Military

By Peter Feaver

Surprise?

I am surprised at how quickly President Obama lost confidence in the Afghan strategy he announced to great fanfare in March and how slowly and publicly (with daily read-outs and extensive tick-tock backgrounders) he is conducting Afghan Strategy Review 2.0. I expected that he would find it politically very challenging to maintain support for his war policies, but I did not expect he would make the job so much harder in this way. If this review results in (a) a sound strategy that (b) President Obama wholeheartedly commits himself to so (c) he spends the political capital necessary to forge a domestic and international coalition behind it, then the do-over will have done some good. But it feels like such a positive outcome is slipping away.

Praiseworthy?

The best decision President Obama made in the foreign policy arena is one of the first decisions President-elect Obama made: keeping Secretary Gates. This step took some political courage on his part, because he had based his electoral campaign on a scorched-earth critique of President Bush. Keeping Secretary Gates and some other key figures (such as Iraq/Afghanistan czar Lt. Gen. Doug Lute) ensured a stable transition and meant that for the first half of the year there were very few transition-related hiccups. Given how difficult it is to change commander-in-chief horses in midstream, this is a great accomplishment.

Constructive criticism?

The aspect of Obama foreign policy that most concerns me may be the flip-side of the praiseworthy piece: how long it is taking for Obama to settle into the role of wartime commander-in-chief. It could be that the decision to continue the bulk of President Bush's war council (and thus its policies) reflected a decision to delay taking ownership responsibilities for the war. To my reading, that is the connective thread that stitches together various problematic aspects of Obama's foreign policy thus far: peddling stale campaign rhetoric long after its sell-by date; repudiating his own comprehensive Afghan Strategy Review and launching a new one; developing a tin ear for civil-military relations and wartime alliance relations; spending so little time explaining his national security policies to the American people; giving his political team such a prominent role in national security; etc.

Prediction?

I think it is highly unlikely that the national security team that is in place today will be in place one year from now. I would not want to bet which principal will leave, but the betting money is someone will leave. Personnel transitions tend to be associated with friction and other mischief, and the causal arrow can go in both ways: intra-team friction leads to early departures and new arrivals disrupt established modus vivendi. So my prediction is that the "no drama Obama" mantra will have proven unsustainable by November 2010. This is not something to celebrate nor is it something to dread. Every administration has to deal with shake-ups and I wouldn't be surprised if President Obama proves he can deal with it better than most.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

By Michael J. Green

In opinion polls, Americans now rate Japan as one of the United States' most reliable allies -- usually behind only Britain, Canada, and Australia. The relationship between President George W. Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junchiro Koizumi was particularly close, and Koizumi's successor Shinzo Abe often described recent years as the "golden age" of the U.S.-Japan alliance. So it was probably something of a surprise for most readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times to see front page stories on October 22 describing an open spat between Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, over U.S. bases in Japan and the future of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

Hatoyama came into office a month ago vowing to pull Japanese ships out of the coalition effort in Afghanistan; to oppose the U.S.-Japan agreement realigning U.S. bases on the island of Okinawa; to investigate U.S.-Japan secret agreements on nuclear weapons dating back to the 1950s and 60s; and to increase Japanese independence by establishing a new "East Asia Community" that would exclude the United States. Gates' message in Japan this week was no-nonsense: The Obama administration is not interested in renegotiating previous base agreements and needs the new Japanese government to get behind the alliance. Hatoyama's response was defiant: He would not rush to decisions just to accommodate Obama's visit to Japan on Nov. 11.  But Gates' tough stance sent shudders through Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan.

So much for the "golden age" in U.S.-Japan relations.

Many Japan experts had urged the Obama administration to be patient so that the new Japanese government would have time to figure out its policies. Some of the same experts are now berating Gates on blog sites for provoking an "unnecessary" crisis with Japan. To be sure, there were good reasons to start off with a gentle posture toward the Hatoyama government. The DPJ won its landslide victory because of the economic crisis and the mounting unpopularity of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) -- not because of the unpopularity of the alliance (supported by 76 percent of the public in recent government polls) or because the Japanese people wanted changes in foreign policy (only 3 percent in exit polls said those issues shaped their choices). Moreover, the DPJ's main purpose is to move toward a more redistributive economic policy in order to steal constituencies away from the LDP before a critical first test at the polls in next summer's elections for the Upper House of the Diet. There is little interest in expending political capital on foreign affairs or defense, where the DPJ is badly divided internally to begin with. It therefore seemed likely that the DPJ would move away from some of its more extreme positions on security policy after coming to power -- just as the Obama administration did. A gentle stance would give Hatoyama the "face" to begin that shift.

However, it has become increasingly apparent that the Hatoyama government cannot -- or will not -- move to the center. The Socialist coalition partners are exerting too much control; Hatoyama is afraid of opening a split within his own party by adopting pragmatic governing policies; and the DPJ has interpreted Washington's gentle touch as a green light to continue slapping around the United States for domestic political purposes while loosely associating with Obama's idealistic visions for a nuclear-free world.

On the Okinawa basing issue, Hatoyama has said he will postpone a decision until next year (presumably after the Upper House elections), but his dithering will only increase opposition to U.S. bases on Okinawa, causing the whole deal to unravel -- whether that is ultimately what Hatoyama intends or not. The half-baked East Asia Community idea has the Chinese and South Koreans as perplexed as it has the Obama administration unhappy, but still sends unhelpful signals to the region at a time when the United States needs its closest ally in Asia on its side. The investigation of secret nuclear agreements may end up a big bore, particularly since the United States has not had tactical nuclear weapons in Asia since 1991. But the special committee of outside academics being established to "investigate" the government's past understanding with the United States could also turn into a witch hunt against the traditional managers of the alliance within Japan's Foreign Ministry.

With the U.S. president heading to Tokyo in less than a month, Gates had no choice but to splash cold water on the DPJ on Wednesday. There is some risk that the ever-populist DPJ will now try to use a spat with the United States to increase votes before the election next year.  But Gates is a shrewd judge of his counterparts. He knows that a crisis in the U.S.-Japan alliance would split the DPJ and turn much of the media against Hatoyama, particularly given the strong public support for the alliance and the growing menace from North Korea and China.  Meanwhile, Hatoyama was letting the DPJ leadership play with firecrackers in a room full of dynamite. Letting the alliance drift posed the greater risk.

On the whole, this could be a rough year for managers of the alliance with Japan. But the future looks brighter. The Upper House election next year will probably flush the Socialists out of the coalition and allow the DPJ to move to the center. The next generation of leaders in the DPJ is made up of realists who want a more effective Japanese role in the world and are not afraid to use the Self Defense Forces or to stand up to China or North Korea on human rights.  Gates did the DPJ a favor by forcing the debate on national strategy that the party was never willing to have while in opposition, and that Hatoyama was eager to avoid for his first year in power.

Song Kyung-Seok-pool/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

President Obama is presiding over a slow-motion civil-military crash occasioned by his meandering Afghanistan strategy review. The crash has not yet happened and is avoidable, but it also foreseeable. Of concern, the latest reports out of the White House suggest that Obama's team is not yet fully aware of the dangers. If it happens, it will be a problem entirely of Obama's own making and it could have a lasting impact on the way his administration unfolds.

As Rich Lowry has observed, President Obama rarely misses a chance to blame a challenge he is confronting on his predecessor. This rhetorical tic served Obama well during the campaign and probably still resonates with partisans who post anonymous comments on blogs or who suffer from chronic Bush Derangement Syndrome. But it gives the impression that the Administration never left the campaign bubble and may even encourage self-defeating campaign-like behavior such as picking feuds with news organizations.

And insofar as the Afghan strategy review goes, it is a narrative string that is thoroughly played out because the current civil-military problem confronting the Obama Administration is entirely of its own making. The problem is not that Afghanistan is a difficult combat theater, nor that Karzai is an inconvenient Afghan ally, nor even that President Obama is taking time to review his strategic options. All of that and more is true and, I suppose, some of it can be "blamed" on President Bush. The problem that cannot be blamed on Bush is that the way President Obama is reviewing his strategic options is generating needless civil-military friction and, unless the Obama team gets it under control, could generate a genuine civil-military crisis.

Tom Donnelly produced an extensive tick-tock of the evolving Obama Afghanistan policy that reads like the first draft of a "what went wrong" post-mortem.  For my money, the key developments were:

• President Obama opts for a misleading straddle in rolling-out the results of his first Afghan strategy review in March. He oversells the extent to which the new strategy is a radical departure from his predecessor's, but more crucially oversells the extent to which he is committed to this strategy. And, like President Johnson in 1965 and unlike President Bush in 2007, he announces the low-ball estimate of new resources expected rather than the high-ball estimate.  Military audiences hear what they want to hear -- namely that the President is committed to resourcing the "new" COIN strategy --and do not hear what they do not want to hear -- namely that the President is reserving the option not to resource adequately the new strategy and, indeed, to change his mind about the strategy in a few months time.
• Shortly after the roll-out, President Obama and his key White House team take their collective eye off the ball and are largely uninvolved in the firing of General McKiernan and the hiring of General McChrystal. Indeed, President Obama has only one substantive interaction with the battlefield commander of his most important "war of necessity" for the next four months.
• The most meaningful senior White House engagement with the Afghanistan theater over the long summer of discontent is a remarkable late June trip that NSA Jim Jones takes and that amounts to an on-the-record politicization of military advice. As reported by Bob Woodward, Jones appears to tell the military commanders to shave their military advice in light of President Obama's reluctance to approve new troop deployments. This episode, I believe, is the key pivot point. Military observers draw two "so that's the way it's going to be" inferences:
  • (1) The Obama team is fully cooperating with Bob Woodward -- a tried and true Washington strategy because Woodward tends to treat more favorably people who have cooperated (i.e. shared information and access) than people who haven't.  Application: it is OK to cooperate with Bob Woodward.
  • (2) The Obama team is politicizing civil-military relations.  Application: play the game or you will get burned.
• On 17 August, despite harboring serious misgivings about the Afghan mission -- and despite the accumulating evidence that the Afghan elections, a few days hence, will be riddled with fraud -- President Obama gives his most important speech since the March roll-out focusing on Afghanistan and uses the same rhetoric that he used on the campaign trail: Afghanistan is a war of necessity. Reasonable inference for military audience: The president is committed to fully resourcing this war.
• A direct result of Jones's late June trip, I suspect, is that Bob Woodward is put on distribution for the McChrystal report and receives it shortly after McChrystal delivers it  to his (McChrystal's) chain of command in late August. However, because Woodward is in the book-writing business, he does not publish the scoop, holding it back for the book. (Many observers believe that Woodward's source was a military officer, but my own hunch is that it was someone from Holbrooke's staff. My conjecture is based largely on the fact that when the story does break, Woodward leaves Holbrooke entirely out of the story, a telling absence of the AfPak czar that makes more sense if one is protecting a source).
• Throughout September, after the McChrystal report is delivered but before it is leaked, there start to be stories that indicate growing military frustration with the White House's lack of strategic focus on Afghanistan. The military apparently believe that President Obama is paralyzed with indecision. This is the context for Woodward going to his source and asking for permission to run the report as a news story rather than as a book scoop: the White House is trying to bury the McChrystal report by refusing to act or even debate it. The result is a real civil-military problem.
• In response to the leak, the White House kicks into high damage-control mode (after a brief delay occasioned by the unfortunate timing of the UNGA meetings), but even here shows some  clumsiness, at least regarding civil-military optics: the 25 hours for the Olympics vs. 25 minutes for McChrystal optic, and the surprisingly prominent participation of the political team in what is supposed to be a national security review.  This coupled with numerous anonymous quotes attributed to senior Obama team members aimed at knocking McChrystal down a peg or two do more to roil than smooth the civil-military waters.
• And then, most recently, a remarkable (and rare) public disagreement between Chief of Staff Emmanuel and Secretary of Defense Gates about whether the Obama team can wait to decide on the McChrystal request until after the fate of Afghan President Karzai is resolved.

In short, President Obama has been slowly veering off into a civil-military ditch of his own digging. Despite his relative inexperience in national security matters, this was not inevitable; during the campaign President Obama showed himself to be fairly deft rhetorically in regards to civil-military relations and he carried this strong performance through the first several months of his presidency. However, in recent months he has seemed far less at ease with his wartime Commander-in-Chief role.

If Obama regains a deft touch, the crash can be averted. To avert it he needs to do more than simply endorse the McChrystal request, though that would surely help. He needs to show that he respects the civil-military process, and he needs to rein in his advisors who have been stumbling about. If he is going to over-rule McChrystal, which is his right as a Commander-in-Chief, he will have a much steeper climb out of his civil-military hole. At a minimum, he will need to forthrightly take ownership of the war and all of its consequences and spend the political capital he has hitherto avoided spending on national security issues to explain his decision to the American people and the American military. Of course, while President Obama and his team bear the lion's share of the responsibility for the current civil-military friction, they cannot by themselves get out of the hole they have dug. The military will have to help by rigorously sticking to proper norms of civil-military relations. That means they must not counter-leak, not even to defend themselves from scurrilous attacks from unnamed White House staffers; seek redress quietly, within the system, and within the chain of command. They must avoid threatening President Obama with resignations in protest if he overrules their advice; such threats subvert the principle of civilian control which implies that civilians have a right to be wrong. And they must be prepared to do their utmost to implement Obama's chosen strategy as effectively as they can with whatever resources he puts at their disposal. If President Obama errs, it is up to the electorate to judge him, not the military.

Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images

By Thomas G. Mahnken

This week's news that, for the first time in 35 years, the U.S. military met all of its annual recruiting goals is testimony to the patriotism of America's sons and daughters and a reflection of the durability of the U.S. armed forces.

The economic downturn surely has something to do with the healthy recruiting figures, but there have been other periods of recession in the three and a half decades since the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force after the Vietnam War. The fundamental fact remains that large numbers of American 18- and 19-year-olds, who were 10 or 11 when al Qaeda on 9/11, continue to choose to join the military in large numbers, even though they will almost certainly deploy into combat in Iraq (remember Iraq?) or Afghanistan.

The recruiting numbers offer a strong rebuke to those who have argued that the U.S. military cannot bear the strain of waging two wars. They also refute periodic calls to replace an all-volunteer military with conscription. Indeed, they show that the means to wage the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq exists; whether the will to employ these forces to achieve victory exists, remains to be seen.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Kori Schake

The release of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's report on the war in Afghanistan has occasioned full-throated cries of insubordination from the president's liberal supporters. The most ignorant and offensive of these is Eugene Robinson's belief that the military "need to shut up and salute."

Let's leave aside that liberal commentators showed no such compunction when the Bush administration was being criticized by the military -- including both active-duty servicemen like Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and retired servicemen like Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold -- for its conduct of the Iraq war and for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's disrespect of their views.

Then, dissent was patriotic. Now, evidently, our military is not to be afforded views on the war they are fighting.

But shutting up the generals would be a terrible mistake, one much more hurtful to the Obama administration than to the military. Here are the main reasons the administration should not take the counsel of its supporters and silence the dissent being vented by our military.

They're more popular than he is. The American military is the most respected institution in these United States, with 82% of the public expressing high confidence, routinely outpacing all other institutions in American life -- to include the presidency (51%), the Supreme Court (39%) and Congress (17%). They're likely to win this one in the eyes of the American people, and that can't be good for the president.

They want to support him. After President Bill Clinton commenced his administration with the ill-fated executive order on homosexuals serving openly in the military, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin wrote him a terrific memo about how to repair relations with the military. The fundamental point was that the military is a winnable constituency for any president. They want him to succeed. Treating them like they're the enemy will offend their professionalism.

They understand the difference between policymaking and execution. It's their job to salute and carry out orders once the president gives them, but that does not proscribe them from influencing policy in the making. Go back and read the transcript of Gen. Colin Powell's lecture at the National Defense University during the "gays in the military" imbroglio for a poignant reminder of how well they get it. It will be a better policy if the president takes account of their concerns.

They know more about war than you do. Less than 1% of Americans serve in the military, and few of our political elites have any experience of the military. Those who are serving or have served do actually know more about the theory and practice of warfare than those of us who have not. They've risked their lives to acquire the knowledge, and deserve us giving deference to their judgment on what it takes to fight and win the nation's wars.

He was persuading allies to remain committed to the fight. President Obama is not General McChrystal's only boss. As the NATO commander, he works for all the governments with forces committed to the mission in Afghanistan. In his comments in London, McChrystal was defending the strategy President Obama asked allies to commit to, and for which their forces are risking their lives. He was helping make the case for the war to skeptical European publics; surely the White House does not want to do all that heavy lifting itself?

Ask yourself why it leaked. Internal government documents like the McChrystal report on Afghanistan tend to be leaked in one of three circumstances: (1) someone who cares desperately about the policy believes an administration is about to make a catastrophic mistake; (2) someone involved in policy formation believes their point of view isn't getting a fair hearing; or (3) someone wants to force the administration to publicly defend its choices. The latter usually occurs when, say, the national security advisor tries to intimidate military commanders into politicizing their advice. Or when the president curries favor with the military by telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars he's all in, then a month later getting cold feet when the bill for achieving his objectives comes due. Whichever of these factors drove this leak, the administration should take it as a canary in a coal mine they aren't building consensus within the government, either for their process or their preferred course of action.

You get the military leadership you deserve. If you penalize military leaders who give you unwelcome advice, they'll stop giving you their best judgment. They'll either fall silent, (as then Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers did in the run up to the Iraq war), or they'll retire (as Lt. Gen. Newbold did in the run up to the Iraq war and Gen. Ron Fogleman did after the commander of the Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia at the time of the bombing was later denied promotion), or they'll go through the motions of what you've asked and achieve little (as Gen. George W. Casey, now Army chief of staff, did when he was the top U.S. commander in Iraq). The president needs -- and should want -- military leaders who give their military judgment, which is all General McChrystal has done.

Secretary Gates judiciously suggested in his speech to the Association of the U.S. Army Monday that the president has a right to receive advice confidentially. He is serving the president well by trying to turn down the temperature on this civil-military imbroglio. People in the White House would also be wise to stop trying to silence the military -- or they won't like the military they end up with.

Photo: Pete Souza/White House

By Peter Feaver

The Obama Administration has been Woodwarded again, this time with a major scoop: Bob Woodward has a major front-page story that is more or less a summary precis of General McChrystal’s confidential Initial Assessment of the Afghan situation.  Remarkably, the Post makes this document also available, with slight excisions, here. Obviously, there is much to chew over here and I trust my Shadow Government colleagues will be chewing. I have a few initial assessments of my own:

1. It is not good to have a document like this leaked into the public debate before the President has made his decision. Whether you favor ramping up or ramping down or ramping laterally, as a process matter, the Commander-in-Chief ought to be able to conduct internal deliberations on sensitive matters without it appearing concurrently on the front pages of the Post. I assume the Obama team is very angry about this, and I think they have every right to be.

2. A case could be made that the Obama team tempted fate by authorizing Bob Woodward to travel with General Jones (cf. “whisky, tango, foxtrot”) in the first place and then sitting on this report for nearly a month without a White House response. You cannot swing a dead cat in Washington without meeting someone who was briefed on at least part of the McChrystal assessment, and virtually every one of those folks is mystified as to why the White House has not responded as of yet. The White House will have to respond now, but I stand by my first point: leaks like this make it harder to for the Commander-in-Chief to do deliberate national security planning.

3. Without knowing the provenance of the leak, it is impossible to state with confidence what the motives were. For my part, I would guess that this leak is an indication that some on the Obama team are dismayed at the White House’s slow response and fear that this is an indication that President Obama is leaning towards rejecting the inevitable requests for additional U.S. forces that this report tees up. By this logic, the leak is designed to force his hand and perhaps even to tie his hands. 

4. The leak makes it harder for President Obama to reject a McChrystal request for additional troops because the assessment so clearly argues for them. The formal request is in a separate document, apparently, but it is foreshadowed on every page of the Initial Assessment. Presumably, the McChrystal assessment and request is shared by Petraeus and, I am told, also by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That does not make it irrefutably correct, but it does make this issue now the defining moment in civil-military relations under President Obama’s watch. Obama has the authority and the responsibility to make a decision that runs counter to what his military leaders are requesting, but it is a very difficult thing for him to do.

5. The toughest part in the report from the point of view of the Obama White House is the twin claim that (i) under-resourcing the war could cause the war to be lost, and (ii) the resources need to show up in the next year. The former puts the responsibility for success/failure squarely on the desk of the President and the latter, because of the long lead times needed to send additional resources into the theater, says that failure could result from choices made or not made in the next few weeks. And it said that a few weeks ago.

6. Paradoxically, however, the report does not make it impossible for President Obama to reject the likely military request for additional forces. Because the report is so candid about all of the challenges we face in Afghanistan, many of the arguments against additional forces are substantiated somewhere in the report: the myriad failures of the Afghan government, the self-defeating restrictions imposed on NATO forces, etc. The only anti-surge argument that I have not seen substantiated (though I read this quickly, so I may have missed something) is the extraordinarily seductive one that suggests we can afford to simply walk away from Afghanistan and conduct “off-shore-counter-terrorism-operations” indefinitely.

7. This document will remind anyone who worked on the issue of the internal debate over the surge strategy in Iraq circa Fall 2006. While the Bush administration Iraq Strategy Review did not produce a 66-page report that leaked, we covered much this same terrain and wrestled with many of the same thorny trade-offs and uncertain bets. The report is basically calling for an Iraq-type surge gambit, asking President Obama to do more or less what President Bush did in 2007: (i) change the strategy, (ii) adequately resource the new strategy, and (iii) overcome the strong domestic political opposition to doing (i) and (ii). If successful, the McChrystal assessment claims that this will buy time to allow for a safer eventual shift back to a train and transition strategy. It will not win the war in the short-run, but it will shift the trajectory of the war and allow for the possibility that our side can prevail in the long run. This is eerily similar to how the pro-surge group within the Bush team thought of the Iraq surge.

The domestic political-military stakes have been ramped up considerably with this leak. It is not quite a 3-AM-phone-call crisis, but it is probably the most serious national security test the Obama team has confronted thus far. I trust they will address it with the same care and candor that characterizes the McChrystal assessment itself. We will know very soon if that is the case.

Update: After I sent in this blogpost, I read the companion article in the Washington Post that appears, to me at least, to tip Woodward's hand on the backstory to the leak. Here is the crucial bit:

... But Obama's deliberative pace -- he has held only one meeting of his top national security advisers to discuss McChrystal's report so far -- is a source of growing consternation within the military. "Either accept the assessment or correct it, or let's have a discussion," one Pentagon official said. "Will you read it and tell us what you think?" Within the military, this official said, "there is a frustration. A significant frustration. A serious frustration."

The civil-military dimensions of the challenge confronting President Obama could hardly be more clearly spelled out. This is significant and serious.

By Peter Feaver

The eyes, mouths, and digits of the punditocracy are understandably focused on the fate of Obamacare. Over here in Shadow Government, we serve the country best by focusing on most everything else.

In that spirit, I was struck by Jane Harman's op-ed, "It's the Corruption, Stupid," in today's Washington Times. Congresswoman Harman is a moderate Democrat on foreign policy and fairly hawkish on national security questions (full disclosure: she is also a friend and fellow Aspen Strategy Group member). She was part of a group of Democrats that the Bush administration considered to be critics especially worth consulting. They were sharply critical of our Iraq, Afghanistan, GWOT, or what-have-you policy, but having enough expertise to be able to offer constructive suggections and sharing enough common ground with us to be willing to do so.  

Bottom line: if you were going to build a bulwark within the Democratic House in support of General McChrystal's request for a ramped up military effort, you would probably begin with Congresswoman Harman.

She may still be part of that bulwark, but I interpret her op-ed as signaling something very different, something very ominous for the Obama Administration. Her argument is that neither increasing nor decreasing coalition troops in Afghanistan makes sense until we have fixed the endemic problem of government corruption. In case you miss the implication, the Washington Times editors spell it out with their subtitle: "Raising U.S. Troop Levels is the Wrong Move." That subtitle might be slightly misleading since, as I read the op-ed, Harman caveats that recommendation with a proviso: "unless or until you fix corruption in Afghanistan."

However, fixing corruption in Afghanistan is the work of a generation, if not more. Indeed, one could argue that you cannot fix corruption in Afghanistan until you have fixed every other problem including ending the drug trade, raising literacy and health standards, ending the influence of tribes, etc., etc. There are vast armies of well-paid bureaucrats in the World Bank and elsewhere who have cushy life-time employment working on corruption issues in societies with far rosier horizons than Afghanistan.

The stipulation that we can not and must not raise troop levels in Afghanistan until we have fixed corruption is tantamount to a stipulation that we can not and must not raise troop levels in Afghanistan, ever. Indeed, that does seem to be Harman's basic argument because she goes on to note, correctly, that once the corruption problem is fixed then it is likely that the Afghan government itself can provide all the additional forces they might need.

That is a principled position, of course, but it is not the one you want in the floor leader defending an urgent Obama administration request for more troops now.  

As I understand it, the recommendation coming from Generals Petraeus and McChrystal involve increased troop levels concurrent with increased efforts aimed at corruption and all the other Afghan problems. Congresswoman Harman appears to be giving that recommendation a clear thumbs-down.

If I am right about this, then President Obama's political problem on Afghanistan is much more thorny than I thought even a few weeks ago.

One final point: in the last couple weeks I have had numerous conversations with journalists all writing some variant of the "Obama administration and national security in wartime" story. I have asked each of them the same question: "Based on your reporting and access to the White House, what do you think is President Obama's gut-level resolve on Afghanistan?" The answer I have gotten back from every one of them, including journalists who are famous for their favorable coverage of Obama, is "I have no idea." That, I believe, may turn out to be one of the most consequential differences between this Commander-in-Chief and his predecessor.

How the administration responds to the signals sent by Congresswoman Harman and others will help clarify this question.

By Peter Feaver

President Obama spoke to the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention today. Over the last 8 years, this and the related American Legion conference (also usually in August) have become important venues for presidential messaging on the conflict formerly known as the global war on terror. If you want an interesting comparison/contrast, read President Bush’s address to the American Legion in August 2007, a period when the president was locked in a different tough political battle with domestic critics. Back then, of course, Bush was locked in a tough fight with critics who wanted to shut down the surge, whereas now Obama is locked in a tough fight with critics who want to shut down his health care plan -- perhaps the comparison is a stretch but, as they say, it is bloggable.  

There is a general form to these speeches and Obama largely followed it -- lots of applause lines about gratitude to veterans and their families for their sacrifice, promises to honor those sacrifices, and calls on Americans to support veterans. The speeches also provide a time to highlight the president’s basic vision for national security during these current conflicts. As far as I can see, there does not appear to be a real news hook in today’s speech, but some bits struck me:

1. The president reiterated the “war of necessity, war of choice” distinction which, as I have argued before, just does not stand up to rigorous scrutiny.  It is short-hand for “wars I support, wars I do not support.” Serious security studies specialists argued against the Afghanistan war from the outset and even more argue that we should walk away from Afghanistan now. I do not endorse their views, but I say that they are an existence proof that the necessity vs. choice distinction is more rhetorical than real. It may even be misleading, since we have lots of choices ahead in Afghanistan and it is entirely possible for us -- either the president or the public or both -- to get those choices wrong.

2. Calling the fight in Afghanistan necessary was as far as he went in terms of rallying the American people to the war. I would have liked to hear a bit more rallying than that. I suspect the speechwriters were also very deliberate in using the word “success” rather than “win” or “victory” in terms of Afghanistan. Doubtless, they have heard that our NATO allies believe that there is a meaningful distinction -- “success” being much less demanding than “victory.”  Personally, I find the “success” vs. “victory” argument strained, and I have yet to see much systematic polling evidence that shows the public draws that nuanced a distinction. For what it is worth, in the academic work I did with my Duke colleagues Chris Gelpi and Jason Reifler, we treated “success” and “victory” as largely synonymous.

3. He declared “mission success” in Afghanistan and Iraq -- or words to that effect:

In recent years, our troops have succeeded in every mission America has given them, from toppling the Taliban to deposing a dictator in Iraq to battling brutal insurgencies. At the same time, forces trained for war have been called upon to perform a whole host of missions. Like mayors, they've run local governments and delivered water and electricity. Like aid workers, they've mentored farmers and built new schools. Like diplomats, they've negotiated agreements with tribal sheikhs and local leaders...

4. Is this really any different from Bush’s much maligned speech aboard the aircraft carrier? Yes, but only in the sense that no one will complain about it.

5.The entire speech reminded me of then candidate-Bush’s Citadel speech, but this was especially striking in the section where Obama talks about defense transformation. It is worth pausing and reflecting on the fact that the Citadel speech was nearly a decade ago, and yet the goal of cost-effective defense transformation remains as elusive as ever.

All in all, the speech was fine and I am glad that the White House has continued the tradition of speaking out on national security during the August recess. I suspect, however, that other news events will likely have greater impact on national security, and other White House messaging will likely preoccupy the talking head community.