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Afghanistan: What Obama is doing right

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Nov 18, 2009

President Obama faces one helluva decision as he returns from China, a decision made even more wrenching by the Fort Hood shooting and  the U.S. justice department’s move to put suspected terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in a transparent, civilian court near 9/11’s epicenter.  Under such circumstances, the specter of bungling national security has to haunt any president — all the more so when we grasp what’s actually going down in Afghanistan.

Recently, I spent a few days in Europe at a human rights gathering. As we discussed, debated and plotted what we all hoped would amount to progress, Afghanistan loomed large on everybody’s minds.  But I hadn’t appreciated just what a dog’s breakfast that country has become until I spoke privately with one of the conference participants. She’s a young Afghan woman who has launched a series of schools in her region.

“How do you feel about the fact that the November elections are now canceled?” I asked her after news broke that Karzai’s rival had dropped out, citing corruption of the process.

“It’s the least worst of the options,” she sighed. “What the media never reports is that the people of Afghanistan are literally tortured whenever we hold another election. In the previous election [on August 20], the Taliban actually sliced off the noses of some voters.  And they cut the ears of other voters.

If we are going to hold a new election, it cannot be a game. Since the election results will be corrupted for sure, there is no point in having one right now. All that would be achieved is more death and damage to the Afghan people.”

“So, should President Obama should commit more troops?” I continued.

She paused. “Yes,” came the ultimate answer. “Let me tell you why. When the international forces arrived, they said to women, ‘Here is the deal: You build your society and we will protect you as you do that. We cannot re-construct your nation for you. But we can secure your efforts to create a better situation for all.’ 

We believed them. Now that we are in the middle of running new schools and medical clinics and so on, we are meeting our end of the bargain. If the international forces do not met their end of the bargain, then we are left in the hands of the Taliban. They know exactly who we are, and we will be the first ones slaughtered when the soldiers walk away.”

Hearing this from an Aghan woman who expresses herself gently and without rancor has left me even more sympathetic to the task that President Obama faces. Despite caustic accusations of dithering and dissing his generals on the ground, the president is absolutely right to be asking question upon question before announcing any decision.

What happens when you don’t dig deep with precise and sometimes annoying questions? Here’s an extract from historian Gordon Goldstein’s, Lessons in Disaster. He tells the story of McGeorge Bundy, a top presidential adviser whose spectacular career successes at Harvard and elsewhere dazzled all.  But:

“In response to the crisis in Vietnam, the administration’s preeminent intellectual demonstrated a fundamental lack of rigor in his analysis of the ends and means of American strategy… He did underestimate the resilience of the enemy. He did fail to examine the plan for military action. And he did fail to anticipate that the American escalation would be met with a furious countervailing escalation by the forces of the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese army…

There was no analysis or evidence to validate Bundy’s expectation that Ho Chi Minh and his fervent followers would capitulate. Bundy also failed to insist that the national security bureaucracy quantify the policy implications of a coercion strategy. How many bombs will it take to dilute the will of the insurgency? How much disruption and destruction would the United States have to impose on their lines of supply and reinforcement? How many US troops would be required to persuade the Vietnamese communists  that they could not prevail? How many casualties would be required to compel them to quit? How many years would it take?…

In scattered notes conveying his struggle to identify the roots of a disastrous military strategy, Bundy wrote, ‘LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson] and the rest of us don’t ask how much Ho can endure… We think of ourselves as propping up Saigon, which will do better and do its share and somehow do – enough.’”

Welcome to one of the biggest leadership challenges that any president must confront: lack of moral courage in his inner circle. Dr. Irving Janis, a psychologist who studied “groupthink,” concluded that in small and cohesive clusters of people, critical thinking typically loses to the comforting sway of consensus. In other words, unity will almost always be confused with uniformity.

Both in the Bay of Pigs and in the Vietnam fiascoes, a highly educated and confident fistful of individuals — all of them distinguished in their chosen professions — abandoned their questioning faculties in the bubble of the White House.

That’s why, when it comes to investigating the facts, the President has to take the lead — and take the time to get his hands mucky in details. He doesn’t know what information is being kept from him by his advisers because they, themselves, might not have posed the right questions (if any) to their sources.

Like I said: a dog’s breakfast.  It’s an accurate description not just of Afghanistan, but of what it will take to make Afghanistan less of a mess.