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I’m still reading Dexter Filkins’ New York Times Magazine profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal but I’m hung up on this quote:
In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.
“One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing,” McChrystal said. “We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.”
I mean, it was shortly after this time that the strategy changed, from one that emphasized the training of Iraqi forces to one that emphasized protecting the population. I don’t have any idea of the context to which McChrystal was specifically referring. And I have no interest in despairing. But this is a virtuous quality that can be dangerous. We should lose confidence in what we’re doing if it looks like it’s not doing what we thought it would. It’s a thin line between fidelity and faith. McChrystal, from everything I’ve seen, including this article so far, is perceptive enough to calibrate that very very very fine and elusive boundary. But, my God, that’s exactly the sort of quote that worries me, and what gives me confidence in the seemingly-vacillating decision to reassess strategy at the White House.
Update: And sure enough, McChrystal has put himself on a clock to check himself when it comes to that confidence issue:
When the briefing was finished, McChrystal looked around the room. “Gentlemen, I am coming into this job with 12 months to show demonstrable progress here — and 24 months to have a decisive impact,” he said. “That’s how long we have to convince the Taliban, the Afghan people and the American people that we’re going to be successful. In 24 months, it has to be obvious that we have the clear upper hand and that things are moving in the right direction. That’s not a choice. That’s a reality.”
But who will judge whether we have indeed shown “demonstrable progress” or have had a “decisive impact”?
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Who will judge?
Just tune into Fox Comedy Channel. They’ll tell us our progress, fair and balanced with neutral guests such as Krauthammer, Kristol and Morris. Those three are about has honest as you can get.
I think you are right about context being important here. If “what you are doing” is your goal, then his assertion isn’t so much of a problem. If, on the other hand, “what you are doing” is your strategy that’s troubling.
Hi Spencer,
I think you missed the “money shot” graphs. Page 9 of the online version:
I’d love to hear how that’s supposed to work – it certainly won’t be through Fontaine and Nagl’s prescription of just ignoring it and carrying on regardless. It’s going to take some fancy footwork in the “just look nonchalant and innocent” department. After all, the U.S. invaded, occupied and then installed both Karzai and his coterie of narco-traffickers and warlords in their mansions.
Regards, Steve
The stated purpose of “The Surge™” was to suppress the violence in order to provide the breathing space for a political reconciliation. In other words, the suppression of violence (protecting the population) wasn’t supposed to be the end, it was a MEANS to a long term political solution. The fact that we now choose to look back at the suppression of violence as a grand success that validates a whole new COIN doctrine and utterly ignore the complete lack of any political solution is a pretty clear indication that we really have NO idea how to actually be successful in these undertakings.
The Arabs, the Kurds, Kirkuk, Iran, Maliki’s split with UIA, Baathists, Awakening Councils…Nothing in Iraq is over. Nothing is solved. Nothing was “successful”, unless you take an exceedingly short-term view.
They appear to have successfully moved the goalposts, but you’ll forgive me if I question their track record as it applies to creating a long term solution in Afghanistan…
mikey
I’m still hung up on how homely McChrystal is. Maybe that’s my flighty feminine side.
Added on edit: or maybe it’s because I think McChrytal’s ugliness is his only significant feature. I report, you decide.
I debated that with a well-informed blogger friend and we decided it was actually one of the less satisfying parts of the piece. We all agree that legitimacy is key. But what does that really mean? It’s a shame Filkins didn’t elaborate. And I didn’t want to hang too much on his not-really-well-demonstrated assertion that McChrystal hasn’t seemed to have thought it through. I guess I really didn’t know how much weight to give it, but I wouldn’t call it the money graf.
Here’s how to think about McChrystal.
He’s a tool. He is meant to scare you.
You are not supposed to challenge him.
Good catch — and yes, that will be some trick.
In listening to the whole public discussion about Afghanistan lately, I am struck by the fact that everyone seems to be talking about McChrystal and the US troop levels on one side and Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the other, but no one seems to be talking about the Afghan government.
Even if one grants McChrystal’s proposition that an increase in US and coalition troop levels is a necessary condition for success (leaving that undefined for the moment), it’s not at all a sufficient condition. The whole point of the counterinsurgency approach also requires a partnership with competent and trusted local leaders, from the villages up to and including the national government. Without such partners — either if we try on our own or if our partners are incompetent — then triple the number of troops McChrystal is asking for and it still won’t make a damn bit of difference.
This leads to a whole bunch of questions:
If competent and trusted local leaders are also a necessary condition for success, what are the odds that we have such partners, or will get such partners in the near to mid-term?
Is there a tactical plan for building up these partners? How different is the plan from the failures in this regard over the last 7 years? On the spectrum of a plan vs. a wish list, where does the current DOD thinking sit?
How does the Galbraith firing and the resignation(s) that followed change the dynamic of the legitimacy of the elections and the US support for Karzai? Is there an option at the national level apart from Karzai?
Bottom line, as I see it: to the extent that the Afghanis view Karzai and his government as corrupt, if our plans depend on him being the leader of our competent and trusted local partners, we are well and truly screwed, regardless of how many troops McChyrstal gets.
And if McChrystal hadn’t thought this through before this interview took place, he needs to do a whole lot more thinking, very soon.
You know, for a while I bought this analysis, and now I guess I don’t. You’re right that nothing has ended in Iraq, and the competition over political questions and resource questions continues. But it really isn’t just security that’s improved, the politics of the place have gotten more open, as cross-sectarian political coalitions started to form after the provincial elections. Those coalitions are immature and they need testing. But they didn’t exist and now they do.
But the greater security provided, in part, by the surge really did allow the sectarian war to return to a political contest, and that in turn led Iraqi politics to include questions that are mundane as well as existential. And I think that you’ve got to score that in the surgeniks’ favor. It’s just too easy, too stuck in a moment, and not correct to say that politics in Iraq remains stuck where it was in 2007.
“…and 24 months to have a decisive impact,”
24 months: that’s 4 Friedman units. That man is quite a forward thinker.
He sure didn’t seem to mind being challenged in his London Q&A.
After all these years of needless occupation… I think American hubris is progressing further into the abyss.
Have we shot any Afghan boys on bicycles today?
The US “found a strategy”? I thought the US got lucky when the sunnis decided they would not fight us if we paid them not to fight us. so we paid them and they stopped.
Where is the Afghan counterpart to that “strategy”? Iraq also had a national government that could claim to represent a majority, and we could use our army to suppress those Mahdi’s that were contesting that majority. Where is the Afgan counterpart.
There’s no there there.
Driven entirely by his boss’s re-election calendar, looks like to me.
What good is a general who has such narrow vision of options that the only strategy he can come up with is to remake Afghanistan into something that looks more like American first, then deal with the problems in those terms. Worthless. Who can afford such a strategy to keep America strong? It will bankrupt us. What are they teaching at the War College these days? Don’t they have any strategies other than nation building?
How many people born inside the borders of Afghanistan.. actually call the place they live Afghanistan?
its always so encouraging when Americans apply their attention-span-of-a-toddler to such minor things as war. Afghanis have been in their hell-hole for millenia. No doubt they laugh their asses off (or more likely can’t even comprehend) McChystal’s egomaniacal talk of changing things there in 12 or 24 months.
It sounds like a statement of faith. A different kind of faith that matches up with the bizarre stories that come of ritualized christianity indoctrination in our military today. The air force seems intent on violating all the laws banning religion from influence in their service. It must take some intelligence to fly a plane, the last bush not withstanding. It is also these that make decisions about what to do with their bombs in the long run. One might wonder if they have the name of their favorite among deities drawn on the bomb they use on the foes of jesus ex machina.
But a statement of faith while people are dying, waiting for some intervention beyond the material or the rational, defies thought. It begs the question, are these all that we have remaining in our officer corps? Have the independent thinkers all left the service? To allow men to die while you wait for guidance unknown does not sound correct in a professional army.
Suppose we arrange swimsuit competition with McChrystal, Mullah Omar, and bin Laden for ya?
We arrange, you deride.
Ding! The history of the Iraq war has been revised so many times that it gets hard to keep track of the real storyline. Petraeus bought off the Sunnis. The protect the civilian population sounds good but by the time of the surge, Baghdad had already gone from being majority Sunni to majority Shia. Petraeus put up some concrete barriers between some of the neighborhoods but the ethnic cleansing had largely taken place. And of course there are the millions who fled Iraq or were internally displaced.
HelenaHandbasket has it right too. We have been in Afghanistan 8 years and McChrystal is talking multiples of Friedman units. It is this that makes such a joke of McChrystal’s sense of urgency. He’s talking 10 years and that won’t even take us to an exit point, just a “decisive impact.” And the crucial question which keeps getting buried in all this is: Is the war even worth the effort, the lives, the time, and the treasure? The answer to this question remains: No.
I think that there’s a difference between “being” in Afghanistan for 8 years and doing things there for that time.it’s been our inaction and inattention that’s given the situation the urgency that McChrystal feels.
That’s no joke.
Just to remind you, we are fighting this war because some Muslim nut jobs flew planes into two of the largest building in the US killing approximately 3000 people in a few hours. That’s why we are there and it is worth the lives and time. The people who are fighting certainly understand that. What they don’t understand is Obama’s lack of interest in fighting this war. McChrystal had to go public just to get a reaction from the White House, while Obama was off “sacrificing” himself to the Olympic Committee. Things like that are incredibly demoralizing to military troops.