In early 2010, then-commander McChrystal had significantly cut back on U.S. air strikes as a COIN-ish measure meant to lessen civilian casualties. In a striking reversal, air power was called in massively. In October 2010, U.S. planes launched missiles or bombs on a thousand separate Afghan missions, numbers seldom seen since the 2001 invasion. The army similarly loosed its massively powerful High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in the area around the southern city of Kandahar. Civilian deaths rose rapidly. Dreaded special operations night raids on Afghan homes by “capture/kill” teams tripled. With them, the body count also arrived. American officials eagerly began boasting to reporters about their efficiency in taking out midlevel Taliban leaders (“368 insurgent leaders killed or captured, and 968 lower-level insurgents killed and 2,477 captured, according to NATO statistics”).
In the districts around Kandahar, a reported American tactic was simply to raze individual houses or even whole villages believed to be booby-trapped by the Taliban, as well as tree lines “where insurgents could hide.” American troops were “blow[ing] up outbuildings, flatten[ing] agricultural walls, and carv[ing] new ‘military roads,’ because existing ones are so heavily mined… right through farms and compounds.” The marines, reported Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, were also sending the first contingent of M1 Abrams tanks (with a “main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away”) into the south. Such tanks, previously held back for fear of reminding Afghans of their Russian occupiers, were, according to an unnamed U.S. officer he quotes, bringing “awe, shock, and firepower” to the south. None of this had anything to do with winning hearts and minds, just obliterating them. Not surprisingly, such tactics also generated villagers fleeing embattled farmlands, often for “squalid” refugee camps in overcrowded cities.
Flip of the COIN
Suddenly, this war for which General Petraeus had won his counterinsurgency warriors at least a four- to six-year extension was being fought as if there were no tomorrow. Here, for instance, is a brief description from a Guardian reporter in Kandahar of the night war from a distance: “After the sun sets, the air becomes noisy with jets dropping bombs that bleach the dark out of the sky in their sudden eruptions; with the ripping sound of the miniguns of the Kiowa helicopter gunships and A-10 Warthogs hunting in the nearby desert. The night is also lit up by brilliant flares that fall as slow as floating snowflakes, a visible sign of the commando raids into the villages beyond. It is a conflict heard, but not often witnessed.”
None of this qualifies as counterinsurgency, at least as described by the general and his followers. It does, however, resemble where counterinsurgencies have usually headed—directly into the charnel house of history.
Chandrasekaran quoted a civilian adviser to the NATO command in Kabul this way: “Because Petraeus is the author of the COIN [counterinsurgency] manual, he can do whatever he wants. He can manage the optics better than McChrystal could. If he wants to turn it up to 11, he feels he has the moral authority to do it.” So Petraeus flipped a COIN and took a gamble. One thing is certain, however: Afghans will once again pay with their homes, farms, livelihoods, and lives, while Americans, Europeans, and Canadians will pay with lives and foot the bill for a war that couldn’t be more bizarre, a war with no end in sight.
Chapter 5
WAIST DEEP IN THE WASHINGTON QUAGMIRE
Numbers to Die For
In my 1950s childhood, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: “If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and ever.” Or if you were young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine’s parody, “Ripup’s Believe It or Don’t!”
With our Afghan and Iraq Wars on my mind, I’ve been wondering whether Ripley’s moment hasn’t returned. Here, for instance, are some figures offered in a March 30, 2010, Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the “drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq”: “There are… more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq.” Admittedly, that list lacks the “believe it or not” tagline, but otherwise Ripley’s couldn’t have put it more staggeringly. And here’s Pillsbury’s Ripley-esque kicker: the American drawdown will be the “equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York.”
When it comes to that slo-mo drawdown, all the numbers turn out to be staggering. They are also a reminder of just how the Pentagon has been fighting its wars in these last years—like a compulsive shopper without a twelve-step recovery program in sight. Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million (all numbers cited in one media account or another), whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which are still operating with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them) or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.
Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses.
In Ripley’s terms, if you were to put all the vehicles, equipment, and other materiel we managed to transport to Iraq and Afghanistan “four abreast,” they, too, might stretch on close to forever. And wouldn’t that be an illustration worthy of the old Ripley’s cartoon—all those coffeemakers and porta-potties and Internet cafés, even imported sand that, if more widely known about, might change the phrase “taking coals to Newcastle“ to “bringing sand to Iraq”?
You see, for all the sand Iraq did have, from the point of view of the U.S. military it didn’t have the perfect type for making the miles of protective “blast walls” that became a common feature of the post-invasion landscape. So, according to Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, U.S. taxpayer dollars shipped in boatloads of sand from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to create those 15-ton blast walls at $3,500 a pop. U.S. planners are now evidently wondering whether to ship some of the leftover walls thousands of miles by staggeringly roundabout routes to Afghanistan at a transportation cost of $15,000 each.
When it comes to the U.S. drawdown in Iraq and the buildup in Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of unbelievable.