I have a lot of time for my FP
blogging colleague, Tom Ricks, even when we disagree. But I keep
reflecting on two of his General McChrystal related observations and I can't square
them with what I know (or think I know) about history and civil-military
relations. So, at the risk of starting a petty intramural squabble, here
are some counterpoints.
In his otherwise sensible New York Times Op-Ed, Ricks
made the following claim:
If
President Obama had not fired General McChrystal, it would have been like
President Truman keeping on Douglas MacArthur after his insubordination during
the Korean War."
Now I supported McChrystal
resigning -- calling it "clearly
a firing offense" -- and I wholeheartedly agree that the disrespectful
command climate that the Rolling Stone interview revealed was corrosive
of healthy civil-military relations. But it was meaningfully less
corrosive than the MacArthur incident on several dimensions and it is both
unfair and unwise to equate the two. MacArthur vigorously opposed
Truman's Korea policies of restraint, sought to lift them, and was colluding
with friendly reporters and political allies back in Washington to thwart them.
And he made no bones about this disagreement, as his post-firing
Congressional lobbying makes clear. McChrystal and President Obama both claimed
that there was no policy dispute at issue, neither in the Rolling Stone interview
nor in the larger civil-military dustup. McChrystal's disrespectful
comments were directed at members of Obama's team who, in McChrystal's views,
were not doing enough to implement Obama's policies. This is a
distinction that may not matter in terms of McChrystal keeping his job, but
should influence what we learn from the incident (and may justify giving
McChrystal a dispensation to retire
at 4-star pay.
My second quibble may be a tick more substantial. In a recent blog
post, Ricks argues that Republican Senators who pressed the issue during
General Petraeus' confirmation hearing were right that Obama's military
timeline made no military sense but wrong to try to pin Petraeus down on
whether the military had ever recommended it. As Ricks argues (absolutely
correctly): "just because the military is strongly against an approach
doesn't mean the approach is wrong." Moreover,
Ricks argues the timeline might even make sense in a larger context. In
Ricks' words:
So,
while the Afghan deadline makes no sense militarily, it might make sense
politically, both for domestic political reasons and in prodding the Afghan
government. If you believe, as I do, that the Afghan government is our biggest
problem in the war (followed closely by the Pakistani government), then what
happens to the Taliban is a secondary issue, and the primary question has to
be: How do we get a government in Afghanistan that is not counterproductive and
can field reasonably good security forces?"
I think Ricks may be right in
theory but is himself missing three important aspects of the larger context
that indicate he may be wrong in this case:
- Establishing
the provenance of the timeline is useful not merely for the historical record
but also as an antidote to a potentially dangerous gambit that some of Obama's
political advisors may have been attempting. According to Jonathan
Alter's account of the Fall 2009 Afghan Strategy Review, the White House
sought to pin the military down on the timeline so as to give the White House
political cover to abandon the Afghanistan surge; they wanted to be able to pin
the blame for any failure on the military and the timeline played a key role to
this end. This kind of gamesmanship is bad strategy and makes for bad
civil-military relations. Identifying who proposed what and why is
helpful.
- The
timeline indeed is foolish in a narrow military sense, as Ricks himself
recognizes. But it is also counter-productive for the larger strategic
aim to which Ricks in his post seeks to direct the critics' focus: getting
helpful governments in Kabul (and Islamabad). The arbitrary timeline and
the strategic confusion it has generated has created the exact opposite
incentives. Instead of creating a sense of urgency, it has created a
sense of despair and incentivized our local partners to hedge and seek separate
deals.
- The
timeline is an exceedingly expensive and unnecessary way of buying acquiescence
(it has not bought support) from Obama's left flank. Public support for
the war in Afghanistan is wobbly, but nowhere near as weak as was support for
the war in Iraq when President Bush pushed for a similar surge. President
Obama's influence over his Afghanistan policy opponents was and is much greater
than Bush's influence was over either supporters or opponents at the time of
the surge. Bush had come close to exhausting his reservoir of political
capital in mobilizing support for the war. Obama has barely started to
tap his reservoir in the war's cause. And so on.
In short, the timeline made no military
sense, no strategic sense, and little political sense -- except in partisan
terms of enabling Obama to shift any blame from a potential failure from
himself to the military. Clarifying who insisted on the timeline and who
is merely accepting it is a useful function in an otherwise less-than-dramatic
congressional hearing.
Read More
(5)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE