Will The Ole Pentagon-- And Its Friends-- Be Able To Brainwash You?

Certainly historian Rick Perlstein's powerful tome, Nixonland, was one of the most crucial books to have come out last year. I find myself referring to it frequently and last night I re-read a couple of passages that sounded not just familiar, but downright prescient.

In March of 1967, U.S. commanders had reviewed the statistics and concluded there had been even more enemy attacks in the previous year than they'd realized. In April, General Westmoreland came to D.C. and begged for at least one hundred thousand more troops "as soon as possible"-- better yet, two hundred thousand; that is, if the president wanted the war to end in two years instead of five. LBJ was skeptical: we would add troops, they would add troops; "Where does all this end?" He worried the Joint Chiefs of Staff still wouldn't be satisfied. They'd beg to bomb the locks, the dikes, mine the harbors, starve the peasants. They'd call for invasions of Laos and Cambodia. They'd ask for biological warfare, for nuclear weapons. He knew how the generals thought.

His thinking was also political. Meeting Westmoreland's request would mean calling up reserves and National Guard. Those units came from specific localities-- places such as Tip O'Neill's Eighth District, where, the congressman wrote to the president July 18, protesters "were mainly from a solid middle class social and economic status and there was no evidence of youth agitators." Communities losing fathers and brothers in bulk would make the war immeasurably more unpopular... Vietnam was obviously stalemated to all but administration apologists. In late July, for the first time, a poll majority disapproved of the president's Vietnam performance. A New York Times front-page story based on a leak of the Westmoreland request reported that "American officers talk somberly about fighting here for decades." Houston's congressman, George H.W. Bush, a Republican ideological weather vane (he lost as a Goldwater conservative in '64, then won as a smiling centrist in '66), wrote his constituents, "I frankly am lukewarm on sending more American boys to Viet Nam. I want more involvement by Asians." Chuck Percy [a GOP senator from Illinois] wondered why we had to spend "66 million a day trying to 'save' the 16 million people of South Vietnam while leaving the plight of the 20 million urban poor in our country unresolved." And Kentucky's Republican senator Thruston Morton, the former RNC chair, and the president had been "brainwashed by the military-industrial complex" into believing in the possibility of a military victory."

Morton's use of the emotively charged word "brainwashed," however, wasn't the first time it was used in relation to Vietnam, nor was it the most notable-- not by a longshot. In the spring and summer of 1967 the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president was decidedly moderate Michigan Governor George Romney. That changed-- abruptly-- in early September when a TV interviewer asked Romney why he was for the war before he was against it. "When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only the generals but also the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job."

I don't doubt you find some of this-- if not the Romney brainwash yet-- reminiscent of what we've been reading in the newspapers in the last few days. Tuesday I read a fascinating piece in the New Republic by A.J. Rossmiller, Stalemate explaining why a real counter-insurgency strategy is not possible in Afghanistan-- and why politics may be the answer. He emphasizes that the propaganda coming from the Military-Industrial Complex, which aims to brainwash us all not just political aspirants, is getting to sound a lot like Iraq. It is-- but it sounds an awful lot like Vietnam as well.

Phrases like "We’re entering a decisive period" and "It’s now or never" are being tossed around ominously as the debate over troop increases rages. One can hardly read an op-ed without being told that the situation is dire and that this is a critical time, perhaps even our Last Chance to Get It Right. Most notably, the report produced by General Stanley McChrystal announced that "the short-term fight will be decisive."

There is not a single Afghanistan myth more prevalent or more specious than this one. To be at a "critical juncture" implies that one side or the other is poised to decisively gain the upper hand and therefore to win. But the situation in Afghanistan is almost the exact opposite of that. I will likely have my pundit card revoked for saying so--nothing diverts attention like saying that a situation isn’t at a critical turning point--but it’s true. After eight years of fighting, two things seem clear: First, the insurgency does not have the capability to defeat U.S. forces or depose Afghanistan’s central government; and, second, U.S. forces do not have the ability to vanquish the insurgency. It’s true that the Taliban has gained ground in recent months, but, absent a full and immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, it cannot retake sovereign control. This is not to say that Afghanistan isn’t unstable; it clearly is. That has been the case for eight years, however, and, in the absence of some shocking, unforeseen development, it could be true for another eight or 18 or 80 years. An increase of tens of thousands of troops will not change that fact, nor will subtle tactical changes. Rather than teetering on the edge of some imagined precipice, the situation in Afghanistan is at a virtual stalemate. Only by appropriately characterizing the current situation in Afghanistan can we begin to determine the best way to achieve our stated goals there.

If President Obama is really going to represent Change, if Change is more than just a focus-group tested campaign slogan, he has an opportunity to do something neither LBJ, Nixon nor, most obviously, George Bush, bothered to do-- appropriately characterizing the current situation and beginning to determine the best way to achieve our stated goals. It's actually what he claims to be doing right now. As Rossmiller suggests, McChrystal and his Pentagon clique are trying to stampede him into doing what the military wants, within the vacuum of an increasingly miserable battlefield. Obama has to have a much broader vista. "Initially," he writes, "the mission in Afghanistan was to depose a government that aided and abetted violent extremism, to destroy Al Qaeda to whatever extent possible, and to help establish a central government that would prevent the country from serving as a base and training ground for international terrorists. The first two aims have been largely accomplished: The Taliban is deposed, and Al Qaeda is in retreat, with many killed, others fleeing to Pakistan or beyond, and fewer than 100 fighters remaining in Afghanistan (according to recent government estimates). At some point in the public debate over Afghanistan, however, the idea of counter-terrorism became conflated with counter-insurgency, and the third goal took center stage."

National Security Advisor Jim Jones recently told CNN, "I don't foresee the return of the Taliban, and I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling." Furthermore, it is by no means clear that even a Taliban return to power would create a safe haven for international terrorists; it is hard to imagine the Taliban happily inviting back the people who got many of them killed and the rest ousted from power, or for the United States to sit idly by even if the Taliban did pursue such a suicidal course of action. The question should be, then, how (or if) a troop increase would enhance our counter-terror operations.

Unfortunately, the McChrystal report is disappointingly oblique about this, instead declaring a need for "classic counterinsurgency operations" without precisely defining them. In fact, whereas counterinsurgency is often defined through a "clear, hold, and build" model of territorial control, followed by provision of legal order and goods and services, the report says the proposed strategy should instead focus on "the population." (The old hearts and minds objective!) The report proposes that allied troops shield the population from insurgent violence, corruption, and coercion. But, aside from the fact that allied troops cannot possibly protect the population from corruption, protecting the population from insurgent violence and coercion (whatever that means) would require hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. General Petraeus’s own "Counterinsurgency Field Manual," while noting that force size calculations depend on the situation, acknowledges that "[t]wenty counterinsurgents per 1000 residents is often considered the minimum troop density required for effective [counterinsurgency] operations." Afghanistan, with a population estimated at 28.4 million, would require 568,000 troops under that model. Even more modest estimates suggest that a force sufficient to defeat the insurgency would require hundreds of thousands of troops. Retired General Dan McNeill, former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, recently suggested that Afghanistan would need a force of at least 400,000 to win. The idea that adding 40,000 troops to the roughly 100,000 American and NATO troops there now will produce a military victory over the insurgency is simply delusional, and does not reflect classic counterinsurgency doctrine.

We're at a point now where we can have some kind of impact on the political settlement in Afghanistan. That's not always going to be the case-- as it wasn't in Vietnam where we had certainly overstayed whatever welcome we at one time imagined we had.