Abstract
Unlike the ‘dumb’ war in Iraq, Afghanistan was portrayed throughout the 2008 election campaign as the ’good’ war, providing Obama a foil to demonstrate his toughness on foreign policy. Yet, despite the optimistic assumptions among Obama administration staffers, the ‘landscape’ spoke back, and it became quickly apparent that the US strategy was not working, prompting questions over US goals in Afghanistan. The lack of US knowledge of the Afghan terrain became evident throughout the autumn 2009 debate over escalation. Internal references and reports shaped the debate and, in the absence of knowledge of Afghanistan, analogies crept in, with civilian advisors fearful of another Vietnam, while many in the military invoked the ‘successful’ counterinsurgency in Iraq as a model that could be applied in Central Asia.
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Notes
Barack Obama, Remarks at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC: ‘The War We Need to Win’, August 1, 2007. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=77040
David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and the Surprising Use of American Power (New York, Crown Publishers, 2012), 20.
Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 77.
The literature detailing the drift of the postinvasion years is extensive. See, for instance, Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: How the West Lost its Way (Yale: Yale University Press, 2010;
Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010);
Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin, 2009).
Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President on a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan’, The White House, March 27, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-a-New-Strategy-for-Afghanistan-and-Pakistan. Of course, Al Qaeda were now proliferating in other areas: see Chapter 2.
For more on the contemporary debate on counterinsurgency, see Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: New Press, 2013);
Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013);
David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 2009).
David Petraeus, ‘Striking a Balance: A New American Security’, Keynote Address, Center for a New American Security Conference, Washington, DC, June 11, 2009, available at .www.cnas.org/files/multimedia/documents/Petraeus_transcript_Complete.pdf.
Andrew M. Exum, Nathaniel C. Fick, Ahmed A. Humayun, and David Kilcullen, Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2009), 7.
Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2013), 295.
Stanley McChrystal to Robert M. Gates, ‘Commander’s Initial Assessment’ (Kabul, Afghanistan: Headquarters, NATO International Security Assistance Force, Afghanistan), August 30, 2009, sec. 1–1, available at http://www.media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_Redacted_092109.pdf
Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 448.
Michael T. Flynn, Matt Pottinger, Paul D. Bachelor, ‘Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan’, Washington DC: Center for a New American Security 2009, 4, 7. http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/Afghanlntel_Flynn_Jan2010_code507_voices.pdf.
Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of Secretary at War (London: WH Allen, 2014), 336.
Vali Nasr, The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (London: Scribe, 2013), 22–23.
Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics (London: Hurst, 2012), 98–99.
Carter Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
On the ‘lessons of history’ and the dilemmas they pose for policy-makers, see Yueng Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Ernest R. May, ‘Lessons’ of the Past: the Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975);
Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: the Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1988).
McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 351; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983).
Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999).
For more on Sorley’s thesis and its influence on the US military, see David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
John A. Nagl, ‘A ‘Better War’ in Afghanistan’, prepared statement before the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 111th Congress, 1st Session, September 16, 2009.
Marvin Kalb, ‘The Other War Haunting Obama’, The New York Times, October 8, 2011. See also Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 241–306.
Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 2008).
Karl Eikenberry, cable to Hillary Clinton, subject: ‘COIN Strategy, Civilian Concerns’, November 6, 2009, 1, available at http://www.documents.nytimes.com/eikenberry-s-memos-on-the-strategy-in-afghanistan.
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Fitzgerald, D., Ryan, D. (2014). Afghanistan, Escalation and the ‘Good War’. In: Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428561_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428561_3
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