Yesterday, I saw General Allen close out his
week-long Washington, DC tour
at
the Brookings Institution. On C-SPAN, I
watched him testify before the House and Senate
Armed Services Committees with Acting
Undersecretary of Defense James Miller. You can
access Gen. Allen's written testimony
here
and you can watch the hearings here:
I am going try to accomplish two things in this
post: (1) Address the risks inherent in
generals becoming spokesmen and (2) Ask some
tough questions that were not asked by our
elected representatives.
General Allen is a man worthy of our
admiration. He has taken on the most visible
and arguably most important command position in
the US military. He is responsible for a
massive 100,000+ coalition plus thousands of
civilians and an unknown number of contractors
from over 42 different countries. He is also
responsible for supporting and growing an
Afghan force of nearly 300,000 people. Whether
or not our political leaders accept it, our
campaign is nothing less than an effort to
build a state where one has never existed and
General Allen has been given that task…
…Which is why it becomes a problem when he also
takes on the role of being the spokesman and
public relations man for that mission. That is
not to say he is not good at it. Anyone who
watches his testimony will understand that
General Allen is an effective public speaker
(if a little stiff) and has impressive
political acumen.
Military culture produces excellent leaders;
leaders who are mission-oriented, analytical,
and optimistic. These are great qualities when
leading men and women in war and peace. In the
military (and elsewhere) it is important to
inspire the people beneath you, give them a
sense of purpose, and make them believe that
the purpose is achievable through loyalty,
duty, respect, selfless service, honor,
integrity, and personal courage. In the
military, the costs of failing to create this
sort of command environment are fatal.
But an accurate assessment of a military
campaign is not always well-served by the "can
do" positive mental attitude of the military
officer ethos. I want a general who believes he
can accomplish the mission, but I also want our
legislators and citizenry to understand when
that belief clashes with the facts.
Anyone that becomes a General Officer must also
be a capable politician. But I do not want my
generals giving rosy assessments and
undeliverable promises in the same manner as
our politicians.
So onto some tough questions:
1) The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)
are essentially our exit strategy. They are
what will allow us to draw-down our forces and
meaningfully transition responsibility for
Afghanistan to Afghanistan. In the years after
the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, President
Najibullah's Afghan security forces fragmented
along factional lines (ethnic, tribal, etc).
This precipitated and, indeed, led to a civil
war that did not end until the Taliban took
most of the country in 1994-96.
Given that the ANSF
remain divided along many of the same lines and
more (ethnic, tribal, mujahideen, former
communists, etc), what planning is being done
to ensure the organizational coherence and
durability of the ANSF post-2014?
2) Pakistan's motivation to support the
Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and
Hizb-i-Islami-Gulbuddin is easy to explain.
Pakistan has three immutable interests in
Afghanistan: (1) Avoiding strategic
encirclement by India, (2) Maintaining
strategic depth against India, and (3) blunting
Pashtun nationalism. Pakistan's support for
Afghan insurgents helps them accomplish all
three. No matter how many billions we funnel
into the Pakistani military, Pakistani civil
society, and Pakistan's civilian government, we
cannot change how Pakistan views the world
(short of a miraculous sea-change in
Pakistani-Indian relations). Pakistan is
pursuing its interests in Afghanistan and will
continue to do so.
Can we facilitate a new framework by
which Pakistan can do this without having to
support armed non-state groups?
3)
Why should
we expect the Taliban and other insurgent
groups to negotiate in good faith towards a
power-sharing agreement if we are leaving and
they know it?
4) General Allen said the following at
Brookings: "And in terms of the unfolding of
the fighting season, we had some pretty good
success last year in the south, in particular
in Kandahar and in the Central Helmand River
Valley, and we’ll be seeking to leverage that
success this year by consolidating our hold in
the south, while we’ll continue to employ our
combat power in the east in a counterinsurgent
mode…"
How will ISAF
consolidate its hold in the south when troop
numbers in Helmand are dropping from about
30,000 to about 15,000 this year?
Approximately 15,000 US Marines are leaving
Helmand this year. Our very real operational
gains in Central Helmand, where I worked with
British and Danish forces, were enabled in no
small part by the efforts of US Marines
fighting hard in the rest of the province. This
gave the British-led Task Force Helmand the
space and time to consolidate a real hold on
the center, most-populous part of the province,
including Nad-e-Ali district, Lashkar Gah
municipality, and – to a lesser extent –
Nahr-e-Saraj district. When most of those
Marines leave, the pressure on those districts
will increase and the hold will be challenged.
It is already happening.
Read more
from Ryan at
Foreign Policy’s
AFPAK Channel
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