Gatesgate: Why Obama was right to Distrust his Generals on Afghanistan

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/01/gatesgate-generals-afghanistan.html

Gatesgate: Why Obama was right to Distrust his Generals on Afghanistan
By Juan Cole | Jan. 9, 2014

Among the charges in former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s memoirs against Barack Obama is that the latter did not trust his generals, did not adopt the Afghanistan War as his own, and was skeptical of the Pentagon plan for a troop escalation and a big counter-insurgency push.

It is now forgotten that Obama came into office in January of 2009 undecided about what course to pursue in Afghanistan. He had opposed the Iraq War and was clearly intent on getting out of that country (which was just as well since there was no prospect that an American troop presence would ever have resulted in social peace there). But on Afghanistan, Obama had more of an open mind. He wanted to destroy al-Qaeda, and putting resources into that fight might require a base of operations in Afghanistan.

According to Bob Woodward, Obama asked the Pentagon for three possible plans — a minimalist one, a medium one and a maximal one.

~snip~

Gen. David Petraeus and others in the Pentagon, as well as Bob Gates himself, did not present Obama with the three plans. Months went by. It got to be October of 2009, and Washington began carping that the new president had no Afghanistan policy. The Pentagon in the end only gave Obama one plan, a plan for a troop escalation of 40,000 and an open-ended big war that would serve as a social engineering laboratory for David Petraeus’s theories of counter-insurgency. Petraeus, like T. E. Lawrence before him, came to believe that he was far more central to the story than he was. The Iraq “surge” of 2007 involved disarming Sunni guerrilla groups first, allowing the Shiites to ethnically cleanse them in Baghdad. The monthly death toll started coming down because the civil war in mixed neighborhoods couldn’t be pursued when the neighborhoods weren’t mixed any more. Petraeus saw the sole explanation of the falling death toll rather as the impact of his counter-insurgency principles.

[liberal N proud]

1. K&R

[bemildred]

2. Yep.

Basically, the COIN afficianadoes wanted to permanently colonize the place militarily (at great cost) so that the Taliban couldn't be there instead. And that's supposed to be military genius. This is why we have civilian rule over the military.

[libodem]

3. K&R

[yurbud]

4. If he really wanted to cripple "al Qaeda," he could simply block Saudi from funding them

if they have no money, the only terrorist attacks they could carry out would be throwing goat shit at our planes flying overhead.