On the night of December 1, shortly after Barack Obama announced plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, retired Lt. Colonel John Nagl appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Maddow was dismayed by Obama’s new plan, which she called “massive escalation,” but, when she introduced Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert who has long called for a greater U.S. commitment to Afghanistan--even if it means raising taxes and expanding the military--she was surprisingly friendly. And, after Nagl spent the segment praising Obama’s plan, which he said would throw back the Taliban and enable more civil and economic development, Maddow may have remained skeptical--but she was also admiring. “It’s a real pleasure to have you on the show, John,” she said.
Today, the U.S. Marines kicked off a new push against bad guys in Afghanistan's fertile and poppy-rich southern province. Per the AP:
Gen. David Petraeus says the Marine Corps offensive launched Friday in southern Afghanistan is part of preparations for the arrival of 30,000 new U.S. reinforcements.
Kevin Drum thinks people, including myself, are being too hard on the Obama team when it comes to AfPak policymaking:
If [Rajiv] Chandrasekar's account is correct, the fault isn't really with the Obama administration at all. It's with the military: McKiernan was on board with the counterinsurgency strategy but didn't indicate that he needed more troops to implement it....
Later, of course, McKiernan was pushed out and a new commander took a fresh look at what resources were needed. But that hardly reflects badly on Obama, and it doesn't really sound like anyone screwed up back in March. Long story short, the military changed its mind about troop levels between March and September, and now Obama has to decide how to respond to that. I don't really see a case for ineptness here...
Here's the problem: There are, or should be, plenty of people in the Obama administration who understand how much manpower the counterinsurgency approach implied by their March policy review would require. Here's what COIN guru John Nagl was saying back in February, before the review was completed:
Camp Julien is surrounded by reminders of Afghanistan’s past. The coalition military base--which sits in the hills south of Kabul, just high enough to rise above the thick cloud of smog that perpetually blankets the city--is flanked by two European-style palaces built in the 1920s by the modernizing King Amanullah. Home to Soviet troops and mujahedin during the past decades of war, the now-crumbling palaces are littered with bullet holes and decorated with graffiti in multiple languages. Uphill from Julien is the old Russian officers’ club, dating from the Soviet invasion and featuring a recently refilled swimming pool that overlooks the southern half of the city. The pool is said to have been the site of executions in the 1990s; the condemned were apparently shot off the diving board.
Rory Stewart, the Scotsman who walked across Afghanistan (literally) and wrote a book about it has emerged of late as a cautionary voice warning that the West simply can't tame or transform that impoverished tribal nation. Today Stewart will make that case for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the first of two hearings on the Obama administration's Afghanisatan policy.
Around the time of the November election, John Nagl, a retired Army Colonel, took a helicopter ride across Afghanistan. What he saw below worried him. Nagl, who is 42 with trim brown hair and academic eyeglasses, spent three years in Iraq, including as part of a tank battalion in the Sunni Triangle, where he witnessed brutal combat in the war's worst years. A West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Nagl applied the lessons of his Iraq experience to the Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he helped write and which was published last year. He currently specializes in the study of war and counterinsurgency at the Center for a New American Security, a center-left Washington think tank, and it is in this capacity that he recently traveled to the Afghan war zone. As his military chopper swooped over high mountain ridges and plunging valleys, he grimly surveyed the size and the inhospitality of the Afghan terrain. Winning in Afghanistan, he realized, would take more than "a little tweak," as he put it to me from back in Washington a few weeks later, when he was still shaking off the gritty "Kabul crud" that afflicts traveler's lungs. It would take time, money, and blood. "It's a doubling of the U.S. commitment," Nagl said. "It's a doubling of the Afghan army, maybe a tripling. It's going to require a tax increase and a bigger army."
