Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [92]
MISSING THE OFF-RAMP
How to save Afghanistan now displaced all other issues atop the U.S. national security agenda. Whether or not Afghans wished to be saved and how exactly they viewed salvation were matters that attracted scant attention. Virtually all of Washington agreed on two points: With Iraq now largely forgotten, Afghanistan posed an urgent problem, and it was incumbent upon the United States to fix that problem forthwith.
In at least a nominal sense, the final decision on how to proceed was left to the commander in chief. Yet even though the president’s national security team went through the motions of presenting him with a range of choices, the options actually on offer amounted to variations on a single theme. All involved extending and deepening U.S. military involvement in an eight-year-old conflict that the previous administration had treated as a stepchild. One option, of course, remained conspicuously “off the table”: getting out.
The weeks between the McChrystal report leak and a presidential speech at West Point in which he announced his decision provided an extraordinary demonstration of how Washington both rules and enforces its rules. Through the fall of 2009, the world waited for the “most powerful man in the world” to reveal how he intended to proceed in Afghanistan. Obama’s critics chided him for “dithering.” His supporters commended his careful deliberation. Parties on all sides agreed that whichever way the president came down, the implications were sure to be momentous.
In fact, however, even as Obama pondered the question of whether to send ten thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand or forty thousand additional reinforcements to Afghanistan, the actual ability to exercise choice had already passed from his hands. In essence, the president found himself in the position of a man shopping for a new suit who is told that he can pick any color so long as it’s some shade of khaki.
The issues that should properly have claimed presidential attention in light of the failure of President Bush’s Freedom Agenda—evaluating the Long War’s purpose and prospects while identifying the principles that could form the basis for a realistic response to violent jihadism (and then applying those principles to Afghanistan)—never seemingly made it to his desk. The issue actually allotted to the president, selecting the right approach to pacifying Afghanistan, was the one he was least qualified to make. It was as if Franklin Roosevelt had spent World War II planning amphibious invasions, while assuming that the formulation of overall strategy would take care of itself.
On December 1, just days before traveling to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama announced that he was ordering an additional thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan. (By the next day, that number had risen to thirty-three thousand; with seven thousand in additional NATO reinforcements promised, McChrystal got his forty thousand exactly.) By escalating the U.S. military commitment there the president in effect ratified the Long War. In doing so, he made it all but certain that Obama’s War would become a central theme of his presidency. Whatever the talk of “off-ramps” and “exit strategies,” the president had effectively forfeited his opportunity to undertake a serious reassessment of the basic approach to national security formulated over the course of the preceding six decades.
Obama would not challenge the tradition that Curtis LeMay and Allen Dulles had done so much to erect. In the counsels of government, the views and voices of the semiwarriors would continue to command respect—indeed, the heirs of McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara applauded Obama’s determination to see things through in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the warriors themselves—Generals Petraeus and McChrystal taking the place of generals like Maxwell Taylor—provided the rationale for why fixing Helmand Province should take precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit. As it had with the lessons of Vietnam, Washington now successfully absorbed