He said that the US could be about to make the same mistake in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq. "You have to have an articulable end-point," he said. "We've got to clearly understand what it is that the US wants to do in Afghanistan and understand what we can do." [Snip]
The US should avoid suggesting that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be followed by a surge of troops in Afghanistan, according to Jim Webb, the Democratic senator for Virginia.
Fresh from ruling himself out as a possible running mate for Barack Obama, Mr Webb's comments come as an implied criticism of the Democratic party's orthodoxy on Iraq and Afghanistan - including Mr Obama's own stance.
Following his recent trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr Obama welcomed growing support for his plan to set a timeline for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq and said the US "should seize the moment" to build up its presence in Afghanistan.
"The scale of our deployments in Iraq continues to set back our ability to finish the fight in Afghanistan," he said.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Webb politely disagreed, without mentioning Mr Obama or other Democratic colleagues by name. "We should be very careful from making it sound like we are withdrawing from Iraq because we have to build up in Afghanistan," he said. "You're starting to see people say this when they weren't saying it before.
"We tend to be country-specific when we talk about how to defeat international terrorism rather than looking at the whole dynamic. The dynamic is that terrorism works the seams of international law. We can't create stable societies in places like Afghanistan . . . that can't be our objective."
Senator Webb is exactly right. Without a clearly articulated end goal, there is no coherent strategy and if anything has become clear in the twentieth century, and organization with no strategy will usually lose to an organization with a clearly articulated and consistently implemented strategy.
Both Vietnam and the invasion and occupation of Iraq have suffered from the absence of a clearly articulated and implemented end goal. Afghanistan is shaping up to be another example of this poor management.
Another thing that needs to be applied in Afghanistan is the application of a broad set of methods of achieving the strategy. Sen. Webb does not mention this in the Financial Times article, but the military is a poor tool for defeating a guerrilla or terrorist movement. Terrorism will be defeated through well-coordinated actions that include Intelligence operations, police operations, NGOs that rebuild Afghanistan and wean that nation from the opium crop, together with long term efforts to train and educate a new generation of Afghani's to lead their nation and close coordination and advice to the government of Afghanistan in how to extend the effective reach of that government to those areas not currently under government control. The State Department and America's allies are going to be more important to Afghanistan in the long run than our military forces.
Without a clearly articulated end goal carefully communicated to all subordinate players, all those resources cannot be effectively coordinated to achieve anything strategically useful.
Experience shows that the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge this. Cheney and Rove do appear to have had clear strategy that they have tried to implement, but it basically has been to convert the dominant political ideology to the mishmash of confused ideas that have dominated the Republican Party for the last three decades and to institutionalize conservative Republican control of the American government by any means possible. Iraq appears to have been one element in that overall strategy, so it was not considered worthy of strategic action itself. This accounts for the extreme secrecy that characterizes the Bush administration. If the public knew what they were seriously trying to do, most of America would rise up to stop them.
McCain has not articulated any central strategy at all. His goal is clearly just more of the same. The disorganization that characterizes his campaign for the Presidency appears to stem for exactly this same kind of lack of a clearly articulated strategic vision.
Obama? I suspect, from the tightly coordinated and effective nature of the campaign he ran for the Democratic nomination, does understand this. The formulation of that end-goal will have to wait until after Obama is elected President and will require close coordination between at a minimum the Pentagon, the State Department and the Intelligence Community. This is going to be the National Security Diretor's primary purpose for quite a while. In the meantime, the nature of sound byte politics does not allow any articulation of a concept this complex. Don't expect Obama to articulate a clear end goal for Afghanistan until after the election. The Republicans would use it to attack him while avoiding any responsibility for the foreign policy and military disasters their party have conducted in the last eight years.
So I am glad to hear Senator Webb state that we need a clearly articulated end goal for Afghanistan. He is completely correct. Unfortunately, the Presidential campaign will not be about that kind of discussion. Instead it is going to be about how scary the Black Man, Obama, is and why the Republicans don't want him elected.
That probably doesn't matter much, though. Presidential elections are won by the party out of power for three reasons. First, when the economy is in the tank during election year, second when the previous President has very low approval ratings and the third factor is an unpopular war. The first two reasons are going to dominate this year. Iraq will be somewhat significant but McCain's history of getting shot down over Hanoi and tortured as a POW somewhat insulates him from that losing the Presidency because of the unpopularity of Iraq. Clearly that experience did not teach him strategic management, however.
Oh, and I have no idea what the appropriate "articulated end-point for Afghanistan" is. Nor have I yet heard one for Iraq. I just know that America will not win in either place without such a clear statement of purpose.
This is going to remain an interesting year right up to January 20, 2009.
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