Under-Bus Insertion Process Begins? And Other Musings

posted at 4:46 pm on September 22, 2009 by J.E. Dyer
[ National Defense ]   

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview for The News Hour, has identified the assessment of U.S. Commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal as one of “several” the administration is looking at.  She names no other assessments or authors, but says the following:

…I can only tell you there are other assessments from, you know, very expert military analysts who have worked in counter insurgencies that are the exact opposite.

This, we should note in passing, is idiotic on even the most superficial grounds.  No one who was expert in counterinsurgency would give an assessment that was the “exact opposite” of McChrystal’s.  An expert’s assessment might differ on the margins, but there is only so much latitude for diametric opposition in either the assessment or the military recommendations.  Indeed, even from the standpoint of abstract logic this statement makes no sense:  there is no logical “opposite” of the proposition that the best way to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan is to focus on stabilizing the civil situation for the people (McChrystal’s formulation).

This content-free assertion by Hillary thus comes off as a mere rhetorical shuffle.  She appears to be starting the process of shuffling McChrystal off to the showers (at a minimum), as the hunt begins for a new strategy that won’t result in such inconvenient advice from the military commander.

The Obama administration, which, with great fanfare, unveiled a new strategy for Afghanistan in March, is now retreating for further cogitation on another new strategy.  We haven’t been operating under Bush’s quasi-limited-surge-lite strategy for six months now, something Obama administration apologists could profit from taking note of.  McChrystal’s 30 August assessment was made under the terms Obama has set for the Afghan campaign.  It’s what he thought were Obama’s objectives that McChrystal was responding to.

Hillary, however, paints this attention-deficient policy record as a triumph for judiciousness and prudence:

I mean one of the points that the President has made continuously since taking office is that we’re going to be assessing, both our strategy and its implementation constantly.  We’re not going to make a decision and then just let it go on autopilot…

I mean we constantly are saying what’s working, what’s not working, so it is both fundamental and it is thorough and thoughtful…

You know I think it’s fair to say, Margaret, that we have an open mind to any argument that is made. Now I’m sure each of us is entering into this process with our own points of view and our own base of understanding what will or will not work. And what General McChrystal has done is to provide his assessment. We will get assessments from others as well. And then we will hash it out in the National Security Council team and then we will present our best recommendations to the president. But at the end of the day it’s the president’s decision and I think what we heard the president saying yesterday is look, you’re going to have to convince me that whatever decision, is it classic counter-insurgency with additional troops? Is it counter-insurgency at the same troop level? Is it a different mix of troops? Is it a counter terrorism strategy?

In the face of this last babble-iteration, the interviewer asks Hillary, “Fewer troops?”  To which Hillary replies, with what would be, if she were not Secretary of State, a ditzy girlish inanity:  “Who knows?”

Who indeed?  It seems like somebody ought to; or at least be able to articulate a thought like “If the right answer is more troops, we won’t hesitate.”  “Who knows?” comes off as almost dementedly agnostic.

With a fundamental and thoughtful process like the Obama administration’s, however, it seems clear that mere data points like the number of troops, and the campaign objective recommended by the commander on the ground, are variables – not solutions.  The whole activity is more analogous to demonstrating proficiency with quadratic equations by working meaningless, disembodied textbook problems, than to using algebra to solve a real engineering problem and design a plan.

Will we continue to change our Afghanistan strategy every six months?  After this current iteration, we may find our strategy-change schedule dictated to us by outside forces:  the Taliban, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, our NATO allies.  We will have to take comfort in the knowledge that the process, at least, is not on autopilot.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions“.

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