Why we lost Iraq and Afghanistan

The generals supported counterinsurgency, Mr. Bolger says, because they assumed that America’s political leadership would keep American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades—a naïve assumption, in his view. During Barack Obama’s presidency, he argues, Gens. David Petraeus , Ray Odierno, Stan McChrystal, John Allen and Joseph Dunford made “poor assumptions that, despite every indication to the contrary, the Obama administration would commit to major long-term U.S. troop deployments.”

There is much that is compelling about Mr. Bolger’s book, but his main argument is not entirely convincing. The most obvious objection to his indictment of the generals is that America’s civilian leadership, by virtue of its constitutional authority, is ultimately responsible for martial success and failure. The commander in chief appoints the generals who will direct the country’s forces in combat and, in an era when Congress rarely serves as more than a rubber stamp, determines where, when and how the nation goes to war.

Certainly generals can be assigned some blame in wartime if the commander in chief has charged them with fighting a winnable war or campaign that they then lose through their own incompetence. It is not hard, for example, to fault Gen. Arthur Percival, who in 1942 lost Malaya, Singapore and his entire command of 140,000 men to a Japanese force half its size. Mr. Bolger’s own retelling of events in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, suggests that civilian policy decisions impeded or precluded military success. As Mr. Bolger reminds us, civilian leaders in the Bush administration disbanded the Iraqi army and purged Iraqi Baathists in 2003, then imposed elections that shifted power from Iraq’s Sunnis to its Shiites. Those decisions guaranteed sectarian strife and ineffectual Iraqi national security forces.