Dexter Filkins: 'Stanley McChrystal’s Long War'

I just finished Dexter Filkins' New York Times essay, "Stanley McChrystal’s Long War."

And that title really does capture the reality of America's mission to Afghanistan. Top military officials are looking at success there in terms of years, in some cases many years. McChrystal says U.S. forces need to see improvement in 12 to 24 months to have a data point for assessing the renewed American effort. And of course there's no guarantee that the mission will be renewed. For in McChrystal's recent advisory report to the White House, the request for 40,000 more troops was an all-or-nothing proposition. The general came right out and said we'll fail without the additional resources. In such stark decision-making stakes, the Afghan war is reminiscent to what the U.S. was facing in Vietnam in the '60s.

In fact, in Filkins' discussion with McCrystal, the general spoke of the need for village pacification in the countryside. And the way the comments were framed, I immediately was reminded of my studies in the military history of Vietman, and the "Strategic Hamlet Program" that sought to separate peasant villagers from the Vietcong fighters.

In the military arena, McChrystal wants to put as many of his men as close to the Afghan people as he can. That means closing some of the smaller bases in remote valleys and opening them in densely populated areas like the Helmand River valley. Here, at least, military force will play a central role, at least in the early phase of his strategy, as the Americans fight their way into areas they have not been in before.

“The insurgency has to have access to the people,” McChrystal told me. “So we literally want to go in there and squat among the people. We want to make the insurgents come to us. Make them be the aggressors. What I want to do is get on the inside, looking out — instead of being on the outside looking in.”

“There will be a lot of fighting,” McChrystal added. “If we do this right, the insurgents will have to fight us. They will have no choice.

And that’s the rub: the population-focused strategy requires more troops — as many as 40,000 more. This is the decision that confronts President Obama and his advisers now.

As far as closing bases and relocation activities, in Afghanistan it's troop units not village populations, but I'm nevertheless reminded of the U.S. Army's rural strategies in the early 1960s. (And as noted at the piece, McChrystal's been reading Vietnam history, so there as something eery in seeing those similarities as well.)

But fortunately for McCrystal, it's not Vietnam that's the model, but Iraq. As the Filkins report notes in an earlier passage:

While Afghanistan is not Iraq, McChrystal’s plan does resemble in some ways that of General David H. Petraeus, who took command of American forces in Iraq in early 2007, when the country was disintegrating in a civil war. For four years, the American military had tried to crush the Iraqi insurgency and got the opposite: the insurgency bloomed, and the country imploded.

By refocusing their efforts on protecting Iraqi civilians, American troops were able to cut off the insurgents from their base of support. Then the Americans struck peace deals with tens of thousands of former fighters — the phenomenon known as the Sunni Awakening — while at the same time fashioning a formidable Iraqi army. After a bloody first push, violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest levels since the war began.

“It was all in,” Petraeus told me about that time.

And so if it was Petraeus who saved Iraq from cataclysm, it now falls to McChrystal to save Afghanistan.

And save Afghanistan he will, if he gets the support from President Obama. And note that should the administration cave, it won't be due to alleged claims of widespread public demands for a drawdown. As IBD reported yesterday, "Americans, In Reversal, Now Back Afghan Troop Surge." What's more likely to happen is we'll see the president capitulate to the stab-in-the-back constituencies on the Democratic-left. There's nothing more these America-haters want to see than a defeat of "U.S. imperialism" in South Asia. And despite his reassuring moves earlier this year, it looks like Obama may indeed revert to form as an acolyte of the Jeremiah Wright/Bill Ayers/Van Jones school of hard-left extremism. Should that happen - and the Americans redeploy out of the region - it's practically guaranteed that we'll see waves of attacks like those of the past few days; and we'll no doubt see additional Mumbai incursions across the region in neighboring countries as well. And God forbid the terrorists eventually succeed in toppling the Pakistan regime, with it's potentially devastating nuclear weapons capabilities.

In any case, don't miss the Frontline special, "Obama's War." A lot of good food for thought there, complete with additional consensus among analysts that the U.S. - if it gets serious about winning - is indeed in for the long haul in Afghanistan.