-case scenario will be achieved here; an unstable nuclear state.

It's not a question of there being no room for moderates, it's that moderates are being pushed towards extremism. Taseer didn't say anything anti-Islamic, he just questioned the blasphemy law and whether it should be used to victimise innocent people. His death has caused many moderates to think there is no point in being a martyr. If it makes people such as myself think twice about what we say, then where does that leave us? We are all now at risk.

Crime in Pakistan is now at a level that breaks all records. Yet 60% of the elite police forces are now employed protecting VIPs. Where does that leave ordinary people? Young Pakistanis are being radicalised and the Taliban grow in strength. The US is no longer fighting just the Taliban, it is fighting the whole Pashtun population.

The consequences for Pakistan, with its population of 180 million, are enormous. And there is an impact, too, on Muslim youth in western countries. Graham Fuller, the CIA chief of staff in Kabul, wrote in 2007 that, if Nato left Afghanistan, Pakistan security forces could overcome terrorism and extremism. But, as long as the Americans push Pakistan to do more in the tribal areas, the situation will worsen – until Pakistan itself implodes.

Obama's March to Folly

Reprinted with permission

Weekend Edition
December 17 - 19, 2010

The Myth of Liberal Intervention and the Arrogance of Ignorance

Obama's March to Folly

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney12172010.html

In a recent opinion piece, "Kosovo and the Myth of Liberal Intervention," Neil Clark in the Guardian on 15 December gave the reader a good summary of the some of the myths surrounding the Kosovo war, although he helped to perpetuate one myth, namely that the so-called genocide of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs could be as high as 10,000. While Clark fudged the issue by using a range of 2,000-10,000, the fact remains that examination of mass burial sites by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, some of whom were undoubtably Serbs; nor could the ICTY distinguish how many of these bodies were victims of war crimes or were the unintended detritus of NATO's "precision" bombing. The number of 10,000 was a face-saving, last-ditch, "statistical" estimate produced by the US State Department (its earlier estimates were far higher), which had a vested interest in proving the genocide it claimed Serbia had committed as a justification for NATO's "humanitarian" bombing campaign. The estimate of 10,000 was based on dubious (to put it charitably) statistical methods for estimating the number of bodies the State Department said existed but could not find -- once illustrating government's propensity to confuse the a priori with the a posteriori

Understanding the politics and propaganda surrounding the "goodness" of the Kosovo War, the less-than-predicted performance of our weapons, and the war's horrid aftermath (including trade in human organs, drugs, white slavery, etc) is crucially important, because Kosovo became the template for the kind of quick, painless, airpower-intensive, intervention that led Bush to recklessly think he had won a quick victory in Afghanistan, when the Taliban, faced with superior military forces, simply melted into the hinterlands in classical guerrilla/Sun Tzu fashion to fight another day. The initially pain-free Afghanistan operation fueled Bush's arrogance and seduced him into believing that, with a enough duplicity to justify his actions, he could repeat the quick trick by invading Iraq, which would be also a cakewalk -- remember his childish "mission accomplished" performance on the aircraft carrier. The myth of precision bombing and targeted killing that created the false impression of a bloodless -- at least for us -- cakewalk to victory in Kosovo [1] is also reflected in the kind of denial that is now sucking Obama ever deeper into the Afghan trap Bush created, as well as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and god knows where else.

Obama's denial can be seen in "march-to-folly" character of the just completed, hermetically sealed, strategic review by President Obama and his group thinking team of compliant rivals. They simply rubber stamped our current so-called counterinsurgency strategy to win hearts and minds by claiming that the war is "on track." Meanwhile, over in the Pentagon, the military is planning to shift to a so-called counter terrorism strategy, because the current strategy is on track to what some strategist ridiculously called a "sub-optimal" outcome. This "shift" is code for an escalation of "precision" bombing and the increased use of special forces in "surgical" killing operations of "high value" targets, which of course assumes a degree of reliable, high-grade "actionable" intelligence that seldom exists. Moreover, we know from our experience to date, an escalation of these operations will produce in an unintended increase in the killing of innocent civilians and their property. We also know from experience to date that, in Afghanistan, escalating murder and destruction will fuel the passions of honor and revenge in what is one of the proudest, toughest, clan-based vendetta cultures in the entire world.

One other external factor ought to have ought to an penetrated the closed circle of advisors who conditioned Mr. Obama's decision to stay the course: namely the self-evident question of the cost and effectiveness that results from mirror imaging the kind targeted killing operations that are so popular with the Israeli military. We all know how successful the Israelis have been in creating an optimal outcome to their conflict with the Palestinians.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Notes.

[1] Kosovo is a case study in the failure of high-tech precision bombardment to live up to its promises. US military planners predicted a "precision" bombing campaign would force the Serbs to capitulate in only two to three days, but the air campaign grinded on for 79 days as the target list grew exponentially (because the destruction was not having its predicted effects). Yet when it was over, NATO intelligence determined only tiny quantities of Serb tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and trucks were destroyed. Serbian troops marched out of Kosovo in good order, their fighting spirit intact, displaying clean equipment, crisp uniforms, and in larger numbers than planners said were in Kosovo to begin with. Moreover, the terms of Serb "surrender," which the undefeated Serb military regarded as a sell out by Serbian President Milosovic, were the same as those the Serbs agreed to at the Ramboullet Conference, before US negotiators and Secretary of State Madeline Albright inserted a poison pill to queer the deal, so we could have what the politically troubled Clinton Administration thought would be a neat, short war.