Paul Yingling, if there’s any justice, will be General Yingling soon. His tours in Iraq — the third of which ended just a few months ago — established him as an exceptional officer. His 2007 essay for Armed Forces Journal, "A Failure In Generalship," established him as an exceptional thinker. That essay wasn’t just insightful, it was brave — an Army officer with a bright future criticized the generation of officers who would decide his career. I wanted to frame the first installment of my "Rise of the Counterinsurgents" series around two brilliant colonels on opposite sides of the counterinsurgency debate. Paul was the obvious choice. (As was his friend and sparring partner, Gian Gentile).

So his latest argument at Small Wars Journal comes as a surprise. It’s not wrong, but it talks past the argument it criticizes. More after the jump.

Gen. Charles Krulak, the commandant of the Marines Corps from 1995 to 1999 (and son of one of the Corps’ most distinguished Marines), recently wrote to George Will to endorse Will’s call to get out of Afghanistan. Krulak makes a couple of points in his letter. Among them: any troop surge to support a population-centric counterinsurgency approach will require "hundreds of thousands" of troops, an unsustainable commitment that will exhaust political will and military capability. Interagency and international cooperation remains insufficiently mature for such an arduous task. Some of the tactics employed are orthogonal and counterproductive to the task, such as fighting "ideas" or destroying the poppy crop. Better to place "hunter-killer teams" along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and support them with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets including close air support; cruise missiles if necessary and "minimal rules of engagement" (a euphemism for letting them go apeshit on anyone they find). 

Even some who share a number of Krulak’s concerns (like myself) are reluctant to embrace his prescription, viewing it as a recipe for an ultimately counterproductive campaign heavy on civilian casualties that risks exhausting the intelligence well through alienating the populace and breathing life into al-Qaeda support elements at a time when al-Qaeda appears notably weak. Yingling is no exception, writing that Krulak’s proposal would "tacitly assis[t] our enemies as they seek sanctuary and support from civilian populations." But this series of questions posed by Krulak really soars Yingling’s ire:

What in Afghanistan is deemed in our Nation’s vital interests? Seriously? Who is the enemy? Seriously? Is the enemy of the United States the Taliban? Is the enemy al Qaeda? We need to determine the answer to those questions immediately. One would think we would have answered them already but none of our actions would indicate we have. 

Yingling writes:

General Krulak appears unsure as to whether al-Qaeda and the Taliban are our enemies, and whether the United States has an interest in preventing Taliban control of Afghanistan. Exactly eight years ago today, al-Qaeda operatives supported by the Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan murdered 3,000 Americans on American soil. The answer to the general’s question is yes – al-Qaeda and the Taliban are America’s enemies.

Krulak’s provocative questions are first-principle questions, and it’s surprising to see Yingling declare that the answer is obvious. al-Qaeda is, I would contend, an obvious enemy; but the "Taliban" is a term that conceals more than it clarifies, as Gen. McChrystal recognizes. Not all Taliban maintain an allegiance to al-Qaeda; and it is only because of that allegiance that the Taliban are America’s enemies in the first place. Furthermore, the Taliban’s component parts are not the same as they were ahead of 9/11. None of which is to say that the U.S. ought to be indifferent to a credible prospect of Taliban control of Afghanistan. But it is to say that there’s an open question, not an obvious one, of the degree of interest the U.S. has with respect to the Taliban; there’s an open question, not an obvious one, about the wisdom of conflating all Taliban with each other and the Taliban with al-Qaeda; and an open question, not an obvious one, about what sorts of U.S. commitment follow from the answers from the first two questions.

And there’s also an open question about sorts of commitment the public ought to support. Yingling gets a bad taste in his mouth when Krulak considers the question:

General Krulak speculates that the American people would not provide the resources necessary to prevail in Afghanistan. While every citizen is entitled to his or her opinion, it’s not clear that General Krulak has any particular expertise in the area of domestic American political opinion.

What’s more certain is that the American people and their elected representatives have provided virtually everything asked of them by our military leaders. If there are insufficient resources to prevail in Afghanistan, it is the responsibility of senior military officers and other leaders within the executive branch to ask for more.

Yingling is of course right about the public and Congress writing blank checks for the wars. That happened before a global economic catastrophe and significant political upheaval in the U.S. fueled, in part, against such blank checks. The collapse of public opinion around the Afghanistan war goes unmentioned here. Yingling is also correct about the responsibility of military leadership to request needed resources. But there’s a context that matters. If leadership requires requesting increased resources, doesn’t it also require considering the sustainability of such requests? I respect that this is not an easy question, and there’s a legitimate worry on the other side about military judgment hiding behind perceived public opinion.

Yet the American people and the Congress have not debated first-principle questions about the Afghanistan war, despite the war being eight years old. We don’t have the luxury of hitting a reset button on a war. It exists in these inescapable contexts. And even if his prescriptions leave a lot to be desired, Gen. Krulak shouldn’t be derided for aiming at the heart of the issue.