Woodward’s missing chapters

Posted By Paul Miller Thursday, October 14, 2010 - 12:45 PM Share

One of Bob Woodward's previous books, Bush at War, told how President George W. Bush and his advisors formulated policy towards Afghanistan in 2001-2002. Woodward's latest book, Obama's Wars, details how President Barack Obama's administration formulated its Afghanistan policy in 2009-2010 (see here for earlier thoughts of mine in response to Woodward's book.) A casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that there was no U.S. policy towards Afghanistan in between.

That view is wrong. From 2003 to 2008 officials in the Bush administration struggled mightily to grapple with the growing challenges in Afghanistan, fighting (with modest success) to get more time, attention, and resources for a war overshadowed by the larger and bloodier one in Iraq. They started moving U.S. policy in the right direction, but only slowly and with small steps. This fight has important lessons that Woodward -- and, I fear, the Obama administration -- neglected in his latest chapter.

Here's a review of the Afghanistan timeline:

  • In 2003 Zalmay Khalilzad, an National Security Council (NSC) staffer before his successive appointments as the president's special envoy for Afghanistan and then U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, lobbied for an increase in reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan. The security situation was relatively calm back then (compared to today) but it was increasingly evident that the Afghans needed greater help to rebuild their country. After the NSC approved his plan, called "Accelerating Success," U.S. assistance for all programs more than doubled from $1 billion in FY 2003 to $2.6 billion in FY 2004, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. (See also the GAO's report.)
  • In late 2006 the NSC, led by special assistant to the president Meghan O'Sullivan and senior director for Afghanistan Tony Harriman, conducted a comprehensive strategic review of U.S. goals, aims, and progress in Afghanistan. This review, almost entirely unheralded by the media (compared to the reviews of 2008 and 2009) was a key strategic turning point for U.S. policy (here is a State Department briefing that mentions it). Following the review the United States tripled its assistance to Afghanistan, from $3.5 billion to $10 billion in a single year, including almost quadrupling assistance to the Afghan army and police, according to the Special Inspector General. This marked the starting point of serious international efforts to build Afghan security forces. Additionally, President Bush appointed a deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan -- Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, my former boss -- who substantially increased the interagency focus and pace of work on Afghanistan. Furthermore, Bush nearly doubled the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan between the 2006 review and the end of his term in office.
  • In 2008 Lute led another NSC strategy review on Afghanistan, briefly mentioned in Woodward's book and in the media at the time. Woodward correctly records that Lute and his team set up an intensive review -- "19 in-depth meetings over six weeks" that were 2-3 hours apiece and involved all the U.S. agencies and departments, military and diplomatic officials, and Afghan leaders. The review recommended more resources, a counterinsurgency strategy, and a greater focus on Pakistan, among other things. Coming so late in the Bush administration's term, the document could not guide budget decisions or troop deployments, but it did become a transition document that was briefed to incoming National Security Advisor Jim Jones. It was also fed into the first of Obama's strategy reviews in 2009, led by Bruce Riedel. While Riedel had many inputs and wrote his own report, his report's recommendations and conclusions were broadly consistent with Lute's.

A cynic might read this history as proof that Afghanistan cannot be fixed. Every few years we reevaluate Afghanistan, determine that it is not working, and try to fix it with more money and more troops. It never works, so we should stop trying.

I read the history differently. It doesn't prove that Afghanistan can't be fixed, it proves that we've never really tried. At no point did Bush (or Obama) fully implement the reviews' recommendations. Time and time again the interagency consensus was that Afghanistan needed massively more resources and faced considerably more challenges than anyone fully appreciated. Time and time again, Afghanistan was not a priority; funds were limited, troops were scarce, and thus Afghanistan was given what was available, not what the mission required. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen famously told Congress in 2007, "In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must." That was the guiding principle of U.S. policy to Afghanistan. When the policy predictably failed to show results, the interagency ground out another strategy review. While it is a myth that the Bush administration simply ignored Afghanistan, the truth is still not very flattering.

But as Woodward's book shows, Obama may be following in his predecessor's footsteps. Obama and his advisors have likely bought into the myth that Bush ignored Afghanistan and thus believe they have already improved matters by merely paying attention. But Woodward's account shows the president more concerned with amounts of time, money, and troops than with -- dare to use the word -- "victory." Rather, it shows the president redefining "victory" downward until it is achievable with the resources he was willing to commit. Obama rightly committed more troops to Afghanistan, but he is restricting the one resource the troops now need the most of -- time. Obama, like Bush, is tailoring the mission to meet the resources rather than the other way around. That's how the president should treat secondary efforts, not his top foreign policy priority or a shooting war in which U.S. vital interests are at stake.

Pete Souza/White House via Getty Images

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN, BUSH ADMINISTRATION, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
 

ZATHRAS

6:04 PM ET

October 14, 2010

Afghanistan

The myth is that former President Bush and his administration ignored Afghanistan. The fact is that former President Bush and most of his administration ignored Afghanistan most of the time; between the first and second mileposts in Paul Miller's timeline there is a gap of approximately four years.

OK, then. Point taken.

Miller suggests but doesn't quite make a case for an important idea: namely, that time lost in Afghanistan has consequences. If you do the wrong things for seven years, starting to do the right things doesn't necessarily fix your problem, because in the meantime the problem has changed.

I actually think President Obama gets this, and so do the key senior American generals. Vice President Biden gets this; so does Richard Holbrooke. Getting something and acting on it are two different things, though, and as a whole the administration has not acted on the idea. What it has done instead is pursue, after much internal review and debate, the military's instinct -- doing the right things may not work, and may not even be possible to do in quite the way we want to, but we have to try it because we can't think of anything else. Naturally, we need more time and more resources to see what will happen.

I don't mean this in a snarky way; the American military's can-do attitude is one of its most admirable characteristics. Having committed so much time to and lost so many soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus and Adm. Mullen naturally want to set the place right. So do I. Everyone's good intentions, though, will founder if "Can Do" runs headlong into "Can't Be Done" in Afghanistan. More time and more resources will only be wasted if that is the situation.

It may well be, a statement I qualify only because I can't prove that it is rather than because I have any faith that it isn't. That isn't to say it was in, say, 2002. That's water under the bridge in a sense, obviously, but in evaluating America's present situation with respect to Afghanistan it's important that we not be sloppy about how we got to where we are now. Afghanistan isn't such a mess because Obama is, tsk tsk, making the same mistakes Bush did. It's a mess because Bush's mistakes dug a hole too deep for Obama or even David Petraeus to get out of.

With all that said, I want to acknowledge that Paul Miller has at least not followed the dishonorable practice of some other contributors to this blog, of kibitzing on Obama administration policy while complaining piteously about criticism directed at Obama's predecessor. America's international position, to say nothing of its economy, were dramatically worse when Bush left office than they were when he became President. Someone has to take responsibility for that. Up to now, it hasn't been anyone contributing to this blog.

 

JAYDEE001

7:05 PM ET

October 15, 2010

We've never really tried???

"I read the history differently. It doesn't prove that Afghanistan can't be fixed, it proves that we've never really tried."

Well, after hundreds of millions of dollars, far too many deaths and disablities to our personnel, and ten years of doing whatever in Afghanistan, I'd like to hear just what we have been doing there. I am with redpossum and rob44 - we've spent a hell of a lot of treasure and time, as well as too many lives to say "we've never really tried". And now, if we are to the advice of our allegedly competent generals, we need to expand our efforts into Pakistan as well?

It's mission creep and I hope Obama has the good sense and the cojones to finally put a stop to it. We failed in the initial mission to kill or capture OBL, we akllowed ourselves to get distracted by an unnecessary and foolish war in Iraq, and we are going to fail to achieve anything lasting in AfPak as well. About all we have accomplished, besides enriching the military industrial complex, is to piss off most of the Islamic world and prove that our pretensions of being a superpower that can change the world for the better are worth very little.

 

MARTY MARTEL

9:58 PM ET

October 15, 2010

Obama is cursed by Bush blunders

Bush was unable to finish Afghan war after more than long seven years because of his three blunders that continue to haunt Obama.

First, during the siege of Kunduz in November 2001, the Bush administration allowed Pakistan to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan from where Mullah Omar’s QST has been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

Second, in order to chase Saddam’s imaginary WMDs, Bush administration allocated huge military resources to Iraq, thereby denying Afghanistan sufficient troops to provide security against Taliban.

Third, Bush recruited Musharraf’s Pakistan to fight the very terrorist threat that Pakistan itself created. So Musharraf played duplicitous game of running with the hare while hunting with the hounds. While capturing and killing some Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders based on US intelligence, Musharraf continued to shelter, protect and support Mullah Mohammed Omar’s Quetta Shura Taliban in Quetta, provincial capital of Baluchistan and Haqqani network in North Waziristan.

American people are tired of this never-ending nine years war with no end in sight. So Obama’s domestic supporters like President himself want to wind down this war as soon as possible. But Obama also wants to stop the ‘cancer’ of terror spreading from Pakistan to Afghanistan as he told November 25, 2009 gathering.

He won’t have both.

So he will force for negotiated solution with Taliban come June, 2011. Taliban will agree to a coalition government with karzai under the fixed time table for US troop withdrawal. Obama administration will agree. US will withdraw and then Taliban will take over, a la Vietnam style with Pakistani help.

Only question left is - will US continue to pay ransom money to Pakistan to stop future terror attacks on US homeland from Pakistan/Afghanistan? If not, would Pakistan revert to same old terror tactics to extract more aid from US and its Western allies?

 

SIMPLULO

10:11 PM ET

October 15, 2010

Opium finances the Taliban

Ironically, something is missing from Paul Miller's "Woodward's missing chapters". Woodward relates that the Lute Report concluded that "the U.S. couldn't prevail in Afghanistan unless it resolved three large problems":
1. Governance (e.g. corruption)
2. The opium trade ("out of control" and "fueled corruption and partially financed the Taliban")
3. Pakistani safe havens

Lt. Gen. Lute continued in his position into the Obama administration, but the report seems to remain squelched. No one wants the link between opium (1/3 of Afghanistan's economy) and the Taliban publicized, as there are only two solutions: eradication (Lute's recommendation) or decriminalization:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Douglas_Lute#No_.22hard_factual_evidence.22_of_.22clear_link.22_between_Afghanistan.27s_drug_profits_and_.22extremists.22

 

Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.

Read More