The dust may have settled relatively quickly, following The McChrystal Affair, but that is not to say that the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) is necessarily back on the tracks in Afghanistan.  General Petraeus’ confirmation hearing didn’t disappoint (or surprise).  Early on, Sen. Carl Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, tipped his hand to one and all by making the point that it was not a question of “if” but “when” the Gen. would be confirmed, a point reiterated by several inquisitors to follow.  The general atmosphere of the hearing was collegially good-natured and congratulatory; there were even a few poignant eulogies for “Stan the Man” McChrystal proving that a general can make a total ass of himself while utterly failing at his objectives and still reap kudos from Congress.  In short, there was nothing in the proceedings to give a new commander the vapors . . .

So . . . that was nice of the Senators to make the General (and his wife Holly, over whose patriotism and sacrifice quite a fuss was made) feel right at home.  Democrats played their part by serving up a few (fast-pitch) softball questions for which the General was well-prepared despite the fact that he could have said “the Earth is flat and I’m a huge fan of Hannibal Lecter” without fear of derailing his foregone confirmation.  Gen. Petraeus was definitely “on-message” just the way the White House likes it . . .

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not, for a second, against confirming Petraeus and handing him a one-way ticket to Kandahar; he started this mess, he should have to own it.  One almost has to feel a little sorry for the guy – he’s just coming off that near-career-death experience in Iraq, and was happily settling into CENTCOM headquarters in sunny Florida and — WHAM! déjà vu all over again.   Petraeus knows damn well that COIN didn’t work in Iraq, and certainly won’t in Afghanistan, but last summer he stood there in the Oval Office, before God and Obama, and swore not only that it would work but that it would work in 18 months.  When pressed, he also promised the President that he would not return, after the aforesaid 18 months had elapsed, hat in hand, and ask for more time/troops/money.  Six months later, however, he was only willing to part with a “qualified yes” when asked if he still supported that earlier mission statement.

A few days ago, Fred Branfman wrote a very incisive post published on Huffington Post (that is short, to the point and well worth reading) pointing out that The McChrystal Affair is just as much an indictment of Petraeus (and Obama, I might add) as McChrystal:

“Petraeus is by his own testimony a close personal friend of his protégé, and he was primarily responsible for McChrystal having been appointed to head U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that he did not know how McChrystal felt about his civilian team members, or was unaware of their inability to work together. If the McChrystal cohort talked this way in front of a reporter, can you imagine how good buds Dave and Stan talk about a Holbrooke, Biden or Obama over a cold one with no one else around?”

“Petraeus’ failure to act before the scandal occurred means he failed as CentCom commander. One of his major responsibilities was obviously to assemble and deploy a smoothly functioning team to conduct military and political warfare in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater — one of the most sensitive arenas in which the U.S. has operated since the end of World War II.”

“Petraeus’ failure is matched, of course, by that of Obama and his top advisers. Neither Petraeus nor Obama should have needed a magazine profile in order to reorganize a team that was clearly broken.”

Branfman certainly managed to make me sit up straight for my first “Duh” moment of the day.  The elegance of Branfman’s point is that it should be pretty apparent to a large cross-section of Americans to include: parents, teachers, and everyone who’s ever served in a military or civilian government post, read Catch-22, or attended any sort of corporate culture workshop.  The McChrystal Affair did not occur in a vacuum, despite its colorful links to Nordic volcanic eruptions and/or Parisian layover beer benders.  And who among us can deny the homespun wisdom informing the well-known American truism about gravitational effects on excrement? No matter how sophisticated we become, and no matter how many stars some of us have pinned to our camos, the sh*t comes from somewhere and it ain’t from downhill.

Just like Davy Crockett probably didn’t kill any “b’ar when he was only three” neither did Davy Petraeus waltz into Baghdad, set the gears of COIN in motion and save the day – but he’s stuck with the legend now because the Bush Administration badly needed something resembling a military victory that would make all of its war crimes somehow worthwhile (and forgettable) – think “ends” justifying “means.”

* * *

Inside the Beltway Visionary: 2005

Back in 2003, no one would have considered COIN a sensible strategy option for Iraq.  It was to be a quick, straightforward invasion with regime change – a snap.  The Bush/Cheney White House game plan for Iraq was to convince the recently terrorized world that 9/11 was only the beginning and that Saddam Hussein was sitting on vast stockpiles of wickedly diabolical WMDs with which he intended to turn The Free World into a wasteland.  Besides, the people of Iraq didn’t seem to like Hussein all that much so they probably wouldn’t mind awfully if US SpecOps removed him from power.  As a matter of fact, at one point early on, the Administration shared its Norman Rockwellian hallucination of how the invasion would be received in Baghdad.  I remember that it was somewhat creepily reminiscent of VE Day in Paris, complete with showers of flower petals, and grateful Iraqis throwing kisses from balconies at their GI liberators rolling through Baghdad in Humvees.

Nobody would need to waste any time going through the motions of hunting for WMDs, either (everyone already knew they weren’t there); we could cut right to the chase and get down to OIL!  A prescient Dick Cheney had already procured aerial mappings of Iraq’s oil fields to share his vision for the future of Iraqi Oil with his Top Secret Energy Commission.  A key (and perhaps fatal) assumption was that once Hussein was removed and a “clean slate” was provided, the Iraqis (no dummies) would want to immediately set up a Western democracy with free advice and lots of US taxpayer dollars to make the right things happen.

Imagine the Administration’s surprise when things didn’t quite work out that way.  The Iraqis were inexplicably fond of the notion of setting up their own government, in their own way, starting with settling old scores and launching aggressive ethnic cleansing campaigns.  The New Iraq was definitely not shaping up to be the gratefully subservient proxy government that Bush/Cheney had dreamed of.

Now, if at the time, you were a historian rather than a tank-thinker, you might have fretted that a combination of recent events in Iraq – outside intervention, the precipitate creation of a power vacuum, a history of centuries of regional and sectarian conflict — might make Iraq ripe for a civil war.  And, of course, your fretting would have been justified because that’s exactly what happened and, in short order millions of Iraqi citizens were murdered or maimed, forced to emigrate, internally displaced or imprisoned without charge and tortured.  Very few are strewing rose petals or throwing kisses . . .

Enter Gen. Petraeus director and producer of a new-fangled type of warfare designed for just such tricky situations.  It’s called Counterinsurgency (shortened to COIN for busy, or secretive people) and it’s actually a revival of an old strategy that’s never quite worked out well for military types since time began.  COIN has featured prominently in well-known military disasters from Alexander the Great to  Vietnam; it seems to be one of those perennially appealing, sounds-good-on-paper ideas that successive generations believe they might somehow pull off despite where others have failed.  COIN has the added attraction of presenting well to post-Enlightenment audiences; in theory it is a “kinder, gentler war” that is less about murder and more about fulfilling foreign cultures’ desperate craving to be Americanized.

Dateline Baghdad, 7/4/2006: Winning hearts and minds . . .

COIN, as it has been reincarnated most recently, is warfare for busybodies – hubristic people who like to intervene in world affairs that are none of their business, for fun and profit.   In its purest form, counterinsurgency theory is a polar opposite of what the Pentagon is selling these days.  Counterinsurgency, as its very name suggests is all about internal domestic affairs; if a government perceives a serious threat from some segment of its own citizens, said government might choose to launch a counterinsurgency to isolate and marginalize the insurgent group, thus encouraging them to return to the herd peacefully. 

Even in the Pentagon remake, COIN theory depends on the existence of a relatively stable central government and infrastructure that can effectively be shown to offer the general population more in the way of security, stability and services than the insurgent group attempting to overthrow the government.  Thus, the general population becomes the government’s ally in effectively marginalizing and finally defeating insurgency. 

So where, exactly, was the insurgency in Iraq that Gen. Petraeus is said to have so remarkably countered via COIN strategy?  If the Iraqi people, themselves, had launched an offensive to remove Saddam Hussein from power, I suppose that faction might reasonably have been described as an insurgency. But that didn’t happen.  If the Iraqi people take up arms while they are under attack or being occupied by a foreign military, that action is best described as “resistance” against invasion — a defensive, rather than an offensive, action.  During the post-invasion chaos we have some people engaging in a sectarian civil war and some people resisting foreign occupation and lots of people being killed, injured or displaced but no real insurgency.  One might conceivably label as insurgents a sliver of the population who seize the moment to push their own agenda as long as chaos reigns, but that would be semantically incorrect and hardly worth billions of dollars and thousands of lives to quash.

Still, there’s no denying the fact that once General Petraeus arrived on the scene a seriously out of control Iraq calmed down considerably shortly thereafter.  Many observers, including (you can be sure) Gen. Petraeus, know that there was far more going on in Iraq, at the time, than a changing of the guard for the invasionary forces. 

Before the famous “surge” was even announced the original US commanders in Iraq, George Casey and John Abizaid (remember them?) had realized some success by assassinating al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which they then followed up with an ingenious scheme to pay off Sunni militants to join the Anbar “Awakening.”

Meanwhile, the US military on the ground responded to the increasingly violent sectarian civil war taking place in the streets by relocating Sunnis and Shiites into separate neighborhoods making it more difficult for them to kill each other but, at the same time effectively aiding ethnic cleansing via segregation.  Shortsighted and misguided as those tactics were, they eventually had a noticeable dampening effect on domestic violence.

Inexplicably, in the midst of all of this chaos, Muqtada al-Sadr unexpectedly ordered his radical Shiite Mahdi Army to stand down, probably at the request of an edgy Iran with problems of its own.

It was only then, that President Bush announced a surge of troops under a fresh commander with a new approach.  As soon as those troops started to surge there was, predictably, a spike in violence that resulted in 1,000 additional troops deaths (25% of the war’s total).  But eventually, the levels of violence decreased again due in large part to Iraqi exhaustion, the physical devastation of war and what amounted to an Iraqi diaspora that separated sectarian groups – not COIN strategy.

Ironically, President Bush might have been more instrumental in solidifying Iraqi peace than Gen. Petraeus, by virtue of the Status of Forces Agreement that he revised in 2008.  That SOFA, as it is known, was the US promise, among other things, of a speedy withdrawal of its forces from Iraq starting with the US military presence in Iraqi cities, with an End of Combat provision to be completed by 2011.  Perhaps the SOFA might not have had the same impact had it not been for the bloody surge but, as it happened, nothing gave the Iraqi people more hope or resolve for the future than the announcement that all US troops were getting out of their country soon; and the sometimes tense and relapsing peace has held up fairly well for two years as the multi-national force draws down.

Sometimes the stars just line up right and if you’ve had a long run of bad luck, and you’re politically astute – you’ll take it (and take credit it for it).  That’s the story that the neocons, generals and think tanks are putting out (and sticking to) and the mainstream media has run with it so effectively that the Petraeus Legend is already writ large in the annals of US military history.

If only it could have ended there but, in a world of simultaneous wars, the general has “lived to fight another day” and has been called on, by a grateful nation, to “work his particular magic” one more time.  Would that the poor man could but, barring some extraordinary realignment of his stars, I’d expect that Gen. Petraeus is due to fall on his sword in the not-too-distant future and see COIN theory consigned to its well-deserved place in the Museum of Spectacularly Awful and Costly Ideas.

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