AMERICAN FUTURE

Retired General Barry McCaffrey has After Action Reports on his recent trips to:

Afghanistan:

http://www.mccaffreyassociates.com/pages/documents/AAR-022607USMA.pdf

Iraq:

http://www.mccaffreyassociates.com/pages/documents/AAR-Iraq032607USMA.pdf

Saudi Arabia:

http://www.mccaffreyassociates.com/pages/documents/AARforUSMA-020507.pdf

Yes, the Democrat’s division of Afghanistan vs. Iraq is notional, not thoughtful; it appeals on a sensate/political level, not in any type of coherent, broadly conceived strategic sense.

I will disagree with Krauthammer here. First, he says that the assumption that “the world’s one superpower, which spends more on defense every year than the rest of the world combined, does not have the capacity to fight an insurgency in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan.” This I believe has been borne by events. Our commanders have in fact said that our armed forces are stretched thin, and our forces are near their breaking point, particularly ground forces like the army, marines and National Guard. Krauthammer makes much on the fact that we spend so much more on defense than the rest of the world, which is true, however, much of that spending has traditionally gone to acquire high end platforms and technology which has ill-served us in fighting an insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have not spent that money on our troops, either in training (as good as it is) on language, cultural and counter-insurgency training, nor on their health care as recent events have borne out (the Walter Reed debacle).
Krauthammer argues that those who want us to focus on Afghanistan as opposed to Iraq make a mistaken assumption, mainly, “that Afghanistan is strategically more important than Iraq.” His thought experiment, however, fails to prove his own assumption here, that Iraq is more important than Afghanistan.
First, in bringing a neutral observer to decide, we would have to provide him with all of the facts. For example, we would have to tell him that it was in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, a place completely disconnected from the world, where al Qaeda not only trained, but planned for the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, it is there (particularly among the Pashtuns) that radical Islam has found many advocates, and the fact that the Pashtuns are the most important ethnic group in the country. To this you would also have to add that these Pashtuns do not recognize the Durand Line which supposedly separates a nuclear armed Pakistan from Afghanistan. This means, that if al Qaeda were to reestablish itself in Afghanistan, with Pashto aid, could potentially destabilize Pakistan, or precipitate an Indo-Pakistani conflict, such as that which they attempted to initiate following the Sept. 11 attacks. Afghanistan is also en entry way into Central Asia’s former Soviet republics, where hundreds of caches of nuclear material are still readily available in the black market and where, due to the nature of the repressive regimes in the region is also ripe for jihad. Add to all of this the fact that Afghanistan is currently the largest producers of opium in the world, bringing it millions of dollars in revenue each year; revenue, which has gone directly to finance its Taliban insurgency.
Moreover, and moving to Iraq, you would also have to tell the Martian that Iraq is almost 60% Shiite, 20% Kurd and 20% Sunni Arab. You would also have to tell him that The Shiites and the Kurds control all of the oil wealth of the country, and that due to their recent history under Saddam Hussein, neither Shiites nor Kurds likes the Sunni Baathists in Iraq. Additionally, you would have to tell this poor Martian, that the Kurds have an effective military organization (the Peshmerga), a working government and great economic prosperity which they have zealously and successfully protected from the violence in the rest of Iraq. In addition, to this, you would also tell the Martian that the Shiite south, has decently sized militias that can protect most of the South (excluding Baghdad and its environs) from Sunni violence and that they have been ruthless in prosecuting their own revenge war against the Sunnis in Iraq. In addition, their economy is growing steadily and closely with Iran (the largest Shiite state in the region, and also a target for Sunni Salafi Jihadists who see it in a worst light than the evil West). In fact, as many strategists have argued, Kurdish Iraq is a success. So is Southern Shiite Iraq (to an extent, except for the fact that it is more closely beholden to Iran than to the US). Our main failure, has been at the intersection of the three ethnic groups, and largely Sunni Iraq, which has no oil wealth or many other natural resources to make it a viable state, and hence one of the main reasons why we are trying to keep any future Iraqi state united. In addition, we would have to mention that unlike a Taliban-al Qaeda controlled Afghanistan; a Sunni Arab Iraq would be surrounded by almost all hostile states. It would have to worry about Hashemite Jordan to its West, Saudi Arabia to its South, Shiite Arab Iraq to its southeast, Kurdish state to its North, a secular ally of Iran in Syria to its northwest, and a belligerent Iran to its east. All of these states fear al Qaeda, as much, if not more than we do, because ultimately, they are the main targets of the organization and their revolution in the region (and all of their governments are seen as evil and apostate).
This is a far more complex question, and not as simple as Krauthammer would like to make it.
He makes much of al Qaeda’s admonition that Iraq is the main battlefront in their war against the West, however, this is a case of selective quoting. For al Qaeda has also said, many times over, that one of their most important strategies in this long war is to bleed the US financially to bankrupt it and in so doing, deny it the ability to continue occupying the Muslim world and allow for the rise of a new power in its midst. The attacks on September 11 bear this out. They were as much symbolic as they were military attacks against us. They attached, out military power (the Pentagon), our political power (the White House or Congress), and our Economic power (the World Trade Center, and the airline industry). Their main purpose was not so much to cause heavy casualties (though it was one of their prime objectives) but also to cripple our economy. For years, they have wanted to fight us on their terms, and in their soil. The Middle East and Afghanistan are such places. However, that does not mean that because they want us fighting there, that we should just walk in blindly into the fight.
Iraq is a state, which as I explained above, and as we all know, is far more complex than simply a Sunni Arab state ready for the taking. In fact, it is largely Shiite (60% of the population), Kurd (roughly 20%), and 20% Sunni Arab and other minorities, with the land divided in a roughly proportional way. The Shiites we know will not allow the Sunni Arabs to take their oil resources, and have been pretty successful, if not brutal in defending themselves against the Iraqi insurgency. As pointed out earlier, so have the Kurds. That means that already, roughly 80% of Iraq along with most if not all of its oil reserves are out of the hands of the Sunni Arabs. In addition to this, however, the insurgency itself is not monolithic. The insurgency is composed by various groups, many of which are former Baathists, and as such more nationalist than religious in their outlook and goals (a fact we have been trying to exploit and use against Al Qaeda in Iraq). This means, that even within the insurgency and the territory in Sunni Iraq, not even 20% of it belongs to AQI.
Krauthammer also makes a lot of the fact that many jihadists are flocking to Iraq; however our own intelligence agencies have placed their number at less than 10% of the overall insurgency. What make their impact disproportionate are their suicide operations. Even these, however, account for far less of the violence than the IEDs and other explosions throughout the country. Apart from this, as many reports have pointed out, what motivates many of these people to go to Iraq is the American occupation of it. This means that many of these people (again, as recent reports have borne out) had not, until Iraq subscribed to the Salafi outlook of al Qaeda. In fact, many more recruits have of late been going to Pakistan’s NWFP and to train with the newly founded al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb with a view to expanding the war to fields other than Iraq and Afghanistan. This they are doing, with a view to repositioning themselves for the next phase of the long war.
Moreover, even our own military has stated time and again that the biggest threat to Iraq and our mission there, is not al Qaeda or even the larger Sunni insurgency but the Shiite militias that until recently had monopolized violence in the country.
What all of this adds up to, is the fact that al Qaeda does not really have as much committed to Iraq as they would like us to believe. They know they can’t take the country because of the Shiites and the Kurds, and that they can only hold on to a small sliver of what’s left to carry out their jihad. In Afghanistan, however, they have a better chance of taking over a larger portion of the country as the Pashtuns are the most important group within the country, and one which has both ethnic and religious ties to their brethren across the border in nuclear armed Pakistan; a group, which refuses to recognize the Durand Line that divides Pashtunistan between the two countries. A group that has many grievances against both the largely Tajik controlled Afghan government, and the largely Punjabi Pakistani state. A Pakistani state which is fighting for its own legitimacy in the face of various insurgencies in its south against the Balochs, the NFWP against the Pashto and other ethnic minorities that feel disenfranchised by the Punjabis. Pakistan is also a state from where we got the AQ Khan network which trafficked in nuclear technology as far away as North Korea, and Lybia, and filled with security forces and scientists sympathetic to the al Qaeda cause, through sympathy for the ousted Taliban militia of Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda has said time and again, that they want to destroy us politically, militarily and economically, with the latter being the weakest target and also the one that would undermine the former two the most. The best way to do this, at least for a military our size is to force us to engage them in as many battlefields as possible. As such, our strategy should be to engage when it is strategically to our advantage to do so. Hence, the experts that argue that Iraq is a distraction from the real war on terror, mean not that Iraq is not important but rather that given the many actors vying for power in the country, it is one conflict were al Qaeda will have the greatest difficulty in coming out on top. In the same manner, because of all the fault lines the conflict trips, we are also left with 160,000 American troops policing up to 4 different conflicts and possibly a few more, wasting blood and money in conflicts that are not directly related to al Qaeda. For example, currently in Iraq we have 1) a Iraqi Sunni v. Iraqi Shiite conflict; 2) a regional Sunni v. Shiite conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran; 3) an al Qaeda v. America conflict; and a possible 4) hardline Shiite v. America conflict (US. v. Iran). Add to this the fact that the Kurds if they choose independence would also enlarge the conflict to include Turkey, Iran, Syria and others and you have far too many conflicts only 1 or 2 of which are directly related to our war against al Qaeda. That means that we are spending blood and treasure inefficiently, because we are getting a lot less for what we are putting in. This is in addition to the fact that world opinion has never been on our side and our allies are abandoning us one by one from Iraq.
This is not the case in Afghanistan, where not only are we directly fighting the Taliban (an al Qaeda ally, and the only group capable of challenging the Afghan government), and Al Qaeda right next door in Pakistan. Here, we also have global support for the reasons mentioned by Krauthammer and a cleared picture of who the enemy is, and what we are getting in return for the blood and treasure we are sacrificing.
Now this does not mean that we should abandon Iraq and forget about it, rather it is about seeking a better strategy and alternatives to the current morass in which we find ourselves. Marc, has argued here for a quarantining of Iraq. Others have done so as well, including Joe Biden who has called for a soft partitioning of the country along sectarian lines. They have done so, by looking at a strategy that contains the worst violence within Iraq, sparing the rest of the region, and to ways in which we can still achieve objectives which are still achievable in the country, while also moving to counter the al Qaeda threat and other emerging threats in the world. If we can have a stable Kurdistan (still under a loosely federal government) and a mostly stable Shiite Iraq, then it is easier to control the Sunni region and move to either push out or contain any AQI threat. At the same time, this would allow us to move to take on the rising Taliban and al Qaeda surge in Afghanistan, North Africa, the Horn while also leaving us space for other threats that may emerge.
You may not agree with me on this, but you must at least concede that unlike what Krauthammer said in his op-ed, a focus on Afghanistan makes strategic sense. After all, the most we will be able to get from Iraq even in the best of circumstances is a government or Shiite region very closely aligned with Persian, and Shiite Iran.

ic, you correct but miss the big prize. The Democrats like the trappings of power, but for many of them, the desire to win elections is much more existential. They have a world-view that describes how they believe the world works, and success by other world-views undermines their very foundations. Part of this view is that they are the reasonable, intelligent people who know how to handle all these complex situations, so putting them back in power – their natural role, they think – is necessary for life to be good in America again.

nykrindc, I have significant agreement with each of your statements but not your conclusion. Krauthammer simplified, and perhaps exaggerated, the relative importance of Iraq and Afghanistan. He migh well have made his essay longer by noting places where Afghanistan did indeed have significance along some lines of projected futures, and Iraq less important and more complicated than he suggests. But none of this would have changed the overall assessment that Iraq is strategically much more important than Afghanistan. It would have added color and some caveats, but naught else.

none of this would have changed the overall assessment that Iraq is strategically much more important than Afghanistan.

I don’t know AVI, it seems that if the Martian had to make a decision, it would not be so easy, and the conclusion that Iraq is much more strategically important than Afghanistan would not be as clear. This, particularly since as I pointed out above, there are many people who have argued that we can contain Iraq in such a way that our strategic interests are taken care of through a quarantine of some sort, whereas we can’t do the same for Afghanistan and Pakistan’s nukes would be just a gunshot or car bomb away from al Qaeda, since once Musharaff is gone there won’t be many that could take his place. That leaves us a destabilized or failed nuclear state in Pakistan, which in addition to Afghanistan and Iraq would push us to the limits of our power to deal with. In Iraq, however, important as it is, we can contain the threat and still get what we want without having 160,000 troops in country as walking targets for a myriad of opponents that have little or nothing to do with al Qaeda. My argument, I guess is not so much that Iraq is not important, it is, but that we can deal with it in a much smarter way that makes way for us to finish what we started in Afghanistan. After all, unless we committ 300,000 plus troops to Iraq, there is likely no way to stabilize it and hold, and build as the president has said. Just look at Tal Afar, we cleared, we held for a period but then we had to rotate our forces and bring in a smaller unit and now we are in the process of loosing it once again. Gen. Petraus and others have voiced concern that we can’t sustain even this minimal surge in Iraq past the summer, what will happen then? I surmise that unless we make tremendous progress within now and August, we will just begin loosing all that we will gain from this surge once again and then we are back to square one, but with even less popular support, and likely a larger crisis in Afghanistan.

Marc,

Also, thanks for the kind words.

The main problem with Afghanistan is that it is high mountain fighting, by and large, especially where the Talibe are hiding out. That is very, very specialized warfare and not amenable to large, flatland forces… so any pullout of Iraq to Afghanistan would require a thorough re-equipping, retraining and acclimatization to the elevations and highland to mountain conditions seen in Afghanistan. Every large force that has gone into Afghanistan has faced the exact same problem of poorly conditioned forces, long logistics trains and constant harassment by small forces. I go over the basics of that ( http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/02/mountain-warfare-and-what-it-takes.html ) and do point out that if Congress were wanting to do this, the effective troop transfer time would be on the order of a year or so. Yes you could do it faster, but without training, equipment and stamina gained at altitude you are asking to quickly dissolve the morale of the troops involved as they find that the skills necessary for low altitude, lowland combat are not the same one required for high altitude combat.

To be effective in Afghanistan you need a cadre of small, effective forces that can understand the terrain and utilize their advantages to the maximum and be self-sufficient for weeks, if need be. Afghanistan, in particular, is notorious for sudden temperature changes for days or weeks, going from near temperate to arctic in the space of hours. Internal combustion engines lose efficiency at altitude and power, helicopters have reduce lifted due to reduced air pressure, wind shear can wipe out fast moving jets by changing trajectories into terrain. The Waffen SS had to use the Alpenkorps in Yugoslavia to protect regular forces, and similar forces in WWI tied up the northern Italian theater. Even Special Forces must train at altitude to gain the stamina and condition their bodies to it. Why anyone would want to be fool enough to try and shift effective lowland forces into Afghanistan seeing the long history of what happens when you do that, is beyond me entirely.

The major ethnic, tribal, religious, educational and ancient civilization faultlines that cross the Middle East all flow directly through Iraq. These faultlines were all going to shift after the Cold War stasis and cause a major re-alignment due to demographic and economic changes, and those, by and large, are all represented in Iraq. This is not a region where you want a regional hegemon, unless you like hearing about repeated genocides, forced migrations and disappearances of towns and villages. And as the Ba’athist regime, both before Saddam and during his reign, factionalized the Nation of Iraq, the lowest reliable unit under the regime was the tribe. Tribal affiliations cross Nation State borders and the stronger adherance to blood over religion or Nation causes familial, tribal and ethnic problems to also migrate over Nation State borders. And with poorly constructed Nations that arose after the bad Peace of WWI, and the immediate carving up of ethnic enclaves so as to distribute them instead of concentrate them, the combination of ethnicity, tribalism, religion, education, economics and ancient cultures all deeply cut through the Nations of the region.

Saddam’s blood drenched reign was disturbing because the ‘Realists’ in the West thought that economic stability was a good thing. Instead it put more pressure on each of those faultlines, causing cross-National problems to shift through already troublesome areas, like the ethnic Kurd and Azeri enclaves, plus the Arabs in Iran. Syria likewise used the blood method and ‘Hama rules’, plus ethnic suppression of the Kurds. Getting some better and more representative government in that region to start addressing these long-term problems is necessary, but not sufficient to address the wide scope of transnational terrorism. The West has, notably, failed in one other region with the exact same level of complexity, but without the natural resources. Another region with high levels of ethnic tension, multiple lines of religion and education, plus old cultural heritage at odds with each other. That is the Balkans. The West has failed there and continues to fail there. That same level of complexity stretches across the entire Middle East with multiple religious factions, political interests, ethnic populations, and tribal associations each slipping in their own way and direction, with religion not being the primary as family and ethnicity outweigh that.

A neutral observer would also need to be informed of all of that.

I would not like to think of what would have happened to Europe if the Balkans had hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into various coffers there, especially after WWI. Strongmen only work for awhile, but leave things worse than when they arrive, only building hatred in their bloody footsteps.

Transnational terrorism cannot be fought, by and large, with 20th century outlook on warfare, economics, and foreign policy as those have all failed and left us with the problems we have. If they had been successful we wouldn’t have the problems now, would we? And until we disabuse ourselves of some of the strange notions we have left over from those failed times and policies, we will be in deadly danger as Nations cannot directly address these problems… there is another way to fight, but that requires looking at our heritage and what is permitted in our system. And recognizing that when the Government fails, the final backstop to freedom and liberty is: We the People. ( http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2006/08/answering-tigerhawk-re-what-will-it.html )

AJacksonian

Even Special Forces must train at altitude to gain the stamina and condition their bodies to it. Why anyone would want to be fool enough to try and shift effective lowland forces into Afghanistan seeing the long history of what happens when you do that, is beyond me entirely.

This is not what I am proposing. I’m not saying that we should move all of our forces to Afghanistan, but rather to redeploy and re-craft our strategy in this long war. In Iraq, we are dealing with so many conflicts, some fueling each other, others not that in order to achieve any aim, we would (particularly the one set out by the President) we would need far more forces to achieve it. With regard to Afghanistan, I merely meant that once we were free of having 140,000 troops in Iraq, we could more readily move to supply and address the Afghan conflict as well as prepare for other trouble spots that will emerge and are already emerging as a result of the Iraq war. Hence, I’m not calling for redeploying 140-160,000 troops to Afghanistan but for crafting a better strategy to deal with it and recognize it as an important front in this GWOT. Rotating most of our troops home, leaving perhaps 50,000 or so in Iraq and its environs, would allow us to rest our army and prepare it for exactly the types of operations you suggest. Currently, our forces (according to most military officers) are stretched thin and nearing their breaking point. That is something we need to address, and soon. Cutting our losses in one campaign while preparing and addressing the problems in the other is one way to begin addressing this larger problem. I think one of the problems with Iraq is that many people still view it as a war, when it should be viewed as a campaign.

I was commenting with another blogger at TPM cafe and he said this, which I think provides a great way in which to view this whole affair. He said this “Iraq is not a war. It is a campaign, within a theater of operations, within the National Security Strategy of the United States.” So long as we remember that, we should also remember that defeats in one campaign are acceptable, so long as we tailor our strategy to compensate for and emerge victorious from others. That is, we have to choose our battles, particularly with an enemy that is trying to stretch us financially, politically and militarily. Iraq, with all its fault lines is not a place to make a final stand, there are too many conflicts, some of which we do not need to be a part of, and which can be contained through a better strategic appraisal of the situation. Our military does not believe it can maintain this minimal surge in Iraq longer than this summer and also that they cannot sustain the level of work we have asked of them without loosing unit cohesion and readiness, hence we need to find a way to address this problems by not only increasing our military’s size, but also by reducing their commitments. We do this, by looking at where we are getting suboptimal results and where we can get more for the blood and money we are spending. This with a view to defeating the enemy that confronts us in the long war, and not solely within one campaign of that war. After all, we could win Iraq, but loose everywhere else, just as we can loose Iraq and still win the GWOT.

Agreed Michael, however, in Iraq we would only loose 20% of the population and territory while leaving 80% under viable stable states (Shiite south, Kurdish north), both of which would also be enemies of the al Qaeda inspired jihad in the form of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Even within that 20% of population/land there would be many who would oppose the al Qaeda threat, and would fight actively against it, so it would not so much be a question of our defeat as a containment of the enemy, leading to its ultimate defeat.

Also, think of Washington, who lost almost every engagement with the Brits and yet still managed to defeat them in the broader war for independence.

The British experience is also instructive here. At the time, they were involved not only in fighting the American war of independence, but also other insurgencies throughout the empire, inspired, financed and encouraged by other great powers trying to undermine British power. Ultimately, the Brits lost the American colonies, but retained their empire and defeated the revisionist great powers, securing its dominion for just a little over 100 additional years.