By Tom Engelhardt
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KL05Df01.htmlLet others deal with the details of President Barack Obama's Afghan speech, with the on-ramps and off-ramps, those 30,000 United States troops going in and just where they will be deployed, the benchmarks for what's called "good governance" in Afghanistan, the corruption of the Hamid Karzai regime, the viability of counter-insurgency warfare, the reliability of North Atlantic Treaty organization (NATO) allies, and so on. Let's just skip to the most essential point which, in a nutshell, is this: victory at last!
It's been a long time coming, but finally American war commanders have effectively marshaled their forces, net-centrically outmaneuvering and outflanking the enemy. They have shocked-and-awed their opponents, won the necessary hearts-and-minds, and so, for the first time in at least two decades, stand at the heights of success, triumphant at last.
And no, I'm not talking about post-surge Iraq and certainly not about devolving Afghanistan. I'm talking about what's happening in Washington.
A symbolic surrender of civilian authority
You may not think so, but on Tuesday night from the US Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered. It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn't on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his head. Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded-in-chief.
And give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot. The campaign began in late September with a strategic leak of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's grim review of the situation in that country, including demands for sizeable troop escalations and a commitment to a counterinsurgency war.
It came to include rumors of potential retirements in protest if the president didn't deliver, as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by General McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive citizen-mobilization of inside-the-Beltway former neo-conservative or fighting liberal think-tank experts, and a helping hand from an admiring media. In the process, the US military succeeded in boxing in a president who had already locked himself into a conflict he had termed both "the right war" and a "necessary" one. After more than two months of painfully over-reported deliberations, Obama has now ended up essentially where General McChrystal began.
Counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine was dusted off from the moldy Vietnam archives and made spanking new by General David Petraeus in 2006, applied in Iraq (and Washington) in 2007, and put forward for Afghanistan in late 2008. It has now been largely endorsed, and a major escalation of the war - a new kind of military-led nation building (or, as they like to say, "good governance") - is to be cranked up and set in motion. COIN is being billed as a "population-centric", not "enemy-centric" approach in which US troops are distinctly to be "nation-builders as well as warriors".
As for those 30,000 troops, most expected to arrive in the Afghan combat zone within the next six months, the numbers are even more impressive when you realize that, as late as the summer of 2008, the US only had about 28,000 troops in Afghanistan. In other words, in less than two years, US troop strength in that country will have more than tripled to approximately 100,000 troops. So we're talking near-Vietnam-level escalation rates. If you include the 38,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces also there (and a possible 5,000 more to come), total allied troop strength will be significantly above what the Soviets deployed during their devastating Afghan War of the 1980s, in which they fought some of the same insurgents now arrayed against us.
Think of this as Obama's anti-MacArthur moment. In April 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, president Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of the American forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure than either McChrystal or Central Command (CENTCOM) commander General Petraeus (and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman's plans to "limit" the war after the Chinese intervened.
Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a "generals' revolt" - amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what right-wing critics termed "dithering" and supporters called "thorough deliberations", Obama dealt with the problem quite differently to Truman. He essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his field commanders. (Not that his Republican critics will give him much credit for doing so, of course.) This is called "politics" in our country and, for a Democratic president in our era, Tuesday night's end result was remarkably predictable.
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