Just imagine a similar news item coming out of another country.
Hot off the wires from Tehran: Iranian special forces teams are scouring the planet for old American Chinook helicopters so they can be well “cloaked” in planned future forays into Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.
That might be a little hard to imagine right now, but I guarantee you one thing: had some foreign news source reported such a plan, or had Craig Whitlock somehow uncovered it and included it in a piece—no matter how obscurely nestled—there would have been pandemonium in Washington. Congress would have held hearings. Pundits would have opined on the infamy of Iranian operatives masking themselves in our choppers. The company or companies that sold the helicopters would have been investigated. And you can imagine what Fox News commentators would have had to say.
When we do such things, however, and a country like Pakistan reacts with what’s usually described as “anti-Americanism,” we wonder at the nationalistic hair-trigger they’re on. We comment on their over-emotionalism, we highlight their touchy “sensibilities,” and our reporters and pundits then write empathetically about the difficulties American military and civilian officials have dealing with such edgy natives. In July 2010, for instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were expanding their role in the Pakistani tribal borderlands by more regularly “venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops.” The Pakistani government has not been eager to have American boots visibly on the ground in these areas, and so Journal reporter Julian Barnes wrote, “Because of Pakistan’s sensitivities, the U.S. role has developed slowly.”
Imagine how sensitive they might prove to be if those same forces began to land Russian helicopters in Pakistan as a way to “cloak” their operations and blend in? Or just what sort of hair-trigger the natives of Montana might be on if Pakistani special operations types were roaming Glacier National Park and landing old American helicopters outside Butte. Then consider the sensitivities of Pakistanis on learning that the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service turned out to be a man of “impeccable credentials” (so said then-CIA director Leon Panetta). Among those credentials were his stint as the CIA station chief in Pakistan until sometime in 2009, his involvement in the exceedingly unpopular drone war in that country’s tribal borderlands, and the way, as Panetta put it a tad vaguely, he “guided complex operations under some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.”
Here’s the truth of the matter, as Whitlock’s piece makes clear: we carry on in the most bizarre ways in far-off lands and think nothing of it. Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm. For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers. If we can’t imagine the surpassing strangeness of our arrangements for making war in lands thousands of miles from the United States, then we can’t begin to imagine how the world sees us, which means that we’re blind to our own madness.
Forever War
Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On September 27, 2010, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s latest book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the commander in chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting called to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it—Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that was meant to represent the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they moved toward a theoretical goal of 400,000—an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success was a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.
The eye-catching detail, however, was the date on the chart. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below the 68,000 level. In other words, two to five years from that September, if all went as planned—a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far—the United States might be back to the force levels of early 2009, before the president’s second surge was launched.
And when would those troops dwindle to near zero? 2019? 2025? The chart makers were far too politic to include anything beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing what they were thinking. But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, was dreaming of and most forcefully recommending to the president a forever war, one which the Office of Management and Budget estimated would cost almost $900 billion?
Of course, as we now know, the military “lost” this battle. Instead of the 40,000 troops they desired, they “only” got 30,000 from a frustrated president, plus a few thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and don’t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a price, couldn’t say no—all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the 10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders.
When, on December 1, 2009, Barack Obama addressed the cadets of West Point and, through them, the rest of us to announce the second Afghan surge of his presidency, he was at least able to slip in a date to begin the drawdown of U.S. forces. (“But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”) Hardly a nanosecond passed before—first “on background” and soon enough in public—administration spokespeople rushed to reassure the rest of Washington that such a transfer would be “conditions based.” Given conditions there since 2001, not exactly a reassuring statement.
More, Never Less
Let’s keep two things in mind here: just how narrow the options the president considered were, and just how large the surge he reluctantly launched was. By the end of fall 2009, it was common knowledge in Washington that the administration’s fiercely debated Afghan War “review” never considered a “less” option, only ones involving “more.” Thanks to Woodward, we can put definitive numbers to those options. The least of the “more” options was Vice President Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy, focused on more trainers for the Afghan military and police plus more drone attacks and Special Forces operations. It involved a surge of 20,000 U.S. troops. According to Woodward, the military commanders, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the secretary of defense more or less instantly ruled this out.