Ray McGovern: Kipling Haunts Obama's Afghan War
The White Man's Burden, a phrase immortalized by English poet Rudyard Kipling as an excuse for European-American imperialism, was front and center Thursday morning (October 29) at a RAND-sponsored discussion of Afghanistan in the Russell Senate Office Building.
The agenda was top-heavy with RAND speakers, and the thinking was decidedly"inside the box" - so much so, that I found myself repeating a verse from Kipling, who recognized the dangers of imperialism, to remind me of the real world:
It is not wise for the Christian white
To hustle the Asian brown;
For the Christian riles
And the Asian smiles
And weareth the Christian down.
At the end of the fight
Lies a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;
And the epitaph drear,
A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East.
With a few notable exceptions, the RAND event offered conventional wisdom to a fare-thee-well. There was a certain poetic justice that President Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has chaired RAND's Middle East Advisory Board, was chosen to keynote the proceedings.
As national security adviser under President Carter, Brzezinski thought it a good idea to mousetrap the Soviets into their own Vietnam debacle by baiting them into invading Afghanistan in 1979, the war that was the precursor to the great-power quagmire in Afghanistan now, three decades later.
On Thursday, Brzezinski disclosed that he had advised the Bush/Cheney administration to invade Afghanistan in 2001, but insisted that he told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the US military should not stay"as an alien force" once American objectives were achieved.
Exuding his customary confidence, Brzezinski first addressed - and ruled out - several"No's," the things that the US must not do:
- Withdrawal is"not in the range of policy options."
- The US must not repeat the Soviet experience in going it alone, but rather must"use all our leverage" to make NATO's commitment stick.
- The US should not neglect the need to include"Islamic" groups in the coalition.
Brzezinski offered a much longer litany of"Yeses" - but his list was disappointingly bereft of new ideas. Indeed, it was notable only for his insistence that the US ought to be more actively engaged in promoting a north-south pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. He said, for example, that India needs access to the resources of central Asia, an area especially rich in natural gas, as well as oil.
Without batting an eyelash, Brzezinski noted that within three months the war in Afghanistan will be the"longest war in US history," and warned that the United States could be"bogged down there for another decade or so." At the same time, he argued, the world impact of an early US departure"would be utterly devastating."
Quagmire, anyone?
Questioned about growing opposition to the war, he conceded condescendingly that"public fatigue" is understandable, but expressed confidence that adoption of his recommended policies would be"persuasive" enough to turn public opinion around...
... Training the Indigenous: Panacea or Mirage?
I am reminded of what former CENTCOM commander, Gen. John Abizaid, described to the Senate Armed Services Committee three years ago as a"major change" in the Iraq war - namely, new emphasis on training Iraqis.
The final returns are not yet in for Iraq, but in my experience this is almost always an unfruitful exercise, as many of us learned from Vietnam. Been there; done that; should have known that.
Three months after John Kennedy's death, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent President Lyndon Johnson a draft of a major speech McNamara planned to give on defense policy. What follows is a segment of an audiotape of a conversation between the two on February 25, 1964:
Johnson: Your speech is good, but I wonder if you shouldn't find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.
McNamara: The problem is what to say about it.
Johnson: I'll tell you what to say about it. I would say we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. We could pull out there; the dominoes would fall and that part of the world would go to the Communists.... Nobody really understands what is out there.... Our purpose is to train [the South Vietnamese] people, and our training's going good.
McNamara: All right, sir.
But the Vietnamese training wasn't"going good." Before long, half a million American troops were in Vietnam trying to save South Vietnam's government.
It is a forlorn hope that unwelcome occupation troops can train indigenous soldiers and police to fight against their own brothers and sisters. That the British also seem to have forgotten these lessons, along with some of Kipling's cautionary poetry about the risks of imperialism, is really no excuse.
If President Obama is depending on the RAND folks and embedded neocon pundits like the Washington Post's David Ignatius, we are in trouble. In Friday's column, Ignatius appeals for more troops"to continue the mission," as the president and his advisers attempt to figure out what the mission should be.
As I sat at the RAND event on Thursday, I could not help wondering what would be the judgments of my former colleagues in the intelligence community on these key issues? Specifically, what might a National Intelligence Estimate on Prospects for Afghanistan say?
NIEs are the most authoritative genre of analytical product, embodying key judgments on important national security issues. They are coordinated throughout the 16-agency intelligence community and then signed by the director of national intelligence in his statutory capacity as chief intelligence adviser to the president.
An NIE can, and should, play an important role. An estimate on Iran's nuclear program, for example, given to President George W. Bush in November 2007, helped derail plans by Vice President Dick Cheney and White House adviser Elliott Abrams for war on Iran. The most senior US military officers had realized what a debacle that would be and insisted that this NIE's key judgments be made public.
They anticipated, correctly, that public knowledge that Iran had stopped working on developing a nuclear warhead in 2003 (and had not resumed such work) would take the wind out of Cheney's, Abrams', and Israel's sails. Bush and Cheney were not pleased; but the NIE helped stop the juggernaut toward war with Iran.
There's Always an NIE, Right?
As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war. All too many bore this title:"Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam."
Typical of the kinds of question the president and his advisers wanted addressed: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing it? If the US were to introduce x thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about xx thousand?
Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being"good team players." But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that. And - truth be told - we often took a perverse delight in being the only show in town without a policy agenda.
Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were pooh-poohed as negativism; and policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account. The point is that they continued to be sought. Not even Lyndon Johnson, nor Richard Nixon, would be likely to decide on a significant escalation without seeking the best guess of the intelligence community as to how US adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step...