Sen. Jim Webb’s recent comments about his concerns about the U.S. role in Afghanistan didn’t make any headlines, but the Obama administration — and the many reporters who cover it—would do well to play close attention to them.
Webb, D-Va., said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that, in drawing up its congressionally mandated December report, Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, “the administration must provide us some clarity, not only as to specific programs, but as to what their policies are expected to accomplish in a larger sense.”
“The argument that we are in Afghanistan because of 9/11 is true only in the sense that the presence of international terrorists inside Afghanistan at that time illuminated the overall threat,” said Webb. “International terrorism is by its very nature mobile, with the capability to operate in many areas, as we know well.”
In other words, Webb said, if the United States is in Afghanistan to counter the global threat posed by al-Qaida and affiliated militants, it needs to do a better job of explaining how it hopes to accomplish that by surging tens of thousands of additional American troops into the country and asking them to do counter-insurgency—especially when al-Qaida’s command has moved to neighboring Pakistan.
Although counterinsurgency, or COIN, has become all the rage within the Obama administration, a growing number of military experts are quietly saying that it could easily draw the United States into a protracted and debilitating (and extraordinarily expensive) war that essentially cannot be won.
The reason: The COIN strategy means that the U.S. military, and its allies in ISAF, are waging war in order to eliminate—or at least diminish—the legitimacy of the Taliban insurgency in alliance with a U.S.-backed government in Kabul that is, at best, a reluctant partner. For that effort to succeed, U.S. forces must also convince the Afghan population to support the Karzai government, even as the already unpopular regime grows even more unpopular with each revelation of corruption—and each public increase in U.S. support.
In his explosive Rolling Stone article last month that resulted in Obama firing his Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, freelance journalist Michael Hastings captured some very telling conversations between the general and soldiers that he was visiting on the front lines of the counterinsurgency effort. One of them tells McChrystal that some of the men believed the U.S. is not only losing the war, but that the troops don’t even know why they’re there.
In the piece, Hastings reports that McChrystal defended his counterinsurgency strategy but that the troops remained highly skeptical. Moreover, Hastings quotes McChrystal’s own chief of operations as saying that the U.S. COIN effort in Afghanistan is, essentially, doomed.
“It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, McChrystal’s chief of operations, is quoted as saying. “This is going to end in an argument.”
Although Webb’s comments were more measured, they carry a lot of clout. Besides being a decorated Marine Corps veteran and former secretary of the Navy, he has in relatively short order become one of the more influential congressional Democrats on the issue. He serves on both the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees in the Senate.
“In its December review, it is important for the Administration to clearly show how the process it is putting into place in Afghanistan will degrade or defeat the threat of international terrorism,” Webb said at the hearing. “This can only be done by demonstrating: (1) measurable results, (2) evidence of political stability; and (3) an agreed upon conclusion to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.”
