American Way of War (31 page)

Striking percentages of Americans attend the church (temple, mosque) of their choice, but when it comes to American politics and the economy, the U.S. military is our church, “national security” our bible, and nothing done in the name of either can be wrong. It’s as if the military, already the most revered institution in the country, existed on the other side of a Star-Trekkian financial wormhole.

Which brings us to Pentagon time. Yes, that third clock is ticking, but at a very different tempo from those in Washington or Massachusetts.

Americans are evidently increasingly impatient for “change” of whatever sort, whether you can believe in it or not. The Pentagon, on the other hand, is patient. It’s opted for making counterinsurgency the central strategy of its war in Central and South Asia, the sort of strategy that, even if successful, experts claim could easily take a decade or two to pull off. But no problem—not when the Pentagon’s clock is ticking on something like eternal time.

And here’s the thing: because the mainstream media are no less likely to give the Pentagon a blank check than Americans generally, it’s hard indeed to grasp the extent to which that institution, and the military services it represents, are planning and living by their own clock. Though major papers have Pentagon “beats,” they generally tell us remarkably little, except inadvertently and in passing, about Pentagon time.

Take, for example, a January 6, 2010, story from the inside pages of the
New York Times
. Reporter Eric Schmitt began it this way: “The military’s effort to build a seasoned corps of expert officers for the Afghan war, one of the highest priorities of top commanders, is off to a slow start, with too few volunteers and a high-level warning to the armed services to steer better candidates into the program, according to some senior officers and
participants.” At stake was an initiative “championed” by Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal to create a “912-member corps of mostly officers and enlisted service members who will work on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues for up to five years.”

As Schmitt saw it, a program in its infancy was already faltering because it didn’t conform to one of the normal career paths followed in the U.S. military. But what caught my eye was that phrase “up to five years.” Imagine what it means for the war commander, backed by key figures in the Pentagon, to plan to put more than nine hundred soldiers, including top officers, on a career path that would leave them totally wedded, for five years, to war in the Af-Pak theater of operations. (After all, if that war were to end, the State Department might well take charge.) In other words, McChrystal was creating a potentially powerful interest group within the military whose careers would be wedded to an ongoing war with a time line that extended into 2015, and who would have something to lose if it ended too quickly. What does it matter then that President Obama was proclaiming his desire to begin drawing down the war in July 2011?

Or consider the plan being proposed by special forces major Jim Gant, and now getting a most respectful hearing inside the military, according to Ann Scott Tyson of the
Washington Post
. Gant wants to establish small special forces teams that would “go native,” move into Afghan villages and partner up with local tribal leaders, “One Tribe at a Time,” as an influential paper he wrote on the subject was entitled. “The U.S. military,” reported Tyson, “would have to grant the teams the leeway to grow beards and wear local garb, and enough autonomy in the chain of command to make rapid decisions. Most important, to build relationships, the military would have to commit one or two teams to working with the same tribe for three to five years, Gant said.” She added that Gant has “won praise at the highest levels for his effort to radically deepen the U.S. military’s involvement with Afghan tribes—and is being sent back to Afghanistan to do just that.” Again, another “up to five year” commitment in Afghanistan and a career path to go with it on a clock that, in Gant’s case, has yet to start ticking.

Or just to run through a few more examples:

Of course, this just scratches the surface of long-term Afghan War planning in the Pentagon and the military, which rolls right along, seemingly barely related to whatever war debates may be taking place in Washington. Few in or out of that city find these timelines strange, and indeed they are just symptomatic of an organization already planning for “the next war” and the ones after that, not to speak of the next generation bomber of 2018, the integrated U.S. Army battlefield surveillance system of 2025, and the drones of 2047.

This, in short, is Pentagon time, and it’s we who fund that clock that ticks toward eternity. If the Pentagon gets in trouble, fighting a war or otherwise, we bail it out without serious debate or any of the anger we saw in the Massachusetts election. No one marches in the streets, or demands that Pentagon bailouts end, or votes ’em (or at least their supporters) out of office.

In this way, no institution is more deeply embedded in American life or less accountable for its acts. Pentagon time exists enswathed in an almost religious glow of praise and veneration, what might once have been known as “idolatry.” Until the Pentagon is forced into our financial universe, the angry, impatient one where most Americans now live, we’re in trouble. Until candidates begin losing because angry Americans reject our perpetual wars, and the perpetual war planning that goes with them, this sort of thinking will simply continue, no matter who the “commander in chief” is or what he thinks he’s commanding. Americans need to stop saluting and end the Pentagon’s free ride before our wars kill us.

We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost twenty years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for thirty years. Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad. And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded? In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better. In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us. After all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they’ve done best in recent years: cut one another’s throats?

Modesty in Washington? Humility? The ability to draw new lessons from long-term experience? None of the above is evidently appropriate for “the indispensable nation,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called the United States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to “see further into the future.” None of the above is part of the American arsenal, not when Washington’s weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrap heap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go anything but truly,
deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us.

An expanding crew of Washington-based opiners is now calling for the Obama administration to alter its plans, negotiated in the last months of the Bush administration, for the departure of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. They seem to have taken Albright’s belief in American foresight—even prophesy—to heart and so are basing their arguments on their ability to divine the future.

The problem, it seems, is that, whatever may be happening in the present, Iraq’s future prospects are terrifying, which makes leaving, if not inconceivable, then as massively irresponsible (as former
Washington Post
correspondent and bestselling author Tom Ricks wrote in a
New York Times
op-ed) as invading in the first place. Without the U.S. military on hand, we’re told, the Iraqis will almost certainly deep-six democracy, while devolving into major civil violence and ethnic bloodletting, possibly of the sort that convulsed their country in 2005-06 when, by the way, the U.S. military was present in force.

The various partial winners of Iraq’s much delayed March 7, 2010, election would, we were assured beforehand, jockey for power for months trying to cobble together a functioning national government. During that period, violence, it was said, would surely escalate, potentially endangering the marginal gains made thanks to the U.S. military “surge” of 2007. The possibilities remain endless and, according to these doomsayers, none of them are encouraging: Shiite militias could use our withdrawal to stage a violence-filled comeback. Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs is likely to increase and violently so, while al-Qaeda-in-Iraq could move into any post-election power void with its own destructive agenda.

Such predictions are now dribbling out of the world of punditry and into the world of news reporting, where the future threatens to become fact long before it makes it onto the scene. Already it’s reported that the anxious U.S. commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, “citing the prospects for political instability and increased violence,” is talking about “plan B’s” to delay the agreed upon withdrawal of all “combat troops”
from the country this August. He has, Ricks reported on
Foreign Policy
’s website, officially requested that a combat brigade remain in or near the troubled northern city of Kirkuk after the deadline.

As 2009 ended, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was suggesting that new negotiations might extend the U.S. position into the post-2011 years. (“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a train, equip, and advise role beyond the end of 2011.”) Centcom commander General David Petraeus agreed. More recently, Gates added that a “pretty considerable deterioration” in the country’s security situation might lead to a delay in withdrawal plans (and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has agreed that this is a possibility). Vice President Joe Biden is already talking about relabeling “combat troops” not sent home in August because, as he put it in an interview with Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the
New York Times
, “we’re not leaving behind cooks and quartermasters.” The bulk of the troops remaining, he insisted, “will still be guys who can shoot straight and go get bad guys.”

And a chorus of the usual suspects, Washington’s warrior-pundits and “warrior journalists” (as Tom Hayden calls them), have been singing ever-louder versions of a song warning of that greatest of all dangers: premature withdrawal. Ricks, for instance, recommended in the
Times
that, having scuttled the “grandiose original vision” of the Bush invasion, the Obama administration should still “find a way” to keep a “relatively small, tailored force” of thirty thousand to fifty thousand troops in Iraq “for many years to come.” (Those numbers, oddly enough, bring to mind the thirty-four thousand U.S. troops that, according to Ricks in his 2006 best-seller
Fiasco
, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz projected as the future U.S. garrison in Iraq in the weeks before the invasion of 2003.)

Kenneth Pollack, a drumbeater for that invasion, is now wary of removing “the cast”—his metaphor for the U.S. military presence—on the “broken arm” of Iraq too soon, since states that have “undergone a major inter-communal civil war have a terrifying rate of recidivism.” For Kimberly and Frederick Kagan, drumbeaters
extraordinaire
, writing for the
Wall Street Journal
, the United States must start discussing “a long-term military partnership with Iraq beyond 2011,” especially since that country will not be able to defend itself by then.

Why, you might well ask, must we stay in Iraq, given our abysmal record there? Well, say these experts, we are the only force all Iraqis now accept, however grudgingly. We are, according to Pollack, the “peacekeepers…the lev[ee] holding back violence…Iraq’s security blanket, and the broker of political deals…we enforce the rules.” According to Ricks, we are the only “honest brokers” around. According to the Kagans, we were the “guarantor” of the recent elections, and have a kind of “continuing leverage” not available to any other group in that country, “should we choose to use it.”