General David Petraeus didn't make much news yesterday at the Counterinsurgency symposium being hosted by Marine Corps University--when asked by a reporter how he felt about the alternative "containment" strategy reportedly being considered by the administration and how it stacked up against General McChrystal's recent recommendations, he demurred. But only in public. In fact while most of the active duty military staff there avoided commenting on what course the president should take in Afghanistan, there seemed to be an undercurrent of frustration among some in attendance that McChrystal's suggestions weren't immediately embraced, expressed most prominently by Eliot Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleeza Rice. While I found the conference interesting, I ultimately left with the concern that COIN has so many moving parts, and success relies on so many external factors--like the character and quality of local leadership--that the decision to simply apply McChrystal's recommendations is far from an easy one to make.
Petraeus made a number of important points--one of them being that "[w]e need to make sure we're not prisoners of our experience in Iraq, and make sure we don't try to solve every problem with solutions that worked in Iraq." Some supporters of escalation in Afghanistan have been quick to say "we just need to do what we did in Iraq" without much mind to the vastly different circumstances in Afghanistan. Petraeus also warned that the U.S. shouldn't overlearn the lessons of Vietnam, adding that "the lessons of history can illuminate but they can also obfuscate."
Framing the debate over the strategy in Afghanistan are the political realities there and in the United States. McChrystal emphasized a 12-month timeline for turning things around in Afghanistan--that goal seems sensitive both to the political circumstances here, in which support for the mission is floundering--and in Afghanistan, where in a year the parliamentary, regional, and district elections will provide another opportunity to shore up the legitimacy of government institutions after the recent presidential election, which was marred by fraud. COIN can't work without a legitimate government to protect. As MCU professor Dr. Amin Tarzi put it, the election "helped the insurgency and not us," because it shored up the insurgents' claim that "this democracy is fake."
Hidden in all this is the reality that if the United States does pursue a COIN strategy, American military forces are likely to be there for years and years to come--even if McChrystal is successful at turning things around within a year. No matter what the administration says about its goals in Afghanistan being limited, this is still Objective 3b:
Promote a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people and can eventually function, especially regarding internal security, with limited international support.
No matter how well things go in the next 12 months, that will take years. I'm guessing that the hope is that, by then, an improved situation in Afghanistan will mean less political pressure to leave, as well as an opportunity to show tangible improvements with another election, thereby validating the decision to stay.
"If next year's elections are botched again," Dr. Tarzai said, "we are not going to do well."
-- A. Serwer
