Armed Humanitarians (46 page)

This approach had its successes. This notion of a better war probably saved the United States from outright defeat, and helped contain Iraq's sectarian violence. But the dominant reading of the Iraq surge—that we somehow managed to “get it right” by applying enough resources and ingenuity to the problem—not only overlooks the larger question of whether we should have intervened in the first place, but also raises the question of whether we could be successful in the long term. This relentless focus on fixing two failed states also meant we were less prepared to handle another foreign policy crisis elsewhere on the globe: an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula, a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, a localized conflict in Central Asia that threatens to become a regional conflagration.

That was the fatal flaw in the whole enterprise. The nation-building missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were too big to fail. Both involvements became so large and so costly that they edged out all other priorities in national security. The cost of keeping a large troop contingent in Afghanistan was the perfect case in point: The mountainous, landlocked country is at the end of a long and difficult supply route. It has no ports, abysmal infrastructure, and difficult neighbors. Factoring in the astronomical cost of transporting fuel, it currently costs around a million dollars a year to keep a single U.S. soldier stationed there.
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And that number doesn't include the intangibles: U.S. officials expend countless hours negotiating complex overflight and supply deals with countries in the region to keep the hellishly complex supply lines open, sometimes cutting deals with very unsavory regimes. Yet they have to persist, because U.S. lives are at stake and because the commitment is so enormous.

This approach shares another flaw with many other imperial adventures: a sort of hubris, a belief we can remake the world in our image. This was the operating assumption behind “shock and awe,” the idea that regime change in Baghdad or Kabul would automatically create functioning democracies friendly to U.S. interests and inhospitable to global terrorists. Nation building is based on a similarly utopian idea: that development work and poverty alleviation in combination with military action can get at the underlying causes of political violence.

The nation builders were some of the best and the brightest: smart, soul-searching people who sought answers to why the United States was failing so miserably to secure the peace in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama administration was packed with true believers in this cause. The Center for a New American Security, the think tank that emerged as a feeder for the new administration's national security team, was the intellectual home to a military reform movement that fully embraced the idea of using military force not just to defeat armies but also to transform societies.

That belief in the power of nation building ignores many of the broader lessons of the postcolonial era. Advocates of counterinsurgency point to many historical precedents for military success: the British campaigns in Kenya or in Malaya; the French victory over the Algerian National Liberation Front in the Battle of Algiers; the U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the early 1970s. But they often overlook the end result, the withdrawal of foreign forces and the establishment of independent states. And proponents of this idea often skirt around what should be the fundamental question:
when
to intervene, not
how
to intervene. If the United States props up a government that is illegitimate, kleptocratic or unwilling to reform, then no amount of U.S. blood or treasure can save the situation.

After nine years of war in Afghanistan, the United States is only belatedly coming to this realization. In July 2010, after replacing General Stanley McChrystal as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus issued new guidance to his troops that underscored how much of a problem corruption had become in Afghanistan. “Money is ammunition; don't put it in the wrong hands,” the guidance states. “Pay close attention to the impact of your spending and understand who benefits from it. And remember, you are who you fund. How you spend is often more important than how much you spend.”
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Coming from the man who was an enthusiastic early convert to using cash as a weapon in Iraq, it was a remarkable admission that U.S. military assistance can, inadvertently, help fund an insurgency.

The manpower-intensive approach of the nation builders also shows how throwing more resources at the problem can undermine our long-term goals. The successful campaign to unseat the Taliban in 2001 was led by a relatively small force of Special Operations troops and CIA operatives whose low-key operating style and almost invisible presence ensured there would be little friction with ordinary Afghans. But even before the Obama administration announced a surge of forces to Afghanistan in late 2009, the mission there had quietly and steadily expanded. When the military establishes an airfield, it requires a “force protection” element to protect it and contractors to sustain it. That in turn requires a larger logistics tail to support all those boots on the ground. As the base grows, it requires more convoys to keep the place supplied. Dangerous supply lines must be avoided, which means more aircraft are needed to ferry people and equipment around. Before you know it, you are expanding the airfield. The military has a marvelous phrase used to describe this phenomenon: the “self-licking ice cream cone,” something that exists to serve itself.

The greater the military presence, the more potential for deadly encounters between the military and the population they are supposed to protect. Today, the presence of U.S. military convoys on the roads is a constant source of tension in Afghanistan. Even Kabul, once a hospitable base for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, has seen a backlash against foreign troops. A deadly July 2010 traffic incident involving State Department contractors led to violent street protests not far from the U.S. embassy in Kabul; every accidental shooting at a checkpoint or misdirected air strike further inflames the population and gives insurgents more fodder for propaganda. Supersizing our commitment only serves to undermine the mission in the long run.

And there's the question about whether we really even understand the long-term mission. A rich literature exists about the European colonial experience, but Americans seem to lack the same gift for self-scrutiny. In his 1936 autobiographical short story, “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell described his moment of awakening when he was serving as an imperial policeman in Burma. Standing in front of the elephant, rifle in hand, he realized the hollowness and futility of the European presence and of his role as an enforcer of colonial law. The colonial policeman seems to be the lead actor in the scene, but it's all charade, an illusion of mastery and control. Larger local forces are at work.

Compared with the characters of Orwell's Burmese days, we make pretty poor imperialists. As a nation, we're relatively incurious about other cultures, terrible at acquiring foreign languages, and generally focused on our own shrill domestic politics. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it leaves us poorly equipped for this kind of work.

Not for lack of trying. The embrace of cultural knowledge, the investment in development projects, and the experiments in fusing civilian and military functions were all worthwhile experiments. But at their core, they were a way to attack a single problem: the twenty-first-century insurgent armed with the improvised explosive device. To begin tackling that threat, the military needed to understand the communities the insurgents operated in, win friends among the local population, and make sure that development funds were spent wisely. Insurgent violence, however, is a symptom of underlying political conflict. All too often, we ignored the politics driving the insurgencies.

In Iraq, we unseated a regime that had favored the Sunni Arab minority. By upending the established political order, we helped kick off a latent sectarian conflict. In Afghanistan, the Kabul government's conflict with the largely Pashtun Taliban drew us into a regional power struggle. Rather than aiming for a realistic end-state, our ambitions of creating functioning democracies and refashioning tribal societies meant we doubled down in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And the more resources the U.S. government threw at the client state (or to use today's euphemism, a “host nation”), the more it created the potential for waste and the growth of kleptocracy. It created a corrosive aid dependency that in the long run can undermine the legitimacy of the government the United States was trying to prop up.

Afghanistan is the textbook example of a country that has become a charity case. For fiscal year 2010, Congress appropriated $6.6 billion for the Afghan Security Forces Fund—money to train, equip, and sustain the operations of the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police and other security agencies. Afghanistan's total annual budget revenue, according to the
CIA World Factbook
, is $890 million. Not surprisingly, Afghan President Hamid Karzai admitted in December 2009 that Afghanistan did not expect to be able to sustain its own security forces for another fifteen to twenty years. Not being able to sustain its own forces means the Afghan government may in a few short years be faced with a large pool of unemployed men with guns. And all the money we pour into training and advising those men could have unintended—and possibly quite violent—consequences.

Despite those flaws, the armed humanitarians were motivated by a desire to do the right thing. Rebuilding Iraq, for instance, was better than invading and walking away. But while acknowledging the flaws, it's absolutely essential that we do not discard lessons acquired at such extraordinary cost in blood and treasure. We need to be able to do these kinds of things but do them intelligently, and well. And in the coming years, we may also have to do them on a much more modest scale. Scaling back may actually improve outcomes.

In July 1972, Colonel Edward Chamberlain, the senior advisor for the Forty-fourth Special Tactical Zone, Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, wrote a confidential debriefing report. The conventional U.S. involvement in South Vietnam was winding down, and U.S. combat troops were being withdrawn. Chamberlain sketched out some of the main lessons he had drawn from the advisory mission. His advice was prescient:

In any future involvements, we must never allow ourselves to become so emotionally involved that we lose our freedom of action. In short, we must be able to quickly extricate ourselves the minute it becomes apparent that the government we are assisting either cannot or will not institute the reforms or actions we deem essential to success. This is of course a political decision but the Army has an important role to play by insuring that we do not oversubscribe ourselves by requesting too much manpower or material for our client … This is the hardest thing of all to practice, because caught up in the enthusiasm and challenges posed by such a conflict, most Army officers at every level are going to be aggressive and determined to succeed regardless of cost. Therefore, any officer or commander who advocates less than an all-out effort is quickly going to be in trouble with his peers, his bosses, and his subordinates, unless we make it perfectly clear from the outset that involvement is limited and will stay limited regardless of success or failure. Easy to say, virtually impossible to practice. Yet somehow we must. There will be another Vietnam whether we like it or not, and the factors which insured our involvement here, even though currently disputed, will arise again and continue to arise so long as we are a global power.

Less is more in nation building, Chamberlain is saying. Involvements must be limited, because the more resources you throw at the problem, the less likely the nation you are assisting will ever be self-sufficient. If a government relies completely on outside assistance, it will be incapable of defending itself when the United States eventually turns off the money taps.

In the future, modest commitments may be the only available course of action. Diminishing budgets, rising deficits, and economic pressure may force a much-needed correction, and compel policymakers to try to do more with less resources. There will be new Afghanistans, and new Iraqs. But committing fifty billion dollars and one hundred thousand troops to rebuilding another country seems unthinkable. In Haiti, after the earthquake in January 2010, the U.S. military staged a rapid and astonishing drawdown, avoiding the temptations of “mission creep.” At the beginning of February 2010, around twenty thousand U.S. troops were on the ground or in the waters just off Haiti. By June 1, 2010, that presence had been reduced to a liaison office of about eight uniformed personnel. That was an example of getting it right. The U.S. military was the only organization that was equipped to respond to a disaster of that scale. But it didn't end up owning the problem. Rebuilding Haiti would be a task for the international community, aid agencies, the private sector, and Haitians themselves.

That less-is-more approach is key to restoring balance within the military. Critics of the “cult of counterinsurgency” have pointed out that a focus on nation building neglects the basics of defense, by creating a military primarily trained and equipped to staff occupations, not fight and win wars. The United States needs a Navy that maintains a global presence to protect trade, commerce, and shipping; an Air Force that protects U.S. airspace and can project power anywhere in the world; an Army and Marine Corps that can win decisively on land; and real alliances—not “coalitions of the billing”—to join the United States in future contingencies. One can look to the Israeli experience in Lebanon in its 2006 war against Hezbollah for a lesson in the dangers of neglecting conventional military might. After years of constabulary duty in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli military's conventional warfighting skills were rusty, and Israeli military planners were not prepared for high-intensity conflict against an adversary armed with some of the latest anti-armor weapons.