24 June 2010: Boston Globe
US military chafes under civilian leadership
By HDS Greenway
THERE IS something classic in the downfall of General Stanley McChrystal, the US top commander in Afghanistan who is a brilliant strategist, tactician, and disciplinarian who, in the end, could not discipline himself. Unfortunately his gaffe with Rolling Stone was not his first indiscretion. His speech before the International Institute for Strategic Studies last fall was borderline interference with his bosses’ decision making. The leak of his proposed strategy memo before President Obama had finished his review of Afghan policy led to the impression that the president’s hand was being forced.
The obvious parallel is with General Douglas MacArthur, arguably World War II’s most brilliant commander, whose hubris exceeded McChrystal’s. His successes in the Korean War went to his head. Indeed, in the days of Rome he might have been proclaimed a god.
He, like McChrystal, thought he was dealing with a president who lacked resolve and might be pushed around. MacArthur’s strategy for Korea, after the Chinese entered the war, was to surge into China itself. He went public with his plan, in defiance of the president, and got fired for it.
There appears to have been no criticism of Obama’s war strategy in the Rolling Stone article. After all it was, with a few modifications, McChrystal’s plan. But just below the level of insubordination, however, there is no doubt that the US military in Afghanistan chafes under its civilian leadership. Obama’s Afghan team has long been in disarray.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worries that if things don’t work out in Afghanistan it will be her department and the civilian effort that will get the blame for losing the war. A better Afghan government is necessary before there can be any light at the end of this tunnel, and the military feels that is the job of the State Department while the military fights the war.
No general would be so impolitic as to say it, but generals typically don’t feel all that comfortable with Democrats. Military men mostly find Republicans more in tune with their thinking.
Military and civilians agree that the war has to end in some kind of political settlement, not by military force alone. “You have to change governance conditions,’’ McChrystal said just before he was invited to the woodshed in Washington. “ You have to change the minds of the people, their perceptions of the future . . . then they can start to make decisions whether they want to support the government or want to support the insurgency.’’
Yet there is still the feeling in the military, as the old saying goes, that if you grab them in a particularly sensitive place, “their hearts and minds will follow.’’ A big difference between the US and the government of Hamid Karzai is that Karzai has little faith left that the Americans can win, thus his efforts to make the best possible deal he can with the Taliban.
McChrystal’s strategy calls for softening up the Taliban with the troop surge to make it more amenable to negotiations, and to make Afghan civilians see that the Taliban is not necessarily going to come out on top. McChrystal’s indiscretion is not going to help that cause.
The military has reason to fear that its civilian masters lack its resolve. Consider that Obama’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke, said in March that US policy was to peel-off lower levels of Taliban commanders, but not negotiate with the leadership. Recently, however, he said that the policy had shifted and the United States was now in favor of “Afghan-led reconciliation efforts.’’
Generals are trained and motivated to win wars, while presidents, such as Truman and Obama, often want to keep them limited. William Westmoreland asked for a couple of hundred thousand more troops to surge in Vietnam, but his civilian bosses wanted to wind the war down.
Obama was right to realize that the only credible replacement for McChrystal is McChrystal’s boss, David Petraeus, who in Iraq was put in the role of Cincinnatus, the Roman general called from the plow to save a losing war. But one hopes that Obama, like that old statesman of World War I, Georges Clemenceau, realizes now that wars are always too important to be entrusted to generals.
H.D.S. Greenway’s column appears regularly in the Globe.
