McChrystal's timing could not have been worse

It would almost seem that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who may be the sole reason nearly 100,000 U.S. troops are in Afganistan, deliberately timed his interview with Rolling Stone to sabotage the vote to fund that war. Top Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Appropriations chairman David Obey have expressed deep reservations about the counterinsurgency strategy that McChrystal promoted and President Obama embraced. The war itself is at a critical juncture, with the offensive in the South not going as quickly as planned.

Obey in particular has argued vehemently that the country can no longer afford open-ended wars. The "emergency" war spending bill this year for the Afghanistan war, now in its 9th year, will cost more than $37 billion. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost so far about $1 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Afghanistan war cost $6.7 billion in February alone, and is now outpacing costs in Iraq as the U.S. proceeds with its pullout there.

The general has been summoned to appear at the White House in person and has apologized, saying he has enormous respect for the president. Things appear otherwise in the article, although the most damning quotes come from aides, who describe McChrystal's views of Obama as being "intimidated" by military brass and disengaged. McChrystal was said to be "disappointed" after his meeting with the new prez. Reigning speculation has it that McChrystal will be fired, although Sen. John Kerry said he has "enormous respect" for the general and urged everyone to back off. If the general is not fired, however, that might be even bigger news, and leave a bigger question about the commander in chief.

The pro-war Senate trio, John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham put out this statement, calling the general's comments inappropriate:

"We have the highest respect for General McChrystal and honor his brave service and sacrifice to our nation. General McChrystal's comments, as reported in Rolling Stone, are inappropriate and inconsistent with the traditional relationship between Commander-in-Chief and the military. The decision concerning General McChrystal’s future is a decision to be made by the President of the United States."

Posted By: Carolyn Lochhead (Email) | June 22 2010 at 08:17 AM

Gates: Military remains unprepared to stop internal security threats at bases

Two months after the deadly rampage at Fort Hood, the military remains unprepared to stop internal security threats at its U.S. installations, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today.

AFP photo Defense Secretary Robert Gates

Gates said an independent review of the Nov. 5 shootings found that the Pentagon, like other federal bureaucracies, remains rooted in Cold War thinking designed to stop state-sponsored threats, not terrorism.

"We have not done enough to adapt to the evolving domestic internal security threat to American troops and military facilities that has emerged over the past decade," Gates said at a Pentagon news conference.

The review was ordered by Gates and conducted by retired Adm. Vern Clark, former chief of naval operations, and former Army Secretary Togo West.

The Army is conducting a separate criminal investigation. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, is charged with premeditated murder in the Nov. 5 shooting that killed 13 people and left 43 injured.

Hasan's lawyer, John Galligan, said he is still waiting for the Army to turn over information and laboratory reports to help his defense prepare for an upcoming sanity board review to determine if he is mentally competent to be court-martialed.

The Pentagon has not made everything public, and is not being completely forthcoming, Galligan said.

"It's obvious to me that they're going to do everything they can to put the agency, the entity, the Army in the best light possible," he said. Read More 'Gates: Military remains unprepared to stop internal security threats at bases' »

Posted By: Richard Dunham (Email) | January 15 2010 at 03:52 PM

Kerry conditions support for troop increase

Sen. John Kerry is expressing serious doubts today about the capacity of a troop increase to fix Afghanistan's problems in a high-profile speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, on C-Span now.

The former Democratic presidential nominee, Vietnam vet, and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is the key player to watch on how Democrats deal with President Obama's decision on whether to increase troop levels.

Kerry laid out three conditions that have to be met "if" he is to support a troop request. They involve radical and dubious improvements in Afghan governance and the Afghan military, and he made clear a military approach alone won't work, saying Gen. Stanley McChrystal's plan goes too far.

This doesn't mean Kerry will refuse to support a troop request. Far from it. He also warned that a civil war would follow a troop pullout and a counterterror strategy (versus a nation building counterinsurgency strategy) won't work.

It does mean Kerry will have a huge hand in the strategy, from sale to execution, building on his save-the-day negotiations with Afghan president Hamid Karzai over resolving the disputed election.

He is not ready to play the role of loyal Democratic opposition in the manner of a William Fulbright to Lyndon Johnson, as Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer points out.

"Fulbright, who chaired Foreign Relations from 1959 to 1974, remains a model to many legislators of congressional activism on decisions of war and peace," Zelizer said. "One way in which the memory of Fulbright could shape Kerry's tenure is by reminding him of the importance of acting as the critic and the skeptic during times of one-party dominance of government."

Kerry also has a closer model: former Foreign Relations chair Richard Lugar, a Republican who despite profound and publicly expressed misgivings about Bush administration policy on Iraq, did little to intervene.

Posted By: Carolyn Lochhead (Email) | October 26 2009 at 10:01 AM

Code Pink's more nuanced Afghanistan policy

As throngs of protesters from across the political spectrum churned outside President Obama's San Francisco fundraiser Thursday, one of San Francisco's best-known anti-war activists, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, was in Washington having just returned from a week in Afghanistan.

She returned from her fourth trip to Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with a perspective on the U.S. war in Afghanistan that's a bit more nuanced than the sign she and her fellow activists carry: "Bring the troops home now."

Now, she faces the same challenge that divides Obama's liberal supporters and has baffled invading armies for centuries: Realizing there are no easy answers in Afghanistan.

She and Code Pink still strongly oppose increasing troop levels. (Obama is now weighing the recommendation of top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to add 40,000 troops). And the organization believes the U.S. should increase its role in peace talks there and "get serious" about training Afghan security forces.

If 90 percent of what the U.S. spends on its Afghanistan effort is devoted to military forces and the rest to diplomatic and economic outreach, Benjamin would like to see that ratio reversed.

But while she was there with a Code Pink entourage Sept. 27 - Oct. 6, native Afghans told them that they don't want the U.S. to pull out immediately. Women, especially, fear that would hasten a return of the Taliban.

"Women want to be involved in the peace talks," she said. "Any talks with the Taliban without women would be disastrous because they would just compromise women's rights further."

While Afghans told Benjamin that they don't want U.S. forces in the city centers, "they want them in their bases, as sort of a deterrent" to further attacks or guarding the Pakistan border.

"Yes, it's time for a new strategy, but they didn't think that more troops was the answer," she said. "When they see U.S. troops, they are afraid of the guns and the troops and they feel that the troops are magnets for more attacks."

While Benjamin's core "Bring the troops home" mantra hasn't changed, it has become more complicated.

"What I was left feeling is that I don't know what would be a realistic timeline without first coming up with the exit plan," she said. Before she went there, "I felt that troops should start coming home now."

"My position hasn't been changed. But I feel now I have a better understanding from the many people we spoke to that an exit strategy has to have several components to it. The sooner there is a commitment to come home, the faster that peace talks can happen."

She feels Obama has been backed into a "disastrous" political corner now that McChrystal's proposal for a troop increase is public.

"Now it pushes him into a corner of being labeled as not supporting the commanders on the ground," she said, "which is a very vulnerable position for him to be in."

Posted By: Joe Garofoli (Email, Twitter, Facebook) | October 16 2009 at 03:12 PM

Drew Joseph: Obama's Afghanistan problem

The quandary that is Afghanistan is looming as the biggest test yet for President Obama, and one that offers no good options, politically or substantively.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday that he has not yet presented to Obama Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's call for as many as 40,000 new troops, clearly a bid for time as the administration conducts its second strategy review in less than a year. Gates said the review would "take a few weeks."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has fired her own signals, making clear to the administration that any call for new troops could face a rebellion in the House. She has often said her toughest vote ever was Obama's request last spring for war money.

Obama said earlier this month that he was "skeptical" that additional American forces could defeat al-Qaeda, but any pullout would set the stage for Republicans to charge that he is abandoning the fight against terrorism in the birthplace of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and exposing Americans to a repeat.

His own administration is divided. Vice President Joe Biden has argued that a large-scale nation building effort cannot work, advocating instead specific operations to target al Qaeda and the Taliban. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CBS over the weekend that although defeating al Qaeda and other enemies remains the priority, she plans to work closely with Afghanistan's new government once the contested elections are finished to create a stable country.

"(It) is important for Americans to understand that focusing on Al Qaeda and the Taliban -- who are largely, but not exclusively, now in Pakistan -- cannot be done if we allow them to return to a safe haven in Afghanistan," Clinton said. "So this has to be viewed as part of the overall strategy."

Translation: nation building.

Any such an effort could take up to ten years, warned Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich in a prominent Washington Post op-ed Sunday. Bacevich, no leftist, argued instead for turning Afghanistan into a cold war that targets jihadist leaders in precise operations and cuts off extremist movements economically. He said the U.S. should turn its focus to living up to the democratic ideals it propounds in a "hearts and minds" approach to counter Islamic fundamentalism.

"Instead of fighting an endless hot war in a vain effort to eliminate the jihadist threat, the United States should wage a cold war to keep the threat at bay," Bacevich wrote. "Such a strategy worked before. It can work again."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., stands poised to pounce, following Gates on ABC Sunday saying "a half-measure does not do justice."

McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy is similar to the strategy Obama launched in February when he deployed 20,000 more American troops, McCain said. Since then, however, conditions have deteriorated. July and August were the two deadliest months of the eight-year conflict, now the longest in U.S. history.

Watch for Gates -- a widely respected Bush administration holdover credited with salvaging Iraq -- to play a central role providing political cover for whatever Obama decides.

Posted By: Carolyn Lochhead (Email) | September 28 2009 at 11:57 AM

Diplomats, Guns & Money ...

Though the news was overshadowed by discussions about health care and budget cuts and police procedures in Massachusetts, this week saw the Obama administration take some big steps toward reshaping the American arts of war and peace, putting money where its mouth has been -- strategically speaking.

The most visible move was the Senate's decision to stop making the F-22, an extremely cool piece of aerial hardware that can fly backflips around most other planes but that SecDef Gates (along with his predecessors) had decided just wasn't all that relevant in an era of suicide bombers and special ops.

Cold war relic it may be, but the plane is still beloved by the Air Force "Fighter Mafia," by China hawks and by multiple members of Congress, who are perhaps also enamored of the jobs the plane plunked in their districts.

The result was a knock-down drag-out fight that included the deeply weird sight of Sen. Barbara Boxer defending a war machine against that well-known dove, Sen. John McCain, and despite a veto threat from the Democratic President.

Ultimately, of course, the Senate blinked first, and it looks likely that the House -- which still has the F-22 in its version of the defense budget -- will follow suit and fold.

But the decision to halt the F-22 line was just one of several moves the Obama administration made this week toward a radical redesign of American power -- and not necessarily the most significant one.

Read More 'Diplomats, Guns & Money ...' »

Posted By: Matthew B. Stannard (Email) | July 24 2009 at 06:53 PM

CIA Hit Teams: Who's In Charge Here?

Revelations of a secret CIA plan to knock off al Qaeda leaders has refueled burning debates in the United States over the proper tools for combating terrorism -- and who should control how and when those tools are used.

The CIA plan -- if you believe the leaks -- dates back to the dawn of the conflict formerly known as the Global War On Terror.

The plans were never carried out, but remained in limbo until last month, when CIA director Leon Panetta found out about the program, killed it, and told Congress all.

The revelation set off a ruckus, with several leading Democrats -- including the Bay Area's Rep. Anna Eshoo and Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- saying that the CIA's failure to brief Congress on the program might have broken the law. They've called for an investigation. Leading Republicans, in turn, have called this all much partisan ado about nothing.

There are at least two debates going on here. One concerns the program's goals: Can U.S. spooks covertly kill bad guys overseas without breaking the law?

Legal experts (SPOILER ALERT!) disagree. Read More 'CIA Hit Teams: Who's In Charge Here?' »

Posted By: Matthew B. Stannard (Email) | July 14 2009 at 06:31 PM

New COIN in the Realm ...

Personnel announcements from the Department of Defense tend to get as much attention as quarterly crop reports -- everybody knows they're important, but nobody cares enough to read them.

Too bad. Because if you want to predict the flavor of the stew you're about to be served, it's always a good idea to stroll into the kitchen and shake hands with the new cook.

In the same way, the folks SecDef Robert Gates named to the newly expanded Defense Policy Board Wednesday offer clues about the military challenges that Gates -- and, presumably, his boss -- expects to face in the next few years.

Created in 1985 to provide the Secretary of Defense with "independent, informed advice and opinion concerning matters of defense policy," the bipartisan Defense Policy Board has gained influence and been a source of controversy over recent years.

How influential? How controversial? Well, in December 2002, the board included Newt Gingrich, Dan Quayle, Eliot Cohen, and California's own Pete Wilson. The board's chairman at the time? Richard Perle.

Some people were not surprised that with those cooks in the kitchen, the resultant menu included the Iraq war.

(Another member of the board at the time, Kenneth Adelman, was the author in 2002 of a Washington Post OpEd predicting that liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." He startled many in 2008 when he endorsed Obama.)By 2004 the board was under scrutiny, accused of cherry-picking intelligence to support the Iraq war and of too-cozy connections to the defense industry -- which led to Perle's eventual resignation from the big chair.

That didn't kill the board -- in fact Gates expanded it Wednesday, adding several new seats to the big table. Read More 'New COIN in the Realm ...' »

Posted By: Matthew B. Stannard (Email) | July 02 2009 at 11:09 AM

New COIN in the Realm ...

Personnel announcements from the Department of Defense tend to get as much attention as quarterly crop reports -- everybody knows they're important, but nobody cares enough to read them.

Too bad. Because if you want to predict the flavor of the stew you're about to be served, it's always a good idea to stroll into the kitchen and shake hands with the new cook.

In the same way, the folks SecDef Robert Gates named to the newly expanded Defense Policy Board Wednesday offer clues about the military challenges that Gates -- and, presumably, his boss -- expects to face in the next few years.

Created in 1985 to provide the Secretary of Defense with "independent, informed advice and opinion concerning matters of defense policy," the bipartisan Defense Policy Board has gained influence and been a source of controversy over recent years.

How influential? How controversial? Well, in December 2002, the board included Newt Gingrich, Dan Quayle, Eliot Cohen, and California's own Pete Wilson. The board's chairman at the time? Richard Perle.

Some people were not surprised that with those cooks in the kitchen, the resultant menu included the Iraq war.

(Another member of the board at the time, Kenneth Adelman, was the author in 2002 of a Washington Post OpEd predicting that liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." He startled many in 2008 when he endorsed Obama.)By 2004 the board was under scrutiny, accused of cherry-picking intelligence to support the Iraq war and of too-cozy connections to the defense industry -- which led to Perle's eventual resignation from the big chair.

That didn't kill the board -- in fact Gates expanded it Wednesday, adding several new seats to the big table. Read More 'New COIN in the Realm ...' »

Posted By: Matthew B. Stannard (Email) | July 02 2009 at 11:09 AM