[THS] Tomgram: Engelhardt, Forever War

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175302/tomgram:_engelhardt,_forever_war/


Tomgram: Engelhardt, Forever War
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 10:21am, September 30, 2010.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: And I do mean readers!  A TomDispatch “library” of
four popular new books is taking shape for fall 2010.  The first is The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo... Whoops, sorry... I meant, of course, my own thriller, The American
Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, which the U.S. military has been
insistent about publicizing these last months (see below); the second, Chalmers
Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, has just gotten a
superb review in Foreign Policy Journal; the third, Nick Turse’s The Case for
Withdrawal from Afghanistan, lays out the option that’s never on the table when “all
options are on the table” in Washington (see below again); and the fourth is Andrew
Bacevich’s bestselling Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.  All four
are connected, some more intimately than others, to this site.  All four add up to a
view of how our Pentagon-heavy American world now works. All four should be on
your bookshelf.  And by the way, every time you click on a TomDispatch book link
and buy something at Amazon.com, we get a small cut of your purchase (at no cost
to you).  It’s a great way to support this website.  While I’m at it, let me offer a deep
bow to all TomDispatch readers who have become recurring contributors to this site.
Your regularly arriving donations are a real factor in our survival.  I wish I could
thank each of you individually, but consider this my thanks to all of you at once!
Tom]

The War Addicts
2016 and Then Some
By Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye.  On Monday,
theWashington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new
book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the
Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners.  As an illustration, the Post
included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009
meeting to review war policy.  It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the
Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General
Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates, among others.

Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment.
Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously
underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they move toward a
theoretical goal of 400,000 -- an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates.
Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue
curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and
company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

The eye-catching detail, however, was the dating on the chart.  Sometime between
2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for
error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip
somewhere below -- don’t gasp -- the 68,000 level.  In other words, three to six years
from now, if all went as planned -- a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so
far -- the U.S. might be back close to the force levels of early 2009, before the
President’s second surge was launched.  (When Obama entered office, there were
only 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)

And when would those troops dwindle to near zero?  2019?  2025?  The chart-makers
were far too politic to include the years beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way
of knowing.  But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high
command, civilian and military, were dreaming of, and most forcefully recommending
to the president, a forever war -- one which the Office of Budget and Management
estimated would cost almost $900 billion?

Of course, as we now know, the military “lost” this battle.  Instead of the 40,000
troops they desired, they “only” got 30,000 from a frustrated president (plus a few
thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some
special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and
don’t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a
price, couldn’t say no -- all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the
10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders).

When, on December 1, 2009, Barack Obama addressed the cadets of West Point
and, through them, the rest of us to announce the second surge of his presidency,
he was at least able to slip in a date to begin a drawdown of U.S. forces.  (“But taken
together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to
accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the
transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”)  Hardly a nanosecond
passed, however, before -- first “on background” and soon enough in public --
administration spokespeople rushed to reassure the rest of Washington that such a
transfer would be “conditions based.” Given conditions there since 2001, not exactly
a reassuring statement.

Meanwhile, days before the speech, Afghan war commander McChrystal was already
hard at work stretching out the time of the drawdown date the president was still to
announce.  It would, he claimed, begin “sometime before 2013.”  More recently,
deified new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has repeatedly assured
everyone in sight that none of this drawdown talk will add up to a hill of beans.

More, Never Less

Let’s keep two things in mind here: just how narrow were the options the president
considered, and just how large was the surge he reluctantly launched.  By the end of
the fall of 2009, it was common knowledge in Washington that the administration’s
fiercely debated Afghan War “review” never considered a “less” option, only ones
involving “more.”  Now, thanks to Woodward, we can put definitive numbers to those
options.  The least of the "more" options was Vice President Biden’s
“counterterrorism-plus” strategy, focused on more trainers for the Afghan military
and police plus more drone attacks and Special Forces operations.  It involved a
surge of 20,000 U.S. troops.  According to Woodward, the military commanders, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Secretary of Defense more or less instantly
ruled this out.

The military’s chosen option was for those 40,000 troops and an emphasis on
counterinsurgency.  Between them lay a barely distinguishable 30,000-35,000 option.
The only other option mentioned during the review process involved a surge of
85,000, and it, too, was ruled out by the military because troops in that quantity
simply weren’t available.  This, then, was the full “range” of debate in Washington
about the Afghan War.  No wonder the president, according to Woodward,
exclaimed in anger, "So what's my option? You have given me one option."

It’s also important to remember that this round of surgification involved a lot more
than those 30,000 troops and various add-ons.  After all, the “president” -- and when
you read Woodward, you do wonder whether a modern president isn’t, in many
ways, simply a prisoner of Washington -- also managed to surge CIA personnel, triple
State Department, USAID, and other civilian personnel, and expand the corps of
private contractors.

Perhaps more significant, that December the president and his key advisors set the
Af/Pak War -- to use the new term of that moment -- on an ever widening gyre.
Among other things, that escalation included a significant acceleration in U.S. base-
building activity which has yet to end; a massive increase in the CIA’s drone war over
the Pakistani tribal borderlands (a quadrupling of attacks since the last year of the
Bush administration, including at least 22 attacks launched this September, the most
yet in a month); a recent uptick in Air Force bombing activity over Afghanistan (which
General McChrystal actually cut back for a while), an increase in Special Operations
activity throughout Afghanistan; and an increase in border crossings into Pakistan.

The last of these, in particular, reflects the increasing frustration of American
commanders fighting a war going badly in Afghanistan in which key enemies have
sanctuaries across the border.  Thanks to Woodward’s book, we now know that, in
2002, the Bush administration allowed the CIA to organize a secret Afghan
“paramilitary army,” modeled after the U.S. Special Forces and divided into
“counterterrorist pursuit teams.”  Three thousand in all, these irregulars have
operated as proxy fighters and assassins in Afghanistan -- and, in the Obama era,
they have evidently also been venturing into the Pakistani tribal borderlands where
those CIA drone attacks are already part of everyday life.  In addition, just days ago,
U.S. helicopters upped the ante in the first of two such incidents by venturing across
the same border to attack retreating Taliban fighters in what U.S. military
spokespeople have termed “self-defense,” but what was known in the Vietnam era as
“hot pursuit.”

In addition, U.S. military commanders, the New York Times reports, are threatening
worse. (“As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H.
Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled
warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral
ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant
networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.”)  In the next year, that
label “Af/Pak” could come into its own as a war-fighting reality.

All of this is, of course, part of the unspoken Pentagon doctrine of forever war.  And
lest you think that the 2016 date for an Afghan drawdown was a one-of-a-kind bit of
planning, consider this line from a recent New York Times report by Michael Gordon
and John Burns on Pentagon anxiety over the new British government's desire to cut
defense spending by up to 20%: “American and British officials said that they did not
expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the
next five years.” Let that sink in for a moment: “over the next five years.”  It
obviously reflects the thinking of anonymous officials of some significance and, if you
do the modest math, you once again find yourself more or less at January 1, 2016.
In a just released Rolling Stone interview, even the President can be found saying,
vaguely but ominously, of the Afghan War: "[I]t's going to take us several years to
work through this issue."

Or consider the three $100 million bases (or parts of bases) that Walter Pincus of the
Washington Post reported the Pentagon is now preparing to build in Afghanistan.
These, he adds, won’t be ready for use until, at best, “later in 2011,” well after the
Obama troop drawdown is set to begin.  According to Noah Shachtman of the
Danger Room blog, one $100 million upgrade for a future Special Operations
headquarters in northern Afghanistan, when done, will include: a “communications
building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle
Maintenance Facility... dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support
working dogs... Supporting facilities include roads, power production system and
electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water production, water storage, water
distribution, sanitary sewer collection system, communication manhole/duct system,
curbs, walkways, drainage, and parking. Additionally, the project will include site
preparation and compound security measures to include guard towers.”

A State of War to the Horizon

Tell me: Does this sound like a military getting ready to leave town any time soon?

And don’t forget the $1.3 billion in funds pending in Congress that Pincus tells us the
Pentagon has requested “for multiyear construction of military facilities in
Afghanistan.”  We’re obviously talking 2012 to 2015 here, too.  Or how about the $6.2
billion a year that the Pentagon is projected to spend on the training of Afghan forces
from 2012 through 2016? Or what about the Pentagon contract TomDispatch’s Nick
Turse dug up that was awarded to private contractor SOS International primarily for
translators with an estimated completion date of September 2014?  Or how about the
gigantic embassy-cum-command-center-cum-citadel (modeled on the U.S. embassy
in Baghdad, now the largest in the world) which the Obama administration has
decided to build in Islamabad, Pakistan?

And let’s not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied
in a recently published report, “Operating Concept, 2016-2028,” overseen by
Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior advisor to Gen. David Petraeus.  It opts to
ditch “Buck Rogers” visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine
counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as "wars of exhaustion," in one,
two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.

So here’s one way to think about all this: like people bingeing on anything, the
present Pentagon and military cast of characters can’t stop themselves.  They really
can’t.  The thought that in Afghanistan or anywhere else they might have to go on a
diet, as sooner or later they will, is deeply unnerving.  Forever war is in their blood,
so much so that they’re ready to face down the commander-in-chief, if necessary, to
make it continue.  This is really the definition of an addiction -- not to victory, but to
the state of war itself.  Don’t expect them to discipline themselves. They won’t.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation
Institute's TomDispatch.com.  His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s
Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has recently been published. You can
catch him discussing war American-style and his book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast
video by clicking here.

[Note for readers: You can read the Army’s full “Operating Concept, 2016-2028, by
clicking here (.pdf format).  Fair warning, interesting as it may be, it's not written in
recognizable English.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt