Hillary Wow's the Arabs

Obsessions are dangerous, because in any conflict, be it political, economic, or military, they create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by one's adversaries -- not to mention one's purported allies.  That is because obsessions shape the Orientation of one's Observation - Orientation - Decision - Action (OODA) loop in a way that induces one to see and act on what one "wants" to see rather than what "is."  When this happens, one's decision cycle looks inward and becomes disconnected from its environment, and as a result, the actions decided on will not have the desired outcome.  The mismatch between desires and reality will then feed back into subsequent decision cycle, and if the obsession is not corrected inside the decision-maker's orientation , the mismatches will amplify themselves in subsequent actions.  Left unaddressed only one outcome is possible: what the American strategist Colonel John Boyd, the inventor of the OODA Loop, used to call "incestuous amplification," or an increasingly self-referencing decision making spiral, that by "talking to itself, succumbs to an inevitable evolution into chaos.  

America's amplifying obsessions with Israel are creating just this kind of evolution, and there is no better example than in our increasingly dangerous self-referencing  policy towards Iran, which itself is now turning into an obsession.

 The downward spiral becomes apparent when one tries to examine the results of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent visit to the Middle East through the eyes of those she was trying to win over.  Her aim was to shore up our Arab "allies" in a unified anti-Iran policy.  But as Rami Khouri, a highly-regarded observer of politics in the Middle East (bio), explains in this commentary in Lebanon's Daily Star, Clinton's pathetically transparent efforts devolved into yet another version of our old self-referencing efforts to shore up a pro- Israeli, neo-colonialist, foreign policy that is doomed to fail again.    

GOP Strategy: Exploit Palinism to Delegitimize Obama

I asked a friend -- a seasoned Republican political operative who must remain anonymous -- to comment on New York Times columnist Frank Rich's recent analysis of the Tea Party phenomenon, Republican faux populism, and its chief spokesperson du jour, Sara Palin (see Rich's Palin's Cunning Sleight of Hand also introduced below).  My friend, call him Republican Operative X, has been very critical of the witty albeit accurate criticisms Rich has used to poke fun at both these subjects as well as their Republican adherents.  Operative X has warned me repeatedly that Rich was being too light hearted about what was a very dangerous movement toward a demagogic strand of populist authoritarianism that could move this country toward the darkness of an "inverted totalitarian" dictatorship.  But this op-ed by Rich is different.  Attached are my friend's reactions to Mr. Rich's latest handiwork and some political prognostications.


A Political Analysis of Inverted Totalitarianism 

by Republican Operative X

February 14, 2010

I suppose Rich gets it now.

1. As I said about 6 months ago, the GOP strategy is to delegitimize Obama and make it impossible to govern -- then sweep into power amid the chaos they they themselves partly created. A "chaos" strategy is the only thing they've got (rather than rational alternative policies), but it's an effective strategy given the intellectual qualities of the American people, effective GOP control of large segments of the media, and the Democrats' propensity to play into their hands.

2. Psychological testing has shown that for people with deeply held but false beliefs, empirical demonstration that their beliefs are false does not cause them to renounce those beliefs; on the contrary, they dig in and believe them more firmly, and invent conspiratorial rationalizations as to why the empirically demonstrated facts are wrong. That's a good profile of the Palinistas.

3. I am already making odds that the GOP will sweep into power, at least in one house of Congress in 2010, and the whole shooting match in 2012. It probably won't be Palin, but the party will be in her image. The Palin GOP will make the Bush GOP look like the Mensa Society.

4. I go back and forth on how radically authoritarian the Bush presidency was: was it sui generis in American history, or did it just incrementally intensify already-evident aspects of cold war and post-cold war America? Conceivably, under the shock of 9/11, a Gore presidency might have adopted similar unilateral and authoritarian measures. And Obama has shown little propensity to roll back the main thrust of Bush's policies. Some people called the Bush administration fascist, but Sheldon Wollin's term "inverted totalitarianism" might be more applicable: intensifying authoritarianism under a façade of normal life. Much of the propaganda function of authoritarian government was done not directly but through corporate intermediaries: advertising, corporate-owned cable "news," etc.  Rather than mobilizing the population a la classic fascism, inverted totalitarianism seeks to make them distracted and politically apathetic: e.g., Bush telling Americans to go out and shop after 9/11.

5. While Bush represented the classically corporate model, the Palin Party will blend in a (faux) populism and a leather-lunged lower middle class white male resentment. A GOP in power in 2018 is going to have more of the trappings of what we think of as traditionally fascist: political witch trials; xenophobia and racism (for reasons having to do with free trade ideology and Eastern elite upbringing, Bush was not xenophobic or racist); political mobilization via the tea parties (or whatever their successors are); and God knows what else.

6. It will finish us off as a great power, for whatever damage the populist side of Palin's GOP does to civil liberties, the social fabric of the country, and foreign relations, the corporate side of the party will be back at their old tricks: they will thoroughly and irrevocably wreck the government's finances, destroy social security, and drain even more of the nation's wealth into the hands of an even more entrenched oligarchy.

Anyway, that's how I think it could happen.

Counterpunch: Mark to Market Pentagon Style

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

February 8, 2010

Buy-to-Budget and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Mark-to-Market Pentagon Style

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney02082010.html

"Mark to Market" is (or was?) an accounting standard that required financial institutions to value their assets at their current market value. Thus a stock portfolio would be valued at an amount determined by the stock market, if the stock holder sold all his assets in that market. Last Spring, when the government was contemplating its plan to rescue the big banks, it settled on the idea of using taxpayer money to purchase or guarantee the so-called toxic assets of the large "investment" banks and their insurers (e.g., collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps). The banks lobbied furiously against the mark to market rule, because the toxic assets could not be sold in a market that was frozen, and under the rule, they would be valued a fraction (somewhere between 0% and 60%) of their original purchase prices. Under mark to market, the banks would take a bath or even become insolvent. So, they concocted a new concept of "fair value," which came close to reimbursing them at cost, thus implying the capitalist market was inherently unfair. The Federal Government ended up guaranteeing the debt at taxpayer expense, thus securing an American economic system that guarantees private profits at the expense of public losses for the privileged entities on Wall Street.

But don't blame the banks for this kind of system. They are only doing what is natural when one is working with the best government money can buy. In fact, the American political economy has many ways of guaranteeing private profits with public subsidies of what should be private losses.

For example, the latest scam in the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) is the so-called "Buy to Budget" formula for the hugely expensive and deeply troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

This formula was just gleefully endorsed in an email recently sent to the F-35's Stakeholders. The author, Charles T. Burbage, is the executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company and general manager of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program Integration. Burbage is responsible for ensuring that all of the F-35's requirements are fulfilled for both the program’s U.S. and its international customers, as well as its industrial partners around the world. And the email makes clear Burbage is licking his chops at the MICC's latest coup.

It is pretty easy to understand why Burbage is so gleeful. Defense contractors operate in a "cost-plus" economy, where profits are a negotiated percentage of costs. If costs rise, profits rise. The Pentagon just approved another higher cost estimate for the F-35 and a reduced production quantity. That is clearly good, but Burbage is confident the future looks even rosier. The reasons for his confidence in Lockheed's rosy scenario becomes clear when "Buy to Budget" is viewed in this context of the MICC's political economy.

"Buy to Budget" increases the incentive to grow costs even faster and thereby increase profits even more over the long term. The rosy scenario results when costs continue to grow, and smaller numbers of F-35s will be purchased each future year, all financed within a given budget level. The lower F-35 production rates will exacerbate the aging crisis of the F-16s, A-10s, F-18s, and AV-8s that the F-35 is supposed to replace. But the average age of these airplanes is already far greater that they were designed for, so the political/bureaucratic pressure to increase the production rate of the F-35 will be enormous. Moreover, Burbage knows the Pentagon does not want any alternatives to the F-35. This rising political/bureaucratic pressure caused by the aging inventories will therefore lead to loud calls for higher F-35 budgets, and larger budgets will provide a larger space in which to "Buy to Budget" by jacking up costs further. Thus, the deadly cycle of cost growth, decreasing production rates, aging inventories, and higher profitability will reinforce itself again, in what is the political-economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

At a program acquisition cost already exceeding $300 billion, and a total life cycle cost approaching one trillion dollars (which no doubt will include lots of follow-on maintenance contracts for Lockheed), the F-35 is solidly on track to be the all time record breaker in high cost programs, in which continual production cutbacks will finance a never ending honey pot for Lockheed. Moreover, the Pentagon just signaled its increased commitment to the importance of the program by elevating its government program manager (Burbage's uniformed equivalent) to a two star to a three star general officer, in this case a vice admiral in the Navy -- which means more high level meetings in bigger offices, more cocktail parties, and more of the pomp and circumstance that are the perks of working in the MICC, not to mention even greater high-powered efforts in the Pentagon to save face by continuing business as usual. That the F-35's foreign partners like Great Britain and the Netherlands will help to foot the ever increasing bill is merely icing on the cake.

In the context of MICCs long-term survival, Burbage's gleeful endorsement of "Buy to Budget" reaches back to the end of the Cold War confirms the farsighted wisdom displayed William Anders, former CEO of General Dynamics (note: GD at that time owned the Fort Worth factory where Burbage now works and the F-35 is produced). "Buy to Budget" is validation of the MICC business strategy that Anders spelled out in 1991. Anders decided that General Dynamics (and by extension the Fort Worth factory, which he subsequently sold to Lockheed) was not going to diversify business operations into the non-defense commercial manufacturing sector, even though the Cold War had just ended. Anders said his decision was to increase his concentration in defense activities (a view widely shared and resulted in increased oligopolization of the industry, in an orgy of Pac Man gobbling up of defense companies by other defense companies during the early 1990s. He said this decision to increase concentration was "not surprising," because 80% of defense acquisitions in the non-defense sector failed. He then explained succinctly why these acquisitions are always so unsuccessful: "Defense industry management teams generally have little commercial experience and market savvy," and "Most have been cost-plus and mil spec trained." He concluded by saying, "In short, most don't bring a competitive advantage to non-defense business," and "Frankly, sword makers don't make good and affordable plowshares."[1]

Of course, what Anders did not say is that sword makers also do not make good affordable swords. But who cares when you live in a posh, post-cold-war marketplace like Burbage's, where ever rising costs and profits are fueled by a user friendly Pentagon policy of "Buy to Budgets."

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] "Rationalizing America's Defense Industry: Renewing Investor Support for the Defense Industrial Base and Safeguarding National Security," Keynote Address, Defense Week 12th Annual Congress, 30 October 1991, page 13.

Counterpunch: The Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

February 3, 2010

The New QDR

The Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney02032010.html

Monday, February 1, 2010, was a day that should live in budgetary infamy. The Defense Department released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and its accompanying Fiscal Year 2011 budget request, which is the first year of the Fiscal Year 2011-2015 five year plan (2011-2015 FYDP). These documents are available on the internet and can be downloaded in PDF format here: QDR and the FY 2011 budget.

Even by the dismal intellectual standards of Pentagon bureaucracy, the QDR and the FY 2011 budget, taken together, establish a new standard of analytical vacuity, psychological denial, and just plane meaningless drivel. I will keep this short by using just one important case to prove my allegation. Judge for yourself if it is necessary and sufficient to make the point.

First, I must bore you with a little background: The Pentagon has been producing FYDPs since 1962. But these FYDPs have been repeatedly criticized for producing defense budgets that were disconnected from the national military strategy -- and because the dollar allocations made in any budget determine what any government's policy really is, the critique was logically equivalent to saying there was no strategy. The congressional legislation in the mid 1990s that established the QDR was only the most recent attempt to deal with this long standing criticism. The aim of that legislation was to require the Pentagon to lay out an intellectual framework for matching its military strategy and ambitions to the resource constraints shaping those ambitions, especially budgetary constraints, but also constraints relating to people, the limitations imposed by available technologies, etc.

The new FY 2011 budget and its accompanying FYDP, therefore, are supposed to attach budgetary and programmatic meat to the strategic skeleton that is the QDR, both of which were completed at the same time and made public on 1 February -- itself a somewhat illogical sequence, given that one is supposed to precede the other. In theory, these documents should permit an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses implicit in the matchup between resources and strategy. Therefore, these documents should enable the Secretary of Defense to send the President and the Congress a comprehensive set of priorities, opportunity costs, and risks associated with his strategic plan. This information would then become the grist for a rational national debate by linking strategic considerations to the inevitable compromises made in the sausage making factory that is Congress. Moreover, as this is President Obama's first budget, and because it represents $700+ billion that Mr. Obama just put off limits in the coming national debate over whether or how to shrink the federal deficit, it was crucially important for the Pentagon to get the QDR and the accompanying FY 2011-2015 FYDP right in a logically consistent and transparent manner.

If we apply this standard to the Pentagon's recently completed handiwork, only one conclusion is possible: the Pentagon flunked the test by being intellectually absent without leave.

One example is sufficient to prove this point. For the past 20 years or so, mainstream and defense related press outlets have inundated the American public with horror stories about the Pentagon's aging force structure and with stories about the Pentagon's unauditable budget shambles -- the two are intertwined. And over the last 10 years or so the public has been inundated by stories describing how that force structure is being being worn out by the high operating tempos of our never ending wars and interventions, yet another dimension of the same problem. In fact, I first started documenting this aging trend in the early 1980s in a series of analytical studies, some classified, but most unclassified, and it has gotten worse and more intractable each year.

There is simply no question that the weapons in our force structure inventories have been getting older on average at an alarming rate. The fundamental reason for the aging trend is that the unit costs of buying and operating new weapons grow faster than defense budgets grow, even when budgets grow at unprecedented rates, as they have since the mid-1990s, and consequently, as weapons grow older over time, they become more expensive to operate, which exacerbates the growth in operating costs even further, and the rising costs eventually forces decision makers to retire the oldest weapons without replacement, thereby shrinking the size of the force structure. It is beyond dispute that today the Pentagon is fielding the smallest and, on average, the oldest force structure since the end of WWII, yet it is paying more for that force structure, even after adjusting for the effects of inflation, than at any time since the end of WWII.

Central to this pathological death spiral is the unquestionable fact that the Pentagon's financial management system can not keep track of its actual expenditures or how the predicted expenditures in its FYDP will unfold over over time. The chaos in the accounting system provides the intellectual "grease" to lubricate the engine driving narrow bureaucratic agendas that are causing the force structure meltdown. Senior decision makers can not possibly understand the trade offs they are really making when they put together a budget, assuming they wanted to, which is also in doubt. The accounting problem has been identified in tens, if not hundreds, of reports produced by the General Accounting Office (the auditing arm of Congress) and the Defense Department's own Inspector General. I described how the budget shambles impacted the strategic decision making problem in my last testimony to Congress in June 2002.

The problem of unilateral disarmament at ever higher cost (i.e., the interaction of weapons cost growth greater than budget growth, aging and shrinking forces, and corrupt accounting system that makes it impossible to sort our corrective strategies) is well established, and thanks to the largess of Mad King George, should now be beyond dispute.

So, I have a test for you, dear reader: Download the QDR and the FY2011 budget from the links in the first paragraph. The are formated in searchable PDF file format. Do word and phrase searches on words like aging, age, "weapons aging," accounting, audit, bookkeeping, or anything else you can think of that might related to the problems described above, and determine for yourself the extent to which these problems are addressed. (eg., a search in the budget of "audit" will take you to page 7-34, among others, where you will find that DoD set a goal of reaching 100% auditability for its assets and liabilities in the year 2017, but the last column shows that the indicator of progress made toward that goal in FY 2010 was deleted at the request of the Comptroller, who happens to be the chief financial officer of DoD!)

Alternatively, you could make the same kind of determination by reading the entire text of each, but before you do so, I recommend you buy a couple of boxes of No Doz, so you can keep awake. Either way, you will end up with the same self evident conclusion.

Some farm defenders might say, we must go forward with this protected monstrosity, because we are at war.

That is a false choice -- President Obama could freeze the core budget at this year's level, just like he is doing for the rest of the government. He could tell the Pentagon to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more reasonable. If he chooses to do this, he should task the Pentagon with a massive crash program to clean up the bookkeeping shambles as job 1, rather than waiting until 2017. At the same time, Obama could then ask Congress to pay for his wars on a "pay as you go" basis, which Congress and the Pentagon have been doing for years, in any case, via supplemental appropriations.

Readers interested in a more details on one way we might go about cleaning out the Pentagon's Augean Stables can read my statement to Congress from the aforementioned link.

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

Counterpunch: Turning Sun Tzu on His Head

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

Weekend Edition
January 29 - 31, 2010

The Eikenberry Cables and the Escalation in Afghanistan

Turning Sun Tzu on His Head

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney01292010.html

In the opening line of Book 1 of Sun Tzu's classic, The Art of War (circa 400 BC), the first treatise ever written on the subject, the Chinese master said,"War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life and death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied." He then goes on to describe a systematic method for assembling the information needed to make a rational decision to go to war.

Today, in Pentagonese, we would call his method a "net assessment," that is to say Sun Tzu described a very thoughtful way to perform a comparative analysis of one's own strengths and weaknesses with those of the adversary. Sun Tzu's strategic outlook is amazingly relevant to contemporary circumstances; indeed, it is timeless, and I submit it provides the gold standard for for evaluating our own efforts to grapple with the question of going to war or to escalate a war -- basically, his advice was simple: know your enemy and know yourself before plunging into war.

When the wisdom of Sun Tzu's gold standard is compared to the crude domestic political machinations used to steamroller President Obama into escalating the war in Afghanistan, a horrifying picture emerges at the most basic of level decision making. The public debate concentrated on only one side of that net assessment -- the side advocating escalation, and even the argument for that side was conceptually flawed in that it did not examine its own strengths and weaknesses.

The recently leaked cables by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry bring this imbalance into sharp relief. Eikenberry raised some thoughtful objections to the McChrystal/Petraeus/Gates/Clinton escalation plan from the perspective of its limitations on "knowing ourselves" (US, Karzai government, and the Afghan security forces). He did not really address the strengths and weaknesses on other side of the net assessment--i.e., those of our adversaries. But his analysis is damning enough. Eikenberry's objections were sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in secret cables. Presumably President Obama studied them prior to his decision to accede to the escalation pressures. Eikenberry's analyses are both an interesting and important counterpoints to what I still believe was an ill advised decision.

Bear in mind, as far as public awareness is concerned, the McChrystal plan, which was also secret, was leaked in redacted form to the Washington Post well before Mr. Obama caved into the domestic political pressures for escalation -- in fact, that leak was part of a carefully orchestrated public political steamroller to pressure Mr. Obama to accede to the escalation. Yet McChrystal's escalation plan was by no means a self evident winner. In fact, it was conceptually flawed in its own terms -- -- namely that McChrystal failed to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the Afghan National Security Forces, yet his whole strategy depended depended on a rapid increase in the effectiveness of those forces. My discussion of this flaw, as well as the raw political character of the escalation steamroller, can found here, here, and here. In short, there is very little evidence that the proponents of escalation on our side did the kind of systematic analysis advocated by Sun Tzu to really "know ourselves," let alone know the enemy.

On the other hand, Amb. Eikenberry's thoughtful objections to that escalation plan at least provided some first order information to redress one side of this conceptual disaster. While his objections were reported in very general terms prior to the escalation decision, they were not leaked to the press (NYT) until well after Mr. Obama's decision. So, given the asymmetric leaking tactics in the bureaucratic war, the net result was that the public and the Congress were presented with a one-sided picture of the debate over a vital question of state -- and this lopsided picture was then pounded into the people, the Congress, and the President by the thumping echo chamber of hysterical warmongers in the mainstream electronic media and talk radio.

So, I pose a question: Read the Eikenberry cables and then ask yourself whether we the people and our representatives in Congress would have had a more constructive political debate over this most vital of questions if the details of Ambassador Eikenberry's objections were known and understood to the same extent as the details of the escalation plan were understood prior to Mr. Obama's decision.

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

Counterpunch:The Afghan War Question

Reprinted with permission of editors of Counterpunch

November 12, 2009

Obama and the Triumph of the Will

The Afghan War Question

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/11/12/the-afghan-war-question/

Marmaris, Turkey.

In the opening lines of the oldest treatise on the conduct of war, Sun Tzu said that the question of war is vital to the state, and therefore, it is imperative to study it. This timeless advice has been been ignored repeatedly by the United States since the end of WWII. The inevitable result has been an insensible rise of war mongering, fueled by arrogance and ignorance, culminating in the chaotic spectacle now enveloping the Afghan War Question in Washington.

The intellectual content of the debate over whether or how much to escalate our forces in Afghanistan has degenerated into formless ranting by all sides. The content of this debate is not conditioned by a clear definition of military success. Nor is it conditioned by a definition of a desired political endstate. When asked how he would define victory, the State Department's special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, arrogantly summed up the collective state of mind by saying pithily, "we will know it when we see it." With thinking like this, it should not be surprising that can be no definition of an exit strategy or a timeline for ending a war we are admittedly losing, even though that war is now in its ninth year. By the way, Sun Tau also advised to avoid protracted war, and the only protracted shooting war we ever won was the American Revolution, in which we were the insurgents.

Yet, in the middle of the worst domestic economic crisis since the 1930s, President Obama appears to be on the verge of caving in to the irrational pressures for throwing more troops and money into the bottomless pit of Afghanistan. How did the Afghan escalation question degenerate into such a ridiculously chaotic state?

Its immediate antecedents are quite clear.

At the center of this debate is, or should be, the strategic plan submitted to President Obama in August by the theater commander General Stanley McChrystal. That plan's centerpiece is to provide security for the Afghan people by accelerating the training and expansion of the Afghan Army and Police Forces (ANSF). To buy time for this expansion, McChrystal said a surge in US forces of 40,000 is needed, an estimate, according to subsequent reports, that may have been expanded to as many as 80,000 troops, a number the US would not be able to field and sustain without a reinstitution of the draft. McChrystal or one his war mongering allies in the Pentagon or in the right wing of the Republican Party immediately increased the beating of the war drums by leaking a carefully "redacted" version of his "secret" recommendations to the most obliging courtier of the permanent Washington apparat, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. By not attempting to find and discipline those responsible for a blatantly insubordinate act aimed at pre-empting his decision-making prerogatives, President Obama, the constitutionally designated commander-in-chief, telegraphed pusillanimity to the proponents of escalation, and thus set the tone for subsequent events.

In the best of circumstances, building an effective military force from scratch takes a long time. History has shown repeatedly that, absent a well trained reserve force and a highly trained active duty officer and NCO corps, it is impossible to rapidly expand the active duty forces of any military organization without seriously degrading its recruiting and training standards. This is true even when one is expanding it from the base of a competent core force, which is certainly not the case in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, as I pointed out in September, McChrystal's plan was fatally flawed, because it contained no systematic evaluation outlining the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of the Afghan forces he wants to double in size over a very short period.

In normal circumstances, such a failure of analysis would have been a sloppy, irresponsible omission. In this particular case, the omission was made even more outrageous for at least two reasons: First, building a national army that puts loyalty to the state ahead of tribe, clan, and family in Afghanistan's ancient clan based vendetta culture would be, in the most ideal of circumstances, a highly dubious proposition, because its goal would go against the traditional perquisites implicit in an ancient, highly-evolved culture. At the very least, this challenge ought to have been subjected to the closest anthropological and historical analysis. Second, conditions are hardly ideal. Indeed, it is common knowledge that the current Afghan security forces are already riven by corruption, the conflicted loyalties of warlordism, drug trafficking and murderous criminality, not to mention the central fact that Afghanistan's Pashtun plurality, whose alienated hearts and minds are crucial to the success of any counterinsurgency strategy, is grossly underrepresented in the army and police forces.

In short, McChrystal's cavalier portrayal of the Afghan National Security Forces at the center of his plan ought to have been a show stopper. Moreover, the fact that it was leaked by a politically motivated military officer or a civilian powerbroker to increase pressure on the President for its approval ought have resulted visible discipline. But of course, the huge hole in McChrystal's plan was ignored and is now forgotten. No one was hung for crass insubordination. So, it should not be surprising that the Afghan War Question devolved into an evermore formless debate.

A recent AP report by Ben Feller and Anne Gearan introduces two interesting points that will add to the confusion:

Rather than lowering the boom and acting as if it was controlling the events it should be controlling, the White House is now retaliating by leaking like a sieve. Unnamed officials now tell us that Obama senses (correctly) that he is being railroaded and, in secret diplomatic cables, Ambassador Eikenbury recently injected his objections to the pervasive corruption infecting the government of Hamid Karzai. Obama, reportedly, is using Eikenbury's objections as leverage to slow down deliberations and to justify his demand for a timetable laying out how long a continued US presence will be needed.

On the other hand, the report, in what is no doubt a trial balloon, says Obama is leaning toward a "compromise" position of authorizing an increase of 30,000 troops, including three Army brigades and an unspecified USMC contingent. Included in this "compromise" head count of 30,000, however, would be an authorization for the bloated overhead of a huge new headquarters housing 7,000 or more troops. Such a headquarters will no doubt necessitate a huge outlay in construction dollars to house it, a quantum increase in the thru-put of logistics pipelines, and a large increase in the number of field grade and general officers to man it. Therefore, this approval also implies an approval for an increase in the size of and vested interests in an open-ended commitment.

President Obama has been accused of dithering by delaying his decision to escalate, but his politically costly purchase of time is not serving to bring clarity to the debate. He has allowed the huge hole in McChrystal's incompetent plan to remain unaddressed, except perhaps obliquely by Ambassador Eikenbury, and to metastasize into a festering state of confusion. This confusion has opened the door to the displacement of rationality by emotion.

Not surprisingly, given the growing tolerance for irrationality in Versailles on the Potomac, the war mongering proponents of immediate escalation are becoming increasingly hysterical. If the mindless mutterings by the likes David Brooks (New York Times) and Michael Gerson (Washington Post) are representative, the proponents of escalation have now reduced themselves to emulating the irrational exhortations made by Adolf Hitler, from the depths of his Fuhrer Bunker cut off from reality, about victory being merely a question of willpower.

This kind of lunatic ranting should not be surprising, because as my good friend Werther recently explained, the triumph of the will over the intellect is an example of the Right Wing's historic preference for emotion over reason. This kind of ranting also sets the stage for a future stab in the back argument that blames Obama for losing what was in reality a colossal Bush screw up.

Of course, the histrionics of Brooks and Gerson do not come close to rivaling the emotive power of the torchlight Nuremberg parades immortalized by Leni Reifenstahl in her artistic classic, "The Triumph of the Will." But the feebleness of their imitation makes it all the more pathetic when a man as intelligent as Barack Obama, a gifted speaker who has all the advantages of the bully pulpit together with the awesome status of commander-in-chief, lacks the moral courage to lift his nation out of their kind of darkness into light of reason.

Obama's Flawed Afghan Strategy Review

September 22, 2009

A Pathway to Disaster

The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch, 22 September 2009

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/09/22/the-huge-hole-in-gen-mcchrystal-s-afghan-counterinsurgency-strategy/

The centerpiece of the General Stanley McChrystal's "new" counterinsurgency strategy of "clear, hold, build" is the accelerated training and expansion of the Afghan Army and Police Forces (ANSF), in addition to a major increase in the size of our forces (according to some reports, by as much as 45,000 troops). The strategic goal is to establish an expanding zone of security for the Afghan people that would enable a steady build up of aid and development efforts to improve their well being with jobs, new infrastructure, new education systems, new agricultural techniques, etc., than thereby win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. McChrystal is asking the President of the United State to approve a pathway to almost certain disaster. Consider please the following:

Of course, there is nothing new in General McChrystal's strategy, it is merely a rehash of the failed oil spot (tache d'huile) strategy, first tried by French colonialist General Louis-Hubert-Gonsalve Lyautey, and then tried again under various guises, again without lasting success, by the Americans in Vietnam.

Indeed, many readers will recall that a necessary condition of our failed Vietnam strategy was the exactly same strategic determination that we could not win the hearts of minds of the indigenous population without providing the people with a competent army and a government that could protect them from the depredations of the insurgents. In Vietnam, this idea was at the center of our early involvement. Protecting the people was first tried on a small scale with some tactical success in the Combined Action Platoons (CAP) program in the Marine Corps, then on a much larger, strategically disastrous scale with the Strategic Hamlets Program, before Americanizing the war. Nevertheless, it rose again like a Phoenix when the idea mutated into into President Nixon's Vietnamization program, but in this case was really a cynical smokescreen for withdrawing without admitting defeat (a goal that Nixon called "Peace With Honor"). In the end, the US-trained Vietnamese army, like the US-installed Vietnamese government, was a corrupt Potemkin-like sham, and once it became clear that both had lost the supporting prop of American firepower, both collapsed and surrendered unconditionally in April 1975, only two months after North Vietnamese launched a final offensive, which the North Vietnamese planners had assumed it would take two years to achieve victory.

Like his predecessors in Vietnam, Mr. Obama is now being told by the military to pin his hopes on an immediate US military escalation, coupled with a rapid build up of US-trained indigenous Afghan army and police forces, together with the development of competent national government, in what is yet another rerun of Lyautey's dream. While there has been much debate in the United States over whether or how much we should escalate our military efforts and how many additional troops are needed, the other equally essential military leg of our not-so-new strategy -- i.e., the training and expansion of the indigenous Afghan National Security Forces (the Army and Police forces) -- has generally been taken as a given, and has not been subject to a serious examination or public debate.

This omission is very odd, particularly when viewed in the light our complete failure to build a non-corrupt professional national army in South Vietnam, not to mention our catastrophic failure to build a competent honest national government, together with our ultimate failure to secure the hearts and mind of the South Vietnamese people. And the omission of our previous Vietnam experiences in this regard is made doubly odd, given the growing mountain of reportage indicating the same kind of massive corruption now repeating itself in the US-installed Karzai government in Afghanistan.

And to make matters even wierder, this intellectual black hole has been compounded by the stunning absence of a critical analysis and discussion of any shortcomings of the Afghan National Security Forces in General McChrystal's new strategy document. Yet the ANSF lays at the center of McChrystal's strategy.

It is now clear that General McChrystal's staff and the Pentagon are trying to maneuver Mr. Obama onto the horns of a dilemma by leaking their demands for an immediate escalation of the war, or otherwise risking defeat. Yesterday, not surprisingly, given his long time connections to the permanent Washington apparat that is now leaking like sieve, Bob Woodward obtained a redacted copy of the strategy document General McChrystal sent to the President on 30 August. This document can be downloaded in PDF scanned image format here.

A careful reading of McChrystal's tome reveals that he proposes to increase our strategic dependence on the ANSF, while at the same time he says almost nothing of substance concerning its current deficiencies. The overwhelming majority of the statements about the widely reported instances of corruption in Afghanistan, for example, relate to the Karzai government, not the ANSF. Readers can determine the truth of by this by doing a two simple searches on the words "corruption" and "ANSF." Readers should bear in mind, there might be more substantive criticisms of the ANSF in the un-redacted report, but if such secret criticisms exist, they would be completely inconsistent with the McChrystal's unclassified recommendations to rapidly increase the size of the ANSF and his statement that the ANSF's problems are merely those of growing maturity, which he implies can be accomplished in the next 12 months in the following passage ...

"Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures [emphasis added] -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." [page 1-2, Commander's Initial Assessment, 30 Aug 2009]

In other words, it looks like General McChrystal, the senior officer in Afghanistan, is telling the President of the United States that, with the exception of what be some relatively minor maturation problems, we can double the size of and field an effective Afghan National Security Force in the short term, and together with a major escalation of US manpower in the short term, we can jointly regain the initiative (which McChrystal acknowledges has been lost) and turn around the deteriorating situation in Afghanstan in the near term.

Given the military's clear failure to do this in Afghanistan over the last eight years, together with its catastrophic failure to do exactly this in Vietnam, I think the President of the United States and the American people deserve a little more information about just how good ANSF is.

We are lucky that Anna Jones has recently produced such a critical analysis of this question She makes an incredibly good effort to fill this disgraceful and inexcusable information vacuum. And although the promoters of the clear-hold-build strategy may not welcome the critique she has produced, it is nevertheless a very important contribution to the our understanding of the current disastrous state of play in a crucial albeit unexamined leg of General McChrystal's not-so-new counterinsurgency strategy.

There may still be time for a course correction. Recent reports indicate Mr. Obama may be trying to buy a little time before being steamrollered by the Generals and the Republicans into approving General McChrystal's request.

If this is indeed the case, the information in Ms. Jones' analysis of the widespread corruption and deficiencies of the ANSF comes at a very crucial time. That is because she identifies some strategically crucial questions that must to be answered before the President or Congress approve McChrystal's request to escalate the war.

Mr. Obama should insist on a dispassionate investigation of whether or not the issues revealed by Ms. Jones are accurately portrayed in her analysis. And if the answer to that question is in the affirmative, Obama should insist that the military leaders explain why those issues were omitted in the McChrystal report. Moreover, if there is anything to Ms. Jones' analysis, Obama should also demand that McChrystal and company explain how, given this sorry state of affairs, they propose turn this situation around in the short time window they admit exists, and he should demand that they explain why the increased spillage in blood and treasure will work this time, if we embark on yet another reiteration what has heretofore been the fatally flawed oil spot strategy.

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