Stephen Hayes over at the Weekly Standard presents a
very intriguing angle
to the civil-military story behind President Obama's Afghanistan decision. He
is emphasizing the wrong part, however.
At issue is the extent to which the senior commanders
endorsed the option that President Obama selected: truncating the surge and
rushing the withdrawal in a fashion that interrupts the 2012 fighting season
(but dove-tails with the 2012 presidential campaign season). As Hayes
demonstrates, the White House sought to depict the president's decision as one
well within a range of options developed by the military. According to
Petraeus' successor, Lieutenant General John Allen, however, the option Obama
picked was not on the menu. Obama's plan -- presumably the arbitrary summer
2012 deadline and perhaps also the numbers involved -- was apparently devised
elsewhere, perhaps by White House advisors.
Hayes emphasizes that President Obama over-ruled Petraeus's advice, which is true but, as I have argued,
he was well within his rights as commander-in-chief. On this, I point to no less an
authority than General Petraeus himself.
From a civil-military point of view, it is important to know whether or not the
military refused to even present this as an option: it would have been
inappropriate if they had tried to tie the hands of the president in that
fashion. But if they did in fact present a range of options that included ones
they thought too risky, and then President Obama chose yet another
still-riskier option, that would not constitute a civil-military foul by either
side. It is worth knowing whether the military endorsed the option, but that
should not be viewed as the dispositive factor.
To me, the most important part of the Hayes story is that,
if accurate and complete, it means the White House did not tell the truth about
the military advice it received. Rather than admit that the president listened
carefully to his generals and then chose something that they did not recommend,
someone at the White House tried to pretend that the president simply chose
among a range of options endorsed by the military. This is a subtle difference,
but in civil-military terms it is a profound one. Civilians do not owe the
military prerogatives over policy choices; they do owe the military a
decision-making process in which the military voice can be heard and in which
military views will be faithfully described to those authorized to hold the president
accountable on these decisions, namely us.
If the president wants to elicit from the military an option
and an endorsement of an option that the military does not initially prefer,
as President Bush did with his Iraq surge, then
he must engage in the lengthy back-and-forth that President Bush engaged in,
cajoling the military into something resembling a consensus. The president does
not have to do that -- he can simply decide, as President Obama did -- but he
owes the military (and the voter) to tell the truth about what he did.
Ironically, if this story is true, the White House has just
replicated the Johnson-McNamara error that was at the heart of H.R. McMaster's
influential Dereliction of Duty account
of the Vietnam War. Although many read McMaster's book as accusing the senior
generals of dereliction for going along with Johnson's decision to escalate the
war more gradually than they thought prudent, in fact McMaster's primary point
was that the generals were derelict in going along with Johnson and McNamara's
willful misrepresentation to Congress and the American people about the content
of the military advice. What McMaster wanted the generals to do was simply tell
Congress what their advice had been, correcting the record that Johnson and
McNamara had muddied by pretending that their Vietnam decisions were consonant
with military counsel.
To their credit, today's senior military leadership have not
been derelict. They have saluted and obeyed their commander-in-chief. And they
have not shrunk from telling the truth about their military views to Congress,
even if it contradicts White House spin. Based on what is in the public record
thus far, I cannot give so positive an evaluation to the civilian participants.
The president has a right to be wrong, but he does not have
a right to lie about it. As Tom Ricks has argued,
the Obama Administration already faces some serious civil-military challenges
in the post Gates-Petraeus-Lute era (Lieutenant General Doug Lute has been a
key civil-military interface in his role as White House coordinator on
Aghanistan-Pakistan issues). Those challenges could quickly become
insurmountable if they compound risky strategy choices with serious
misrepresentations of the military position.
I hope those with better access to the president than I have
will impress upon him the importance of clarifying this matter as quickly as
possible. Perhaps the current story has a garble, and the anonymous White House
official was misunderstood. I hope so, because otherwise I fear a
civil-military rot will set in that could be quite corrosive to national security.
Read More
(10)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE