WASHINGTON — Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision.
But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military.
A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room.
“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”
Last week the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., gave voice to the concerns of those in the military when he issued a terse statement criticizing Mr. Obama’s review of Afghan war strategy.
“The extremists are sensing weakness and indecision within the U.S. government, which plays into their hands,” said Mr. Tradewell’s statement on behalf of his group, which represents 1.5 million former soldiers.
Last August, in a speech to the V.F.W., Mr. Obama defended his strategy, saying, “This is not only a war worth fighting; this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
A retired general who served in Iraq said that the military had listened, “perhaps naïvely,” to Mr. Obama’s campaign promises that the Afghan war was critical. “What’s changed, and are we having the rug pulled out from under us?” he asked. Like many of those interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals from the military’s civilian leadership and the White House.
Mr. Obama’s civilian advisers on national security say the president is appropriately reviewing his policy options from all sides. They said it would be reckless to rush a decision on whether to send as many as 40,000 more American men and women to war, particularly when the unresolved Afghan election had left the United States without a clear partner in Kabul.
Although the tensions do not break entirely on classic civilian-military lines — some senior military officers have doubts about sending more troops to Afghanistan and some of Mr. Obama’s top civilian advisers do not — the strains reflect the military’s awareness in recent months that life has changed under the new White House.
After years of rising military budgets under the Bush administration, the new administration has tried to rein in Pentagon spending, and has signaled other changes as well, including reopening debate on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy governing military service by gay men and lesbians.
The administration has made clear that Mr. Obama will not necessarily follow the advice of his generals in the same way Mr. Bush did, notably in the former president’s deference to Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of the Central Command, and that it does not want military leaders publicly pressing the commander in chief as they give their advice.
Two weeks ago, after Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, rejected calls for the Afghan war to be scaled back during a question-and-answer session in a speech in London, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned not only General McChrystal, but also the military as a whole, to keep quiet in public as the debate progressed.
“It is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilian and military alike — provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately,” Mr. Gates told the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, a private support group, in Washington.
Andrew M. Exum, a former Army officer in Afghanistan, an adviser to General McChrystal and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that the change in style from one administration to the next had led to some of the military’s discontent. “The Bush administration would settle on a strategy and stick to it, and you could argue often to ill effect,” he said, referring to the president’s decision not to send more troops to Iraq until 2007, after years of rising violence.
The Obama administration, he said, is not afraid to go back and question assumptions. “There’s a value in that,” Mr. Exum said, “but that can be incredibly frustrating for those trying to operationalize the strategy.”
Part of the strain comes from lessons learned from the generals who acquiesced to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s demands for a small invasion force in Iraq, then faced criticism that they had not spoken up for more troops to secure the country during the occupation.
The retired general who served in Iraq said that today’s senior officers had decided, “I won’t be so quiet, I won’t be a lap dog.”
Another source of tension within the military is the view that a delay is endangering the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan. “McChrystal has troops out there who are risking their lives more than they need to, partly because we have not filled in the gaps and we have not created a safe zone in southern and eastern Afghanistan,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution.
A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ”
Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”
Rufus Phillips, raised in rural Virginia and educated at Yale, was a young C.I.A. officer in Saigon in the nineteen-fifties, a protege of the legendary Colonel Edward Lansdale. Over the next decade, Phillips became that rare thing in American foreign policy—an expert in the politics of another country. (Leslie Gelb, the former Times columnist and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, once told me, “American foreign-policy experts don’t know anything about countries. That is a fundamental and tragic problem in our policymaking process.”) Phillips got to know South Vietnamese politicians and military officers better than any other American. He ran the U.S. civilian counterinsurgency program in the early sixties and traveled all over rural South Vietnam (he was Richard Holbrooke’s first boss). When the Saigon government started to collapse, in 1963, Phillips returned to Washington and, though he was far down the bureaucratic pecking order, was asked to brief President Kennedy. Phillips was one of the few officials in a position to know how badly the war was going, and he and a blithely optimistic Marine general argued it out in front of Kennedy, in a scene that made Phillips’s reputation as a fearless straight-talker (David Halberstam recorded it in “The Best and the Brightest”)..
After 1963, Phillips ended his official work in Vietnam. But he was one of those young men who never got over it, never again found anything else as interesting and important. A couple of decades ago, Phillips started to write a memoir, but he put it aside when publishers told him that no one wanted to read another Vietnam book. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan caused him to take it up again, and last year, at the age of seventy-nine, Phillips published “Why Vietnam Matters.”
It is, among other things, a wonderful read, full of detail and drama. It tells you what it felt like to live and work in Saigon before the Americans arrived by the hundreds of thousands—the Saigon of the French hangover and the American operatives who met their Vietnamese contacts at colonial hotels—where Ngo Dinh Diem seemed for awhile like the best hope of stopping Communism, and Americans had a sunny confidence in their own democratic faith. Phillips might have been the prototype for Graham Greene’s “quiet American,” except that through the lens of Greene’s Catholic-and-Communist loathing for liberalism, Phillips would have been caricatured, his idealism turned to dangerous arrogance, his kindness to naïvete.
Last week, I wrote about two Vietnam books making the rounds of the Obama Administration, one on White House decision-making early in the war, the other on military counterinsurgency near its end. I’d suggest “Why Vietnam Matters” as a third. To my mind, it’s the most useful of the three—the only book that recounts in detail, from the inside, the failure of America’s effort to reform the government of South Vietnam. Today’s Times makes its relevance pretty clear.
Phillips is tall, though not as tall as he used to be, with an open, blue-eyed face, and when I met him over the summer in his condominium in Arlington, Virginia (the side table in his living room came from a Saigon market circa 1955), it wasn’t hard to identify him as the young man in the black-and-white pictures taken half a century ago, towering over Vietnamese counterparts amid banana trees and thatch roofs. About to turn eighty, Phillips was contemplating a trip halfway around the world to Kabul. He was worried about the war in Afghanistan and thought that the presidential election, set for August 20th, would be a critical event. An independent Afghan group, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, had invited him to come over as an unpaid adviser. Having seen America try and fail to win a war without a political strategy once before, he thought he had something to contribute in Afghanistan. He asked me for advice on what to wear, what kind of cell phone to bring, how to get into the city from the airport. I asked him why he was going to put himself through it, and he replied that he believed in putting your money where your mouth is. “I’ve still got the fire,” he said as he walked me to the elevator.
A few weeks later, at the end of July, I saw Phillips again, in Kabul. He had just arrived, jetlagged and exhausted; without the right clothes for an embassy dinner, he was wearing a tan safari jacket. Holbrooke introduced him to the guests and alluded to their long-ago connection in “a war that was completely different from and remarkably similar to this one.” Phillips stayed on in Kabul through the election. He worked with an inspiring group of Afghans, including many women, who were risking their lives for a fair vote. And he saw the beginnings of the overwhelming tide of fraud, in evidence gathered by the group’s twenty-four hundred workers from around the country. Phillips spent his eightieth birthday in Kabul and then came home to celebrate it with his wife, distressed that the U.S. had relied so heavily on the U.N. to keep the elections reasonably honest, and that both had clearly failed. International officials seemed prepared to accept that, one way or another, Karzai would remain president, regardless of legitimacy. All the current Washington talk of military strategy and troop numbers missed the main point: wars like this are ultimately won or lost through politics, and there are no short cuts. It was all too familiar.
This past weekend, Phillips wrote me:
I’m afraid the President, who seems like a supremely rational being, is trying to find the most rational policy option on Afghanistan, without thinking about whether it is feasible given political conditions on the ground, as well as who is going to implement it and how. What seems the most rational option here could be likely unworkable over there.
This is part of what happened to President Johnson during Vietnam. He relied exclusively on policy ‘experts’ who understood military and geopolitical strategy in the light of World War II and Korea, but who had no direct experience combating a ‘people’s war,’ while underestimating the North Vietnamese and misunderstanding the importance of the South Vietnamese, who were treated as bystanders. His advisers constructed strategies whose feasibility never got tested by those who knew Vietnam first hand. Pure reliance on the chain-of-command was disastrous in Vietnam because much of the most relevant information, the nuances which counted, could not be fully described in writing and were strained out as information flowed to the top. At a minimum, [General Stanley] McChrystal and [Ambassador Karl] Eikenberry, who have that first-hand knowledge, should be sitting in these strategy sessions.
I don’t see evidence of any real political thinking about how to deal with Karzai and the local political scene, no matter what option is selected. As we swing between counterproductive table pounding and passive non-interference, we must muster the will to interfere quietly but firmly when we are on solid moral ground—standing up for the Afghan people and for principles of honest governance.
My Afghan friends tell me as soon as he is confirmed, Karzai is going to launch a big initiative on talks with the Taliban, which are not likely to go anywhere if he leads them. Are we thinking that if we cede territory to the Taliban because they promise not to let Al Qaeda back, we will be able to hold an imaginary line, including Kabul, with the Afghan and international forces we will have? What will that tell the Afghan people, except to signal ultimate abandonment? And how will that affect their support for the Taliban to avoid being killed or severely punished?
I just have an uneasy feeling that this is too similar to the policy discussions Johnson went through, except those were mainly out of public view and these are not. The whole notion that we can speed up the training of the Afghan armed forces and this will do the job is unrealistic—another numbers game. I guess not being in the meetings puncturing balloons is what is really frustrating me. That and the fact that nobody seems to factor in our moral obligation to the Afghan people. We abandoned them twice. Will this be the third time? What does that say about us? It seems more convenient to equate Karzai with the Afghan people. Maybe it will all come out for the best—but the process, and what I see from the outside being discussed so far, doesn’t pass my gut check.
The outcome of the Afghan struggle is ultimately going to be determined not by our unilateral actions or geopolitical moves, but by whom the Afghan people wind up supporting, even reluctantly. Vietnam—Lesson One
A retired Army officer and national defense strategist says it will be exceedingly difficult to get the Russians to go along with tougher sanctions against Iran, thanks to President Obama's giving away of a major bargaining chip.
Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (USA-Ret.), who spent much of his career working in military intelligence, is an expert on Russia. He says it is no secret that the U.S. is facing a challenge in trying to convince Russia that tougher sanctions are needed against Iran. Both Russia and China are veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council and have long defended Tehran by watering down resolutions, he laments.
Peters says Barack Obama made a huge mistake by scrapping U.S. plans to deploy interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic, without first getting the Russians to agree to impose tougher sanctions on Iran.
He complains that Obama blindsided the east Europeans, who are now furious and terrified at the move -- and the deal, he says, made no sense.
"The one thing Putin wanted was to prevent us from deploying these defensive missiles in Eastern Europe," says Peters. "We could have at least cut a deal and got something out of it -- but our president, for reasons only he can understand, simply gave it away before the negotiations. I have to say President Obama is starting to really alarm me."
Pity poor Pakistan. As I write, 30,000 of its troops are advancing ever further into one of its fiercely independent tribal areas to kill thousands of their own countrymen many of them don't want to fight, in a war they cannot win.
But their preferences or prospects no longer matter: the Taliban and their allies in the al-Qaeda and Kashmiri jihadist groups throughout the country have taken the war to them. A battle is being waged over the future of Pakistan in which the government and army's only hope is to take the fight into the heart of "Terror Central" – the remote South Waziristan tribal agency which has served as al-Qaeda's safest haven since its leadership was driven out of Afghanistan in 2001.
Although Pakistan's military chiefs have been talking about an "imminent" assault since last June, all the evidence has pointed to deep reluctance to launch a massive ground offensive they believe will provoke an overwhelming backlash with suicide bombings and fidayeen commando attacks throughout the country.
It was the Taliban's new leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who finally forced a decision upon the army when his militants launched a daring commando raid into the army's headquarters in Rawalpindi. Just 10 fidayeen gunmen shot their way into the GHQ, seized 42 hostages, and killed 14 soldiers and civilians in a 22-hour siege.
It was the centrepiece of a 12-day rampage in which Hakimullah demonstrated he could reach into the heart of Pakistan's military establishment and kill at will. More than 160 people died in the attacks, which targeted elite police commando training colleges in Lahore and a police intelligence HQ in Peshawar.
The real humiliation for the army is that most of these raids were shown, shot by shot, on live television news channels. Hakimullah's challenge could not have been more forceful or more public. His question: who calls the shots in Pakistan?
The answer has traditionally been a no-brainer – the army, with occasional incursions by elected governments. But Hakimullah's onslaught questioned the military's invincibility, and its chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, could not let that challenge pass.
The wonder for many is that it has taken the army so long. Almost eight years have passed since
al-Qaeda's leadership fled the American bombardment of their caves at Tora Bora, over the border in Afghanistan, and took refuge in the Taliban's South Waziristan safe haven.
Since then, Arab fighters and commanders from Libya and Egypt, thousands of militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Chechens, Kashmiris and Punjabis have flocked to the "emirate", as it's known, to train as suicide bombers, wage jihad against British and American troops in Afghanistan or plot international terror attacks. Gordon Brown has said that 75 per cent of all terrorist plots against Britain originate in Pakistan, and most intelligence agencies believe the heart of al-Qaeda's terrorist infrastructure is in South Waziristan.
To put it bluntly, part of Pakistan has been Islamised as a result of American action. And now it is Pakistan that has to deal with the consequences, fighting battles in the way America wants against some of its own people.
Pakistan's reluctance to attack the Taliban in its heartland has, until now, been based on a fear of a backlash in its biggest city, Karachi, where several million ethnic Pashtuns from its tribal areas live, and important strategic considerations: Pakistan raised the Taliban to bring order and an end to civil war between mujahideen factions in Afghanistan. Its political leaders were nurtured by Benazir Bhutto's interior minister, General Naseerullah Babar, and many of its commanders were trained by Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency.
After the American-led offensive in Afghanistan that ousted Mullah Omar's Taliban regime in 2001, several key Taliban figures were protected by the Pakistan army, which still regards them as "strategic assets". Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son, Sirajuddin, are among them. They continue to organise attacks on Nato forces from Waziristan, unmolested or challenged by the Pakistan army.
The Pakistan military believes the Americans and the British will withdraw from Afghanistan – and when they do they will need old Taliban friends such as Haqqani once again to minimise the influence of its Indian enemy in its Afghan back yard. It is for this reason too that Islamabad has turned a blind eye to the presence of Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura, the ruling council that co-ordinates the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan from a hideout close to the Balochistan state capital.
These leaders are what the Pakistan military have in mind when they talk of "good" and "bad" Taliban – those who pose a threat to Pakistan and those who do not. Those who pose a mortal threat to British and American troops over the border can still be "good Taliban" in Pakistan.
It is the rise of the "very bad Taliban", such as Hakimullah Mehsud's pro-al-Qaeda Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) – which threatens both Pakistan and Nato forces in Afghanistan – that has brought the largest deployment of Pakistani troops to the tribal areas since the British Indian Army arrived in the Thirties to crush the Faqir of Ipi's jihad against the Raj.
The current Taliban jihadis use the same attacks and pose the same dangers – ambushing convoys by overpowering hilltop pickets as they withdraw – with one significant difference.
While the Faqir wanted an end to unjust British rule and autonomy for Waziristan, he could not export his jihad beyond Waziristan's arid mountain landscape. When Hakimullah's 10 commandos stormed the Pakistan army HQ on October 10, five of them were "Punjabi Taliban" – members of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, one of a number of militant, army-trained lashkars originally formed to fight Indian rule in Kashmir but now part of the bad Taliban-al‑Qaeda network.
The group's spokesman, Azam Tariq, said their attack was just the start and would be repeated in Singh and Balochistan provinces.
Just before the Taliban offensive, their new commander, Hakimullah Mehsud, gave an interview at a secret location in Waziristan where he was "determined to take severe revenge for Baitullah Mehsud's killing and the continued drone strikes... both America and Pakistan will have to face the consequences. We have respect for al-Qaeda and the jihadist organisations – we are with them."
Baitullah Mehsud, his predecessor, who was killed by an American Predator drone attack in South Waziristan in August, had fought Pakistan's army to an effective surrender in 2006 when the government was forced to sign a "peace deal" that undermined pro-government tribal areas and pulled the rug from under the feet of local army and Frontier Constabulary officers who suddenly realised they were on their own.
A series of such "peace deals" were signed under former military ruler General Musharraf, who argued that Pakistan had lost hundreds of troops in Waziristan, but that these agreements could be a model for ending the broader conflict.
According to American officials, what actually happened is that al-Qaeda used the "peace" as a breathing space in which to rebuild its global terror infrastructure and replenish its coffers. Under one deal, $500,000 was paid to the Taliban, which was in turn given to al-Qaeda as a loan repayment.
From 2006 until 2008, much of Waziristan was effectively ceded to the Taliban as a territory beyond the Pakistan government's writ. American officials, including then vice-president Dick Cheney, were so incensed that they visited General Musharraf to show him evidence of how al-Qaeda was rebuilding its terror HQ under the protection of his "peace deals".
The American response was to increase its Predator drone attacks on "high-value" Taliban and
al-Qaeda targets. But although they killed a number of militant commanders, they undermined the Pakistan government even further among its tribesmen close to the border: either it had collaborated or it was too weak to resist the breach of its sovereignty.
The problem for Pakistan is that until now it has not been able to enforce its writ or defend its sovereignty in Waziristan, which has become an "ungoverned space" of the sort that the new post-9/11 world can no longer abide.
Pity poor Pakistan, because the space it gave the Taliban in Waziristan allowed them to train new groups in their own image from all over the country.
Today, there are little bits of Waziristan throughout Pakistan's major towns and cities, and the army's belated ground offensive will light the touchpaper for a national explosion.
