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As if the current occupant of the Oval Office needed just one more reminder, General Stanley McChrystal’s much heralded report on Afghanistan makes clear that Barack Obama has inherited command of a misguided, inadequately resourced war effort, a campaign that has been rooted from the start in profound ignorance of the Afghan people - and the forces, homegrown and foreign, who seek to dominate them. But McChrystal doesn’t stop at stating the obvious.
He burdens his commander-in-chief with a proposal for a Soviet-style troop build-up, complete with the retrenchment of U.S. and NATO forces in heavily populated areas, allegedly to better protect the Afghan people.
Worst of all, Gen. McChrystal dismisses in a cavalier way the Taliban’s key strategic advantage: the sanctuary and support endowed to its leaders, recruiters and armorers by the Pakistan Army – the same umbrella of support that enabled the Afghan Mujahideen to send the Red Army packing in the 1980’s.
The general’s report lists three militant fronts, Mullah Omar’s rump Taliban leadership (the “Quetta Shura”), and groups led by the CIA’s former client warlords, Haqqani and Hekmatyar.
But too often in his text, McChrystal succumbs to semantics.
“Afghanistan’s insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan,” his report states. Supported by Pakistan would be the wording more befitting the evidence. But here, too, McChrystal fudges, stating that the major Afghan insurgent groups “are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan’s ISI.”
Reportedly? Does CIA Director Leon Panetta tell President Obama that the agency’s drones cannot direct Hellfire missiles at Mullah Omar in his Quetta protectorate because he is reportedly aided by the ISI? Of course not.
The Taliban leader and his council would be out of business without the institutional and tactical shield provided by Pakistan’s military, as would have been the case for the Mujahideen without President Zia's support.
McChrystal blows still more smoke. His report states: “While the existence of safe havens in Pakistan does not guarantee ISAF’s failure, Afghanistan does require Pakistani cooperation against violent militancy, particularly against groups active in Afghanistan.”
This is more than diplomatic doubletalk. It’s deeply misleading. The Afghan Taliban’s safe havens provide vital command and control elements. Pakistan is crucial to the militant groups’ recruitment and re-armament.
To propose changes in strategy that fail, even by political or diplomatic means, to apply pressure to an enemy’s command and control elements, and to its supply chains, goes beyond incompetence. It is dereliction of duty, a betrayal of U.S. and NATO troops, and of the Afghan people.
Yet rather than stressing the need to deal with Pakistani interference, McChrystal suggests that improving local government in Afghanistan can “strengthen” the country against “foreign insurgent penetration.”
He fails to square this lofty goal with the Afghans’ loss in confidence in the Western-crafted Kabul government. Most Afghans doubt whether the regime will ever deliver water and electricity, much less effective "sub-national" governance.
McChrystal attributes this to “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and (the International Security Assistance Force's) own errors…”
Perversely, elsewhere in his report, McChrystal disregards his own bleak assessment of the Karzai regime by quoting at length one of its most incompetent officials, Defence Minister Rahim Wardak (whose son, Hamid, has benefited from a raft of contracts from the Pentagon).
Widely known as the hardest-drinking, least capable member of Karzai’s cabinet, the elder Wardak disputes that Afghanistan is a “graveyard of empires” and asserts that Afghans have never seen the U.S. as occupiers.
Gen. McChrystal reports: “Minister Wardak’s assessment was part of my calculus.” As was Wardak’s wildly exaggerated manpower claims for his Afghan National Army: McChrystal perpetuates the myth that the ANA is 92,000 men strong.
The general’s field commanders have experienced the bitter truth: U.S. Marines ran short of combat-ready ANA support personnel within days of launching their Helmand offensive this summer.
As an exit enabler, the ANA remains little more than a pipe dream, one fuelled not so much by the intoxicants found in Afghan bazaars, but by the ambitions of careerist foreign generals and politicians.
From McChrystal's smorgasbord of the obvious and absurd, President Obama must try to salvage something from his predecessor’s most contemptible foreign policy failure.
It won't be easy.
But the first step is self-evident: understanding that any war plan for Afghanistan that does not begin in Pakistan is no plan for war at all, much less for success.
