Obama's Afghanistan Surprise

At the other end of the spectrum, former US military officers, some now acting as civilian trainers for Afghan troops, are bullish about adapting a large-scale counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan. While mindful of the importance of covert counterterrorist tactics and quiet regional diplomacy, these officers advocate a full-scale commitment to nation-building. Their concerns are rural electrification, road building, the shaky legitimacy of the Karzai government, endemic corruption, and even eradication of Afghanistan’s prime cash cow, the heroin trade. Their byword is “the best weapons don’t shoot.”

General David Petraeus, who last month became chief of Central Command, in charge of US forces in the region, is keenly aware of the problems Afghanistan presents to military strategists. In October, he appointed a special Joint Strategic Assessment Team, headed by the Army’s top counterinsurgency expert, Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, to come up with a plan to present to Obama shortly after the inauguration.

Petraeus is not pulling his punches. He has signaled that the US “effort in Afghanistan is going to be the longest campaign of the long war.” He also declared that he believes an Iraq-style military strategy—in which troops live among and protect civilians, identify and destroy terrorist networks, and seek reconciliation with moderate insurgents—could work in Afghanistan. Petraeus concedes building up Afghanistan’s security forces to do the job will take time, money, and a long-term US commitment. “...You cannot kill or capture your way out of an insurgency,” he says.

The general’s immediate military priorities, military sources speculate, will be to deploy enough US troops to reestablish security for the Afghan people, and enough US advisers to train some 350,000 Afghan troops and police and enable them to mount the kind of counterinsurgency operations that made the Iraq “surge” effective. US strategists would like to nearly quadruple the size of the Afghan army, which now numbers 58,000.

General Petraeus has a considerable professional stake in pushing the newly refined US counterinsurgency doctrine, which he and his brain trust resurrected from the ashes of Vietnam in 2006. For now, the general is credited with turning around Iraq, and is routinely compared by admirers to General Matthew Ridgeway in Korea. Given the speed with which the tenets of “full-spectrum” counterinsurgency have swept the officer corps, Petraeus is presenting the new president with a military strategy that already has a momentum of its own with commanders on the ground and at the Pentagon.

Obama made it very clear to Petraeus last summer in Iraq that he would hear out the general’s military proposals, then weigh the national interest and make his own decisions. A vocal faction among US officers is worried Petraeus’s counterinsurgency juggernaut has moved too fast, without proven results or sufficient debate. Petraeus himself readily admits the security produced by the surge in Iraq is “not irreversible,” a cautionary note that applies as well to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan will be among the first major tests of Obama’s presidency. The danger is that Petraeus’s full-blown, can-do, war-fighting doctrine—which promises to enhance the utility of American armed forces over the next half-century—will so dazzle the usually cautious but change-minded new president that Afghanistan policy could well turn into a “Yes, we can!” trap, guaranteeing an outsize American military footprint and financial commitment, with potentially disastrous consequences, as the Russians are only the most recent to attest.

Russ Hoyle is the author of Going to War (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2008), a detailed account of the18-month run-up to the Iraq war. He is a former senior editor at the New York Daily News, Time, and The New Republic. Hoyle is at work on a new book about counterinsurgency and the U.S. military.