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Brookings Expert Michael O’Hanlon Thinks We’ve Won Our Recent Wars

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Fresh off the call from his hero, David Petraeus, to cooperate with al Qaeda, Michael O’Hanlon suggests we should lower the standards for vetting of “moderate” rebels, so we can then partition Syria and pretend we haven’t just empowered al Qaeda.

But envisioning a federal arrangement offers the hope that a future peacekeeping force in Syria that could deploy largely along the lines of separation rather than throughout all the major populated areas. That would reduce its needed size and its likely casualty levels. There would surely be violence, and tests of the force — so Americans would have to be part of it, to give it backbone and credibility, but to the tune of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 troops rather than the 100,000 or more that typified our peak efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, even this kind of deal would require the defeat or near-defeat of both the Islamic State and Assad, given how divisive and illegitimate each has become. So it would only be possible after moderate opposition forces had been strengthened and made much more military headway than they have so far.

This points a path forward. The United States and partners should expand their help for moderate factions, among other things by relaxing the vetting standards that have prevented us from working with anyone who wants to target Assad rather than just the Islamic State. Once somewhat larger moderate forces are available, and able to establish dependable toeholds within Syria, we should send in training teams to work with them in accelerating the recruiting and training of local forces. Such an approach would also allow the much better provisioning of humanitarian relief — an urgent priority recognized by all.

The plan itself is gibberish (and fails for the same reason his other options do: because the US won’t want to and cannot enforce this).

But it’s all premised on something else — that having an outside power intervene can end wars, including civil wars. To support that claim, he points to … America’s wars in the past 15 years.

A second potential war-ender is an intervention by some outside power, which could side with one party to win it. Beyond the U.S.-led wars of the last 15 years, good modern examples include Tanzania overthrowing Idi Amin in Uganda and the Vietnamese army defeating the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Last I checked, our intervention had reignited a long-simmering civil war in Afghanistan, and started ones in Iraq and Libya. In all those places, those civil wars continue to rage.

Yet those three examples of the US causing a civil war are Brookings expert Michael O’Hanlon’s idea of how to end a civil war.

 

David Petraeus: The Bestest General Ever Since George Washington

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From what I’ve read, maybe about half of David Petraeus’ boosters are shocked about his plea deal — not so much that he pled guilty to a crime, I think, but the details about the kinds of sensitive materials he stored in a rucksack then passed on to his mistress. Perhaps, too, a few of them have qualms about a top official lying to the FBI (apparently unaware that Petraeus has been lying for years).

So the result has been that, even with a posse of PR hacks in the waiting, the response to his plea has been relatively muted.

Of course, that creates a problem for the people for whom Petraeus has been a necessary myth for years, a heroic biography on which to hang a narrative of benign conquest.

Enter Michael O’Hanlon.

It’s not so much that I’m surprised O’Hanlon has written this sappy hagiography. That’s what O’Hanlon does.

I’m amused with O’Hanlon’s failure to explain why he has chosen to write such a hagiography now, just after we’ve learned Petraeus was willing to compromise some of America’s most sensitive secrets to get laid, and then lied about it.  “David Petraeus, National Hero” the title reads, followed by the sub-head, “His openness was his downfall.”

Fucking in private in exchange for sharing code word intelligence is “openness”?

But O’Hanlon probably didn’t even write that. If not, then the only hint in O’Hanlon’s slop of Petraeus’ betrayal of vows that the General was hailing even as he was lying about breaking his own is in his admission that, Petraeus “has just taken another hit in recent days,” as if getting special treatment for crimes others do decades in prison for is akin to the two incidents were Petraeus almost died that O’Hanlon has just lionized, though neither incident happened in combat.

I’m more amused than shocked by the way O’Hanlon tries to turn shrink-wrapping helicopters into a sexually charged act.

Petraeus wanted to talk mostly about shrink-wrapping helicopters. He knew that he might have to move the 101st Air Assault Division by train from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to the Atlantic seaboard in preparation for possible deployment to Iraq. We didn’t talk a lot about the high politics or military practicalities of an actual invasion in that conversation. You know the old saying, generals think logistics! And that is exactly where his mind was.

David Petraeus and your local UPS guy. “That’s logistics.”

Though I would have thought calling David Petraeus the best General since George Washington a little over the top, even for O’Hanlon.

To my mind, what he did in Iraq was probably the greatest complex accomplishment by any American general since Washington in the Revolutionary War. Sure, I’m biased, and sure, the stakes for the nation were lower in Iraq than in the world wars or Civil War and the achievements less durable in the face of future events. And for hardship in the field, those generals of earlier days usually had it much worse.

But in the need to combine knowledge of maneuver warfare, required for the taking-down of Saddam back in 2003, to the reinvigoration and refinement of proper counterinsurgency operations that Petraeus led in the field in 2007 (after writing the U.S. military’s manual on the subject with Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Amos, the future Commandant, in 2006), to the mastery of Iraqi tribal and regional and national politics needed to bring all the pieces of the team together, to the handling of the Washington debate, there was something different about this war. It was simply more complicated, with more moving parts, and more things that had to go right to have any chance of success.

O’Hanlon’s conclusion, after imbuing Petraeus and his team of heroes with some great act in taking out Saddam and then managing the occupation well enough that it might have “any chance of success” is notable. Because this is where O’Hanlon ends this embarrassing project:

This dream team refashioned the Iraqi Security Forces and their leadership, then worked with them to bring down violence rates in Iraq an incredible 90 percent and give Iraqi leaders a chance to turn their country around. That change, tragically, was largely squandered in ensuing years, but Petraeus and Crocker et al gave them the chance. On balance, this was arguably the greatest military comeback in American history, after four successive years of losing the war.

The greatest military comeback in American history, according to Michael O’Hanlon, came when the same military leaders who had been losing that war for four successive years decided to bribe enough Sunnis so America could make a break for it and claim victory, a victory the lie of which was exposed when those same “refashioned Iraqi Security Forces and their leadership” turned and ran when faced by Iraq’s former officers teamed up with some of those same Sunnis now claiming radical Islamic sanction.

The greatness of America for the COINdinistas is now being hung on the claim that a General whose commitment to his vows (to secrecy, to say nothing of his own marriage) couldn’t withstand the promise of a good lay. And that General’s triumph is now measured in utter silence about the crimes for which he’ll go scot free, and in celebration for his ability to shrink wrap (or have shrink wrapped) helicopters and — after 4 years of losing — giving those we occupied “a chance.”

And this, to the COINdinistas, is the greatest accomplishment since Washington’s successful revolt against our own occupier Empire gave us, our idealized nation, far far more than “a chance.”

Karzai’s Latest: US Behaving Like Colonial Power

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Since he lobbied for and then obtained loya jirga approval of the Bilateral Security Agreement but then added new conditions before he would sign it, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has exasperated military planners in NATO and the US, confounded most of the Obama administration and spawned a growth industry among pundits trying to explain his actions. Karzai’s latest offering though, provides a delightful turning of the tables in which he has decided to characterize the actions of those who are pressuring him to sign the agreement. Here is how Tolo News described Karzai’s most recent gem:

Amidst highly public tensions with the United States over negotiating a long-term security deal for the coming years, President Hamid Karzai has said that the U.S. is behaving like a colonial power.

In a response to a somewhat leading question from the French newspaper Le Monde in an interview published Tuesday, “Do you think the USA is behaving like a colonial power,” President Karzai said:

“Absolutely. They threaten us by saying ‘We will no longer pay your salaries; we will drive you into a civil war.’ These are threats,” Karzai said. “If you want to be our partner, we must be friends. Respect Afghan homes, don’t kill their children and be a partner. So bluff or no bluff, we want respect for our commitment to the safety of Afghan lives and to peace in Afghanistan.”

I would have described the question from Le Monde as highly leading rather than somewhat leading, but Karzai’s response shows that he realizes that for those in his country, the situation indeed resembles colonialism with the US as the colonial power. And the US is clearly using that colonial positioning as a very blunt instrument with which to attempt to control Afghanistan. Karzai is telling us that only a colonial power would threaten to withhold salaries and generate a civil war. He wants the US to realize that he wants a partner and not a colonial overlord. The partner would have no trouble meeting his demands of secure homes and a negotiated peace with the Taliban.

I had missed it when it came out on Thanksgiving, but this Op-Ed in the New York Times could serve as Karzai’s primary example of colonial behavior by the US. It was penned by Michael O’Hanlon, who was perfectly described by Glenn Greenwald as a “really smart, serious, credible Iraq expert” who also clearly lends the same sort of intellectual firepower to his Afghanistan analysis and John Allen, the mental giant who opined that green on blue attacks in Afghanistan were caused by fasting at Ramadan (and appears to have found the perfect home for himself at Brookings with O’Hanlon after his retirement from the military). O’Hanlon and Allen open with a blast at Karzai’s lack of appreciation for all that the US has done for Afghanistan:

What is going on with President Hamid Karzai? The world’s only superpower, leading a coalition of some 50 nations, is willing to stay on in his country after a war that has already lasted a dozen years and cost the United States more than $600 billion and more than 2,000 fatalities — and yet the Afghan president keeps throwing up roadblocks.

Isn’t that just the height of ungratefulness? We (the world’s ONLY superpower!)  waged war in Karzai’s country for twelve years, have offered to continue doing so and he has the gall to throw up roadblocks? Really!

But this paragraph is perhaps the height of colonial positioning by O’Hanlon and Allen: Read more →

Afghan Situation So Bad Propagandists Only Speak Of “Something That Could Still Resemble Victory”

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Back in April, I ridiculed the Senate Armed Services Committee and especially ISAF Commander Joseph Dunford for continuing to hold on to the delusion that the US can still “win” in Afghanistan. As the situation in Afghanistan continues to get worse, a new wave of summer propaganda is being trotted out to combat the gore being produced by the Taliban’s summer offensive. One arm of the propaganda has been to tout an individual vigilante group that claims to have cleared a hundred villages of Taliban fighters in one small region. I’ll return to the problems with that a bit later, but the big propaganda blitz that is now hitting is so pitiful that I keep checking the URL of the report to make sure it wasn’t published by The Onion.

The feel-good war hawk think tank that is supposed to make the left love war, Center for a New American Security, just released a “report” that is meant to get the country to buck up and continue to support the war effort in Afghanistan. In order to get anyone to lend their name to this drivel, the group had to sink so far as to recruit serial “liberal” war apologist (and always wrong) Michael O’Hanlon. O’Hanlon was joined by John Allen, the former ISAF Commander who is so smart that he blamed green on blue killings on Ramadan fasting and former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy. But even this hand-picked group of people guaranteed to be in favor of any kind of violence that the US can wage could only muster half-hearted enthusiasm for “success” in Afghanistan. From the report (pdf):

The United States can still achieve its strategic objectives in Afghanistan if it maintains and adequately resources its current policy course – and if Afghan partners in particular do their part, including by successfully navigating the shoals of their presidential election and transition in 2014. The core reasons for this judgment are the impressive progress of the Afghan security forces and the significant strides made in areas such as agriculture, health and education, combined with the promising pool of human capital that is increasingly influential within the country and that may be poised to gain greater influence in the country’s future politics. However, the United States and other international security and development partners would risk snatching defeat from the jaws of something that could still resemble victory if, due to frustration with President Hamid Karzai or domestic budgetary pressures, they were to accelerate disengagement between now and 2014 and under-resource their commitment to Afghanistan after 2014.

Note that this group is carefully laying out several potential villains on whom to blame the upcoming failure. Read more →

We Spend $1 Billion/Year Fighting Each al Qaeda Member in Afghanistan

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Think Progress does the math on Panetta’s admission that there are just 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and discovers we’ve got 1,000 American troops in Afghanistan for each al Qaeda member.

The U.S. has committed nearly 100,000 troops to the mission in Afghanistan. ABC This Week host Jake Tapper asked CIA Director Leon Panetta how big is the al Qaeda threat that the soldiers are combating:

TAPPER: How many Al Qaeda, do you think, are in Afghanistan?

PANETTA: I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda is actually relatively small. I think at most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity. There’s no question that the main location of Al Qaeda is in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The 100,000 U.S. forces that have been tasked to dismantle the 100 or so al Qaeda members — a ratio of 1000:1 — is complicated by the fact that we are also engaged in operations going after the Taliban leadership.

Now let me add to their math. Even Afghan war fans admit that it costs $1 million a year–on top of things like salary–to support a US service member in Afghanistan.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, says one useful way to break down these huge numbers is to look at how much it costs to send just one soldier to war.

“We are at a point where it’s unbelievably costing us close to a million dollars, in additional costs — above and beyond salaries and the equipment that’s already in the inventory — per soldier or Marine per year,” he says.

Fighting in Afghanistan means fighting in one of the most remote regions on Earth, and that plays a large role in the seemingly astronomical figure.

Dov Zakheim, a former chief financial officer for the Defense Department, says the $1 million price tag includes getting the soldier to Afghanistan, getting his equipment to Afghanistan, and moving the soldier around once in the country.

So 1,000 US troops per al Qaeda member, at a cost of $1 million each. That’s $1 billion a year we spend for each al Qaeda member to fight our war in Afghanistan.

This sort of adds a new twist to that old Einstein quip about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Because we’re doing the same thing over and over again–at a cost of $1 billion a year per nominal opponent–and expecting anything other than bankruptcy.