Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Vietnamization 2.0
By Andrew Bacevich
Posted on October 13, 2015, Printed on October 13, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176055/
After the United States toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003,
L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian official in occupied Iraq,
took a bold step. He dissolved Iraq's military, deciding to replace Saddam's
350,000-man army with a lightly-armed border protection force that would
start with 12,000 troops and eventually peak at around 40,000 soldiers,
supplemented by various police and civil defense forces.
Bremer's best-laid plans imploded as an insurgency blossomed from the
roiling mass of well-trained Iraqi military veterans he had ushered to the
unemployment line and a civil war soon wracked the country. A bloodbath
ensued and never ended, even as the U.S. surged in more troops and pumped in
tens of billions of dollars to build what eventually became the 930,000-man
strong Iraqi security forces. (That's not much smaller than the South
Vietnamese Army the U.S. built up in the late 1960s!) Along the way, there
was plenty of progress. "Every single day, the Iraqi security forces are
getting bigger and better and better trained and better equipped and more
experienced," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. "You know, the
one thing -- the one thing we have seen is that Iraq has developed a very
good capability to be able to defend itself," said Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta six years later. "And I think that's a reflection of the fact that
the Iraqis have developed a very important capability here to be able to
respond to security threats within their own country."
And yet by 2014, the Iraqi military had (and was paying) more ghost soldiers
-- troops who existed only on paper -- than the number of real soldiers
Bremer had envisioned to secure the whole country back in 2003. As it
happened, Iraq was anything but secure. Today, it's a half-failed state,
riven by sectarian strife, and has lost a significant portion of its
territory to an extremist group incubated in U.S. prison camps. The country
is now far worse off than the one the U.S. invaded in 2003.
The U.S. military is great at a lot of things, just not things like winning
wars or effectively training foreign forces. TomDispatch regular Andrew
Bacevich takes on the how-and-why of this latter failure, tracing the sorry
history of U.S. nation- and army-building from the battlefields of Vietnam
-- which he knew intimately -- to the festering wars of today. Buckle up for
a long, strange trip. Nick Turse
On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail)
Why Washington Can't "Stand Up" Foreign Militaries
By Andrew J. Bacevich
First came Fallujah, then Mosul, and later Ramadi in Iraq. Now, there is
Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. In all four places,
the same story has played out: in cities that newspaper reporters like to
call "strategically important," security forces trained and equipped by the
U.S. military at great expense simply folded, abandoning their posts (and
much of their U.S.-supplied weaponry) without even mounting serious
resistance. Called upon to fight, they fled. In each case, the defending
forces gave way before substantially outnumbered attackers, making the
outcomes all the more ignominious.
Together, these setbacks have rendered a verdict on the now more-or-less
nameless Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Successive blitzkriegs by ISIS and
the Taliban respectively did more than simply breach Iraqi and Afghan
defenses. They also punched gaping holes in the strategy to which the United
States had reverted in hopes of stemming the further erosion of its position
in the Greater Middle East.
Recall that, when the United States launched its GWOT soon after 9/11, it
did so pursuant to a grandiose agenda. U.S. forces were going to imprint
onto others a specific and exalted set of values. During President George W.
Bush's first term, this "freedom agenda" formed the foundation, or at least
the rationale, for U.S. policy.
The shooting would stop, Bush vowed, only when countries like Afghanistan
had ceased to harbor anti-American terrorists and countries like Iraq had
ceased to encourage them. Achieving this goal meant that the inhabitants of
those countries would have to change. Afghans and Iraqis, followed in due
course by Syrians, Libyans, Iranians, and sundry others would embrace
democracy, respect human rights, and abide by the rule of law, or else.
Through the concerted application of American power, they would become
different -- more like us and therefore more inclined to get along with us.
A bit less Mecca and Medina, a bit more "we hold these truths" and "of the
people, by the people."
So Bush and others in his inner circle professed to believe. At least some
of them, probably including Bush himself, may actually have done so.
History, at least the bits and pieces to which Americans attend, seemed to
endow such expectations with a modicum of plausibility. Had not such a
transfer of values occurred after World War II when the defeated Axis Powers
had hastily thrown in with the winning side? Had it not recurred as the Cold
War was winding down, when previously committed communists succumbed to the
allure of consumer goods and quarterly profit statements?
If the appropriate mix of coaching and coercion were administered, Afghans
and Iraqis, too, would surely take the path once followed by good Germans
and nimble Japanese, and subsequently by Czechs tired of repression and
Chinese tired of want. Once liberated, grateful Afghans and Iraqis would
align themselves with a conception of modernity that the United States had
pioneered and now exemplified. For this transformation to occur, however,
the accumulated debris of retrograde social conventions and political
arrangements that had long retarded progress would have to be cleared away.
This was what the invasions of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom!) and
Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom!) were meant to accomplish in one fell swoop
by a military the likes of which had (to hear Washington tell it) never been
seen in history. POW!
Standing Them Up As We Stand Down
Concealed within that oft-cited "freedom" -- the all-purpose justification
for deploying American power -- were several shades of meaning. The term, in
fact, requires decoding. Yet within the upper reaches of the American
national security apparatus, one definition takes precedence over all
others. In Washington, freedom has become a euphemism for dominion.
Spreading freedom means positioning the United States to call the shots.
Seen in this context, Washington's expected victories in both Afghanistan
and Iraq were meant to affirm and broaden its preeminence by incorporating
large parts of the Islamic world into the American imperium. They would
benefit, of course, but to an even greater extent, so would we.
Alas, liberating Afghans and Iraqis turned out to be a tad more complicated
than the architects of Bush's freedom (or dominion) agenda anticipated.
Well before Barack Obama succeeded Bush in January 2009, few observers --
apart from a handful of ideologues and militarists -- clung to the fairy
tale of U.S. military might whipping the Greater Middle East into shape.
Brutally but efficiently, war had educated the educable. As for the
uneducable, they persisted in taking their cues from Fox News and the Weekly
Standard.
Yet if the strategy of transformation via invasion and "nation building" had
failed, there was a fallback position that seemed to be dictated by the
logic of events. Together, Bush and Obama would lower expectations as to
what the United States was going to achieve, even as they imposed new
demands on the U.S. military, America's go-to outfit in foreign policy, to
get on with the job.
Rather than midwifing fundamental political and cultural change, the
Pentagon was instead ordered to ramp up its already gargantuan efforts to
create local militaries (and police forces) capable of maintaining order and
national unity. President Bush provided a concise formulation of the new
strategy: "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Under Obama, after
his own stab at a "surge," the dictum applied to Afghanistan as well.
Nation-building had flopped. Building armies and police forces able to keep
a lid on things now became the prevailing definition of success.
The United States had, of course, attempted this approach once before, with
unhappy results. This was in Vietnam. There, efforts to destroy North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces intent on unifying their divided country had
exhausted both the U.S. military and the patience of the American people.
Responding to the logic of events, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon had a tacitly agreed upon fallback position. As the prospects of
American forces successfully eliminating threats to South Vietnamese
security faded, the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese to defend
themselves became priority number one.
Dubbed "Vietnamization," this enterprise ended in abject failure with the
fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet that failure raised important questions to which
members of the national security elite might have attended: Given a weak
state with dubious legitimacy, how feasible is it to expect outsiders to
invest indigenous forces with genuine fighting power? How do differences in
culture or history or religion affect the prospects for doing so? Can skill
ever make up for a deficit of will? Can hardware replace cohesion? Above
all, if tasked with giving some version of Vietnamization another go, what
did U.S. forces need to do differently to ensure a different result?
At the time, with general officers and civilian officials more inclined to
forget Vietnam than contemplate its implications, these questions attracted
little attention. Instead, military professionals devoted themselves to
gearing up for the next fight, which they resolved would be different. No
more Vietnams -- and therefore no more Vietnamization.
After the Gulf War of 1991, basking in the ostensible success of Operation
Desert Storm, the officer corps persuaded itself that it had once and for
all banished its Vietnam-induced bad memories. As Commander-in-Chief George
H.W. Bush so memorably put it, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome
once and for all."
In short, the Pentagon now had war figured out. Victory had become a
foregone conclusion. As it happened, this self-congratulatory evaluation
left U.S. troops ill-prepared for the difficulties awaiting them after 9/11
when interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq departed from the expected
script, which posited short wars by a force beyond compare ending in
decisive victories. What the troops got were two very long wars with no
decision whatsoever. It was Vietnam on a smaller scale all over again --
times two.
Vietnamization 2.0
For Bush in Iraq and Obama after a brief, half-hearted flirtation with
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, opting for a variant of Vietnamization
proved to be a no-brainer. Doing so offered the prospect of an escape from
all complexities. True enough, Plan A -- we export freedom and democracy --
had fallen short. But Plan B -- they (with our help) restore some semblance
of stability -- could enable Washington to salvage at least partial success
in both places. With the bar suitably lowered, a version of "Mission
Accomplished" might still be within reach.
If Plan A had looked to U.S. troops to vanquish their adversaries outright,
Plan B focused on prepping besieged allies to take over the fight. Winning
outright was no longer the aim -- given the inability of U.S. forces to do
so, this was self-evidently not in the cards -- but holding the enemy at bay
was.
Although allied with the United States, only in the loosest sense did either
Iraq or Afghanistan qualify as a nation-state. Only nominally and
intermittently did governments in Baghdad and Kabul exercise a writ of
authority commanding respect from the people known as Iraqis and Afghans.
Yet in the Washington of George Bush and Barack Obama, a willing suspension
of disbelief became the basis for policy. In distant lands where the concept
of nationhood barely existed, the Pentagon set out to create a full-fledged
national security apparatus capable of defending that aspiration as if it
represented reality. From day one, this was a faith-based undertaking.
As with any Pentagon project undertaken on a crash basis, this one consumed
resources on a gargantuan scale -- $25 billion in Iraq and an even more
staggering $65 billion in Afghanistan. "Standing up" the requisite forces
involved the transfer of vast quantities of equipment and the creation of
elaborate U.S. training missions. Iraqi and Afghan forces acquired all the
paraphernalia of modern war -- attack aircraft or helicopters, artillery and
armored vehicles, night vision devices and drones. Needless to say,
stateside defense contractors lined up in droves to cash in.
Based on their performance, the security forces on which the Pentagon has
lavished years of attention remain visibly not up to the job. Meanwhile,
ISIS warriors, without the benefit of expensive third-party mentoring,
appear plenty willing to fight and die for their cause. Ditto Taliban
fighters in Afghanistan. The beneficiaries of U.S. assistance? Not so much.
Based on partial but considerable returns, Vietnamization 2.0 seems to be
following an eerily familiar trajectory that should remind anyone of
Vietnamization 1.0. Meanwhile, the questions that ought to have been
addressed back when our South Vietnamese ally went down to defeat have
returned with a vengeance.
The most important of those questions challenges the assumption that has
informed U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East since the freedom agenda
went south: that Washington has a particular knack for organizing, training,
equipping, and motivating foreign armies. Based on the evidence piling up
before our eyes, that assumption appears largely false. On this score,
retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, a former military commander and
U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, has rendered an authoritative judgment. "Our
track record at building [foreign] security forces over the past 15 years is
miserable," he recently told the New York Times. Just so.
Fighting the Wrong War
Some might argue that trying harder, investing more billions, sending yet
more equipment for perhaps another 15 years will produce more favorable
results. But this is akin to believing that, given sufficient time, the
fruits of capitalism will ultimately trickle down to benefit the least among
us or that the march of technology holds the key to maximizing human
happiness. You can believe it if you want, but it's a mug's game.
Indeed, the United States would be better served if policymakers abandoned
the pretense that the Pentagon possesses any gift whatsoever for "standing
up" foreign military forces. Prudence might actually counsel that Washington
assume instead, when it comes to organizing, training, equipping, and
motivating foreign armies, that the United States is essentially clueless.
Exceptions may exist. For example, U.S. efforts have probably helped boost
the fighting power of the Kurdish peshmerga. Yet such exceptions are rare
enough to prove the rule. Keep in mind that before American trainers and
equipment ever showed up, Iraq's Kurds already possessed the essential
attributes of nationhood. Unlike Afghans and Iraqis, Kurds do not require
tutoring in the imperative of collective self-defense.
What are the policy implications of giving up the illusion that the Pentagon
knows how to build foreign armies? The largest is this: subletting war no
longer figures as a plausible alternative to waging it directly. So where
U.S. interests require that fighting be done, like it or not, we're going to
have to do that fighting ourselves. By extension, in circumstances where
U.S. forces are demonstrably incapable of winning or where Americans balk at
any further expenditure of American blood -- today in the Greater Middle
East both of these conditions apply -- then perhaps we shouldn't be there.
To pretend otherwise is to throw good money after bad or, as a famous
American general once put it, to wage (even if indirectly) "the wrong war,
at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." This we
have been doing now for several decades across much of the Islamic world.
In American politics, we await the officeholder or candidate willing to
state the obvious and confront its implications.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is professor emeritus of history
and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of Breach
of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, among other
works. His new book, America's War for the Greater Middle East (Random
House), is due out in April 2016.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Andrew Bacevich
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176055
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Vietnamization 2.0
By Andrew Bacevich
Posted on October 13, 2015, Printed on October 13, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176055/
After the United States toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003,
L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian official in occupied Iraq,
took a bold step. He dissolved Iraq's military, deciding to replace Saddam's
350,000-man army with a lightly-armed border protection force that would
start with 12,000 troops and eventually peak at around 40,000 soldiers,
supplemented by various police and civil defense forces.
Bremer's best-laid plans imploded as an insurgency blossomed from the
roiling mass of well-trained Iraqi military veterans he had ushered to the
unemployment line and a civil war soon wracked the country. A bloodbath
ensued and never ended, even as the U.S. surged in more troops and pumped in
tens of billions of dollars to build what eventually became the 930,000-man
strong Iraqi security forces. (That's not much smaller than the South
Vietnamese Army the U.S. built up in the late 1960s!) Along the way, there
was plenty of progress. "Every single day, the Iraqi security forces are
getting bigger and better and better trained and better equipped and more
experienced," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. "You know, the
one thing -- the one thing we have seen is that Iraq has developed a very
good capability to be able to defend itself," said Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta six years later. "And I think that's a reflection of the fact that
the Iraqis have developed a very important capability here to be able to
respond to security threats within their own country."
And yet by 2014, the Iraqi military had (and was paying) more ghost soldiers
-- troops who existed only on paper -- than the number of real soldiers
Bremer had envisioned to secure the whole country back in 2003. As it
happened, Iraq was anything but secure. Today, it's a half-failed state,
riven by sectarian strife, and has lost a significant portion of its
territory to an extremist group incubated in U.S. prison camps. The country
is now far worse off than the one the U.S. invaded in 2003.
The U.S. military is great at a lot of things, just not things like winning
wars or effectively training foreign forces. TomDispatch regular Andrew
Bacevich takes on the how-and-why of this latter failure, tracing the sorry
history of U.S. nation- and army-building from the battlefields of Vietnam
-- which he knew intimately -- to the festering wars of today. Buckle up for
a long, strange trip. Nick Turse
On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail)
Why Washington Can't "Stand Up" Foreign Militaries
By Andrew J. Bacevich
First came Fallujah, then Mosul, and later Ramadi in Iraq. Now, there is
Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. In all four places,
the same story has played out: in cities that newspaper reporters like to
call "strategically important," security forces trained and equipped by the
U.S. military at great expense simply folded, abandoning their posts (and
much of their U.S.-supplied weaponry) without even mounting serious
resistance. Called upon to fight, they fled. In each case, the defending
forces gave way before substantially outnumbered attackers, making the
outcomes all the more ignominious.
Together, these setbacks have rendered a verdict on the now more-or-less
nameless Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Successive blitzkriegs by ISIS and
the Taliban respectively did more than simply breach Iraqi and Afghan
defenses. They also punched gaping holes in the strategy to which the United
States had reverted in hopes of stemming the further erosion of its position
in the Greater Middle East.
Recall that, when the United States launched its GWOT soon after 9/11, it
did so pursuant to a grandiose agenda. U.S. forces were going to imprint
onto others a specific and exalted set of values. During President George W.
Bush's first term, this "freedom agenda" formed the foundation, or at least
the rationale, for U.S. policy.
The shooting would stop, Bush vowed, only when countries like Afghanistan
had ceased to harbor anti-American terrorists and countries like Iraq had
ceased to encourage them. Achieving this goal meant that the inhabitants of
those countries would have to change. Afghans and Iraqis, followed in due
course by Syrians, Libyans, Iranians, and sundry others would embrace
democracy, respect human rights, and abide by the rule of law, or else.
Through the concerted application of American power, they would become
different -- more like us and therefore more inclined to get along with us.
A bit less Mecca and Medina, a bit more "we hold these truths" and "of the
people, by the people."
So Bush and others in his inner circle professed to believe. At least some
of them, probably including Bush himself, may actually have done so.
History, at least the bits and pieces to which Americans attend, seemed to
endow such expectations with a modicum of plausibility. Had not such a
transfer of values occurred after World War II when the defeated Axis Powers
had hastily thrown in with the winning side? Had it not recurred as the Cold
War was winding down, when previously committed communists succumbed to the
allure of consumer goods and quarterly profit statements?
If the appropriate mix of coaching and coercion were administered, Afghans
and Iraqis, too, would surely take the path once followed by good Germans
and nimble Japanese, and subsequently by Czechs tired of repression and
Chinese tired of want. Once liberated, grateful Afghans and Iraqis would
align themselves with a conception of modernity that the United States had
pioneered and now exemplified. For this transformation to occur, however,
the accumulated debris of retrograde social conventions and political
arrangements that had long retarded progress would have to be cleared away.
This was what the invasions of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom!) and
Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom!) were meant to accomplish in one fell swoop
by a military the likes of which had (to hear Washington tell it) never been
seen in history. POW!
Standing Them Up As We Stand Down
Concealed within that oft-cited "freedom" -- the all-purpose justification
for deploying American power -- were several shades of meaning. The term, in
fact, requires decoding. Yet within the upper reaches of the American
national security apparatus, one definition takes precedence over all
others. In Washington, freedom has become a euphemism for dominion.
Spreading freedom means positioning the United States to call the shots.
Seen in this context, Washington's expected victories in both Afghanistan
and Iraq were meant to affirm and broaden its preeminence by incorporating
large parts of the Islamic world into the American imperium. They would
benefit, of course, but to an even greater extent, so would we.
Alas, liberating Afghans and Iraqis turned out to be a tad more complicated
than the architects of Bush's freedom (or dominion) agenda anticipated. Well
before Barack Obama succeeded Bush in January 2009, few observers -- apart
from a handful of ideologues and militarists -- clung to the fairy tale of
U.S. military might whipping the Greater Middle East into shape. Brutally
but efficiently, war had educated the educable. As for the uneducable, they
persisted in taking their cues from Fox News and the Weekly Standard.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082964/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082964/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Yet if the
strategy of transformation via invasion and "nation building" had failed,
there was a fallback position that seemed to be dictated by the logic of
events. Together, Bush and Obama would lower expectations as to what the
United States was going to achieve, even as they imposed new demands on the
U.S. military, America's go-to outfit in foreign policy, to get on with the
job.
Rather than midwifing fundamental political and cultural change, the
Pentagon was instead ordered to ramp up its already gargantuan efforts to
create local militaries (and police forces) capable of maintaining order and
national unity. President Bush provided a concise formulation of the new
strategy: "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Under Obama, after
his own stab at a "surge," the dictum applied to Afghanistan as well.
Nation-building had flopped. Building armies and police forces able to keep
a lid on things now became the prevailing definition of success.
The United States had, of course, attempted this approach once before, with
unhappy results. This was in Vietnam. There, efforts to destroy North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces intent on unifying their divided country had
exhausted both the U.S. military and the patience of the American people.
Responding to the logic of events, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon had a tacitly agreed upon fallback position. As the prospects of
American forces successfully eliminating threats to South Vietnamese
security faded, the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese to defend
themselves became priority number one.
Dubbed "Vietnamization," this enterprise ended in abject failure with the
fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet that failure raised important questions to which
members of the national security elite might have attended: Given a weak
state with dubious legitimacy, how feasible is it to expect outsiders to
invest indigenous forces with genuine fighting power? How do differences in
culture or history or religion affect the prospects for doing so? Can skill
ever make up for a deficit of will? Can hardware replace cohesion? Above
all, if tasked with giving some version of Vietnamization another go, what
did U.S. forces need to do differently to ensure a different result?
At the time, with general officers and civilian officials more inclined to
forget Vietnam than contemplate its implications, these questions attracted
little attention. Instead, military professionals devoted themselves to
gearing up for the next fight, which they resolved would be different. No
more Vietnams -- and therefore no more Vietnamization.
After the Gulf War of 1991, basking in the ostensible success of Operation
Desert Storm, the officer corps persuaded itself that it had once and for
all banished its Vietnam-induced bad memories. As Commander-in-Chief George
H.W. Bush so memorably put it, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome
once and for all."
In short, the Pentagon now had war figured out. Victory had become a
foregone conclusion. As it happened, this self-congratulatory evaluation
left U.S. troops ill-prepared for the difficulties awaiting them after 9/11
when interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq departed from the expected
script, which posited short wars by a force beyond compare ending in
decisive victories. What the troops got were two very long wars with no
decision whatsoever. It was Vietnam on a smaller scale all over again --
times two.
Vietnamization 2.0
For Bush in Iraq and Obama after a brief, half-hearted flirtation with
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, opting for a variant of Vietnamization
proved to be a no-brainer. Doing so offered the prospect of an escape from
all complexities. True enough, Plan A -- we export freedom and democracy --
had fallen short. But Plan B -- they (with our help) restore some semblance
of stability -- could enable Washington to salvage at least partial success
in both places. With the bar suitably lowered, a version of "Mission
Accomplished" might still be within reach.
If Plan A had looked to U.S. troops to vanquish their adversaries outright,
Plan B focused on prepping besieged allies to take over the fight. Winning
outright was no longer the aim -- given the inability of U.S. forces to do
so, this was self-evidently not in the cards -- but holding the enemy at bay
was.
Although allied with the United States, only in the loosest sense did either
Iraq or Afghanistan qualify as a nation-state. Only nominally and
intermittently did governments in Baghdad and Kabul exercise a writ of
authority commanding respect from the people known as Iraqis and Afghans.
Yet in the Washington of George Bush and Barack Obama, a willing suspension
of disbelief became the basis for policy. In distant lands where the concept
of nationhood barely existed, the Pentagon set out to create a full-fledged
national security apparatus capable of defending that aspiration as if it
represented reality. From day one, this was a faith-based undertaking.
As with any Pentagon project undertaken on a crash basis, this one consumed
resources on a gargantuan scale -- $25 billion in Iraq and an even more
staggering $65 billion in Afghanistan. "Standing up" the requisite forces
involved the transfer of vast quantities of equipment and the creation of
elaborate U.S. training missions. Iraqi and Afghan forces acquired all the
paraphernalia of modern war -- attack aircraft or helicopters, artillery and
armored vehicles, night vision devices and drones. Needless to say,
stateside defense contractors lined up in droves to cash in.
Based on their performance, the security forces on which the Pentagon has
lavished years of attention remain visibly not up to the job. Meanwhile,
ISIS warriors, without the benefit of expensive third-party mentoring,
appear plenty willing to fight and die for their cause. Ditto Taliban
fighters in Afghanistan. The beneficiaries of U.S. assistance? Not so much.
Based on partial but considerable returns, Vietnamization 2.0 seems to be
following an eerily familiar trajectory that should remind anyone of
Vietnamization 1.0. Meanwhile, the questions that ought to have been
addressed back when our South Vietnamese ally went down to defeat have
returned with a vengeance.
The most important of those questions challenges the assumption that has
informed U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East since the freedom agenda
went south: that Washington has a particular knack for organizing, training,
equipping, and motivating foreign armies. Based on the evidence piling up
before our eyes, that assumption appears largely false. On this score,
retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, a former military commander and
U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, has rendered an authoritative judgment. "Our
track record at building [foreign] security forces over the past 15 years is
miserable," he recently told the New York Times. Just so.
Fighting the Wrong War
Some might argue that trying harder, investing more billions, sending yet
more equipment for perhaps another 15 years will produce more favorable
results. But this is akin to believing that, given sufficient time, the
fruits of capitalism will ultimately trickle down to benefit the least among
us or that the march of technology holds the key to maximizing human
happiness. You can believe it if you want, but it's a mug's game.
Indeed, the United States would be better served if policymakers abandoned
the pretense that the Pentagon possesses any gift whatsoever for "standing
up" foreign military forces. Prudence might actually counsel that Washington
assume instead, when it comes to organizing, training, equipping, and
motivating foreign armies, that the United States is essentially clueless.
Exceptions may exist. For example, U.S. efforts have probably helped boost
the fighting power of the Kurdish peshmerga. Yet such exceptions are rare
enough to prove the rule. Keep in mind that before American trainers and
equipment ever showed up, Iraq's Kurds already possessed the essential
attributes of nationhood. Unlike Afghans and Iraqis, Kurds do not require
tutoring in the imperative of collective self-defense.
What are the policy implications of giving up the illusion that the Pentagon
knows how to build foreign armies? The largest is this: subletting war no
longer figures as a plausible alternative to waging it directly. So where
U.S. interests require that fighting be done, like it or not, we're going to
have to do that fighting ourselves. By extension, in circumstances where
U.S. forces are demonstrably incapable of winning or where Americans balk at
any further expenditure of American blood -- today in the Greater Middle
East both of these conditions apply -- then perhaps we shouldn't be there.
To pretend otherwise is to throw good money after bad or, as a famous
American general once put it, to wage (even if indirectly) "the wrong war,
at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." This we
have been doing now for several decades across much of the Islamic world.
In American politics, we await the officeholder or candidate willing to
state the obvious and confront its implications.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is professor emeritus of history
and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of Breach
of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, among other
works. His new book, America's War for the Greater Middle East (Random
House), is due out in April 2016.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Andrew Bacevich
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176055