The New York Times highlights on its front page some damning assessments of the Afghan National Security Forces. In the words of the Times reporters, “the internal reviews, written by officials directly involved in the training program or charged with keeping it on track, describe an overstretched enterprise struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.”

The indictment is accurate as far as it goes — but it doesn’t go very far. A lot of the problems plaguing the ANSF have to do with chronic underinvestment since 2001. The U.S. and its NATO allies have never made the kind of commitment needed to produce an ANSF that could truly secure its own territory. Successive foreign commanders have limited spending on the ANSF because they wanted a force small enough that Afghans could pay for it on their own. That has produced a force far too small to take on a powerful, entrenched insurgency. The entire ANSF numbers only 180,000, and only about 100,000 of those soldiers and police are actually in the field at any one time. The Iraqi Security Forces, by contrast, number 620,000 — and Iraq is smaller than Afghanistan. As one sign of the underinvestment, soldiers and police get paid considerably less (usually under $160 a month) than do the Taliban (around $300 a month). No wonder corruption and desertion are endemic, especially among the police, when those on the front lines have trouble supporting their families and are in constant mortal peril.

Nevertheless the Afghan National Army, in particular, has performed well. Its soldiers fight hard and have made their force the most trusted institution in Afghanistan. The police lag further behind, but elements of the Afghan National Police have also performed capably. Expanding their ranks won’t be easy, because of many of the problems listed in the Times article, in particular this problem: “The most significant challenge to rapidly expanding the Afghan National Security Forces is a lack of competent and professional leadership at all levels, and the inability to generate it rapidly.”

But does that mean that it’s impossible to grow the ANSF or that we should not even bother trying? That is not the right conclusion to draw. If we devote more resources to the problem — not only more money but also more American trainers — there is little doubt that we can grow both the size and effectiveness of the ANSF. While U.S. forces are not great at building civilian governmental capacity, they do have a proven track record of generating effective military forces — often from very unpromising materials. They have been doing it as long ago as the turn-of-the-century Philippines and as recently as Iraq. They can do it in Afghanistan, too, but the Times is right to raise questions about how quickly the process can be accomplished without compromising the quality of the forces. That is precisely why we need to send more American troops as a stopgap to fill the security vacuum that exists in much of the Afghan countryside until Afghan soldiers are ready to take over on their own –which won’t happen for a number of years.

Jennifer Rubin has already commented on the Washington Post’s analysis of the Obama administration’s failures in mediating between Israelis and Palestinians. The tactical miscalculations that Glenn Kessler lays out are real enough and show a lack of savvy on the part of this administration that is, unfortunately, distressingly similar to the blunders made by many previous administrations. My Council on Foreign Relations colleague Elliott Abrams has a wonderful description of what the administration has been up to — “nine months of nonsense.”

But even if the administration had eschewed the nonsense (e.g., calls for a complete Israeli settlement freeze) and been more tactically adroit, is there any reason to assume it would have succeeded in its goal of a “final status” accord between Israelis and Palestinians? Of course not. The difference between what most Israelis will give up and what even Fatah will accept — to say nothing of Hamas — is simply too wide. To take just one example, the Palestinians have never shown themselves willing to surrender the “right to return,” which, if implemented, would mean the end of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

This doesn’t mean that American intervention is hopeless. Some of the small, limited steps taken during the Bush years — notably pushing for financial reform in the Palestinian Authority and for the creation of a more professional police force — have borne some fruit. But it is the height of hubris for any American policymaker to think that he or she can bring these age-old enemies into accord, to assume that the only thing standing in the way of agreement was the ineptitude of the previous administration. This, alas, is the illusion to which not only Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Mitchell have fallen prey. It is also the illusion that gripped Condoleezza Rice in the second Bush term when she dreamed of settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by the end of 2008. Similar grandiose visions have afflicted Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Jim Baker, Warren Christopher, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and a long line of American statesmen dating back to the 1940s. Perhaps it’s time for someone in a position of authority to admit the obvious — no final settlement is in the offing and American attempts to force one can easily result in more harm than good. There are simply certain problems so intractable that they have to be managed rather than “solved.”

It’s a little odd to see Tom Friedman, normally the high priest of globalism, in a lather about the use of contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aren’t firms like KBR, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater models of the kind of entrepreneurial firms he normally trumpets if they’re producing widgets or microchips? In this case these companies are hired to produce security — an even more precious commodity. Admittedly, they don’t always do a good job; their failings are legion and some of them are cited by Friedman. But the U.S. government has had its share of failures too. (Remember Hurricane Katrina? Abu Ghraib? The bloated stimulus package?) That doesn’t mean we write off the government as a hopeless failure; rather we work to improve its effectiveness.

We should be doing the same with contractors unless we are prepared to eschew their use altogether, as Friedman implies we should. In that case we would have to either dramatically increase the size of our armed forces or dramatically downsize our commitments, in effect ceding Afghanistan to the Taliban. If we make the former choice — increasing the size of our military — we would have to increase defense spending considerably. I personally favor that option, but I don’t see a majority in Congress getting behind it. But then I also don’t see most Americans, despite their misgivings about the war, being willing to allow a Taliban takeover.

So we are left with the road of least resistance — the use of contractors. As I’ve argued in the past, mercenaries can actually do some good — more than UN blue helmets can. But they need a regulatory and legal framework that more closely integrates their operations with our military forces in the field and that holds them to account for wrongdoings. Working to design such a framework is a lot more useful than simply bemoaning the contractors’ existence — or poking our allies in the eye while you’re doing it. (Friedman claims we don’t have a “true global alliance” in Afghanistan, even though the military mission is being run by NATO with the participation of 41 nations that have ponied up well over 30,000 troops, not counting the American contingent.)

Hamid Karzai is by no means a great statesman, but his return to office for another term does bring with it two salutary consequences. First, it will force the Obama administration to stop dragging its feet and make a decision at long last about U.S. troops levels in Afghanistan. That vital decision has been delayed reportedly because the president wanted to see who the next leader of Afghanistan would be — as if there were any serious doubt that Karzai would emerge on top. No matter who runs Afghanistan, we can’t afford to write off the country, because we are there in our own self-interest, not as a favor to Hamid Karzai or anyone else.

Second, it will force the administration to start figuring out how to improve Afghan governance rather than hoping that some deus ex machina would remove Karzai from office and magically install a new president who would dramatically improve the performance of the government. In reality, no such candidate exists or could exist. The problems are so deeply rooted and systemic that they will require years of hard, concerted effort at both the national and local levels. Focusing so much on Karzai’s future has been a distraction. Now the hard work of mentoring Afghan officials should begin. A good start would be to assign Western officials to act as full-time advisers to governors in eastern and southern Afghanistan, in much the same way that military officers are assigned as mentors to Afghan military leaders. At the moment, the job of improving governance is assigned to Provincial Reconstruction Teams, but they are project-focused, not official-focused, which means that no Western officials are in constant face-to-face interactions with the governors, who are the key intermediaries between Kabul and the people.

It would also make sense for the current U.S. ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, and other senior officials to play a similar mentoring role with Karzai — offering tough love, but only in private. In public they should refrain from the temptation to criticize Karzai, which only feeds his insecurities and drives him deeper into the arms of unsavory warlords. Karzai is not an evil man — at least not that I can tell. If anything, he is a bit weak and disorganized and plagued with predatory relatives, but those faults can be rectified or at least ameliorated with close coaching. He got that kind of attention at one time when Zal Khalilzad was U.S. ambassador, but in more recent years he has been allowed to drift. Now, perhaps, we can strive to improve governance by trying to work with Karzai rather than against him.

Greg Scoblete at Realclearworld.com takes me to task for my item on the Baghdad bombing, in which I urged readers not to lose sight of the bigger picture — namely that the situation in Iraq has improved markedly over the past couple of years. He writes:

Iraq’s population is currently 29 million. A bombing that kills 155 Iraqis is the proportional equivalent of a bombing that kills 1,600 Americans. I wonder, in the wake of such an attack, if Boot would issue similar calls for context and urge us to recognize that America remains overwhelmingly safe and secure despite the occasional terrorist atrocity.

This misses an important distinction. The United States has not been locked in a war on its home front for the past six years. Iraq has. At times that fighting became debilitating. In 2006 and early 2007, large swathes of Baghdad looked like a ghost town as residents fled in the face of Sunni suicide bombers and Shiite ethnic-cleansing squads. Today, by contrast, the capital is full of people, stores (including liquor stores) are open, and amusement parks are thronged.

All I was suggesting is that a few bombings like the one that just occurred, or the earlier bombing on August 19, have not shaken that return to normality. That doesn’t mean the bombings are acceptable or no big deal. Iraq will have trouble growing in the future if such bombings continue. Certainly all available resources should be employed to destroy the al-Qaeda cells that carried out these attacks. As long as there are still massacres in Baghdad, or anywhere else in the country, the war cannot be considered truly over. But it is still a positive sign that such atrocities are much more infrequent than they used to be.

If media leaks are to be believed, President Obama will attempt to chart a middle way in Afghanistan, sending more soldiers but not as many as General Stanley McChrystal would like. The New York Times describes the emerging strategy as “McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country,” a blend of the diametrically opposed approaches advocated by the general (who favors a counterinsurgency strategy) and the vice president (who wants to do counterterrorism operations only). The Times writes that “the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Maza-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said.” In the rest of Afghanistan, presumably, operations would be limited to a few air raids and Special Operations raids. Other media reports suggest that the administration is looking to send 10,000 to 20,000 troops — not the 40,000 that McChrystal wants.

To read more of this COMMENTARY Web Exclusive, click here.

I happened to be few miles away from the terrible bomb blasts that went off in central Baghdad on Sunday, but I first became aware of them when word spread around the conference room in the U.S. embassy, where I was being briefed.

This reminds me of what I learned long ago in Iraq: acts of violence that occur a few blocks away might as well be a world away. Once again, I learned the details from CNN, just as observers back in the U.S. did. I did not feel the roar of the explosion, nor see the smoke. Nor, I should add, did the vast majority of Baghdadis, much less of Iraqis. That is not meant to minimize the horror of what happened or to downplay its significance. It is simply to place it in some context and urge readers not to lose sight of the big picture: Attacks are still down to their lowest level since 2003-2004. Life has returned to a semblance of normality in Baghdad and other areas. A few high-profile attacks — this one or the one in August — do not change the fundamental, day-to-day reality of life getting better.

I will have more to say on this in the future, but for now I have to get my body armor and head for the Black Hawks to take a trip to southern Iraq.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes in the Washington Post today about the Marines’ success in pacifying Nawa in southern Afghanistan — the same story I mentioned in my New York Times op-ed. Chandrasekaran’s article is excellent and adds more details than I could include in a brief opinion piece. He suggests, as did I, that the relative success in Nawa — admittedly fragile and limited — indicates “that after eight years of war the United States still may be able to regain momentum in some areas that had long been written off to the Taliban.”

To expand such successful efforts across southern and eastern Afghanistan will require more troops, more time, more money — and more casualties. It’s a painful process, but what choice do we have unless we want to risk Afghanistan reverting to its pre-9/11 state? Options such as “reintegration” — offering incentives to lure Taliban fighters to lay down their arms (described in this USA Today article) — are unlikely to work until foreign and Afghan troops have changed the facts on the ground to convince the Taliban they can’t win. Other shortcuts such as the counterterrorism option or training Afghan forces can complement a large ground-force commitment but can’t substitute for it.

For an explanation of why there is no credible Plan B in Afghanistan — any more than there was in Iraq when the surge was being debated — see this New Republic article by my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Stephen Biddle.

I want to pass along a great line I heard from an American colonel while I’ve been touring Afghanistan this past week. Needless to say, American troops, or at least their officers, are watching the debate in Washington over Afghanistan with great interest and not a little consternation. They know they need more help to win — and they know they might not get it. That concern is expressed in typical soldiers’ wisecracks like this one: “Not implementing the McChrystal plan is like knowing that the rules call for 11 on 11 but deciding you’d rather play with eight — and count on knocking the opposing quarterback out of the game on the first play.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Dick Cheney’s former  national security adviser, John Hannah, has an interesting op-ed in the L.A. Times that challenges the conventional wisdom that stiffer sanctions and, even more so, military action would only unite the Iranian people around their regime. That’s not the message he received from a gathering of Iranian dissidents in Europe last week. Their view:

Popular loathing of the regime has reached such levels that almost any negative development is likely to be seized on as ammunition to attack its gross misrule. Almost any outside action that further squeezes Iran’s tyrants and calls into question their legitimacy in the eyes of the world will be welcomed, even at the risk of imposing additional hardships on the Iranian people.

The dissidents Hannah spoke to were generally more opposed to military strikes, but some suggested that they could be beneficial if they “spared civilians while destroying Iran’s nuclear installations as well as targets associated with the regime’s most repressive elements — the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia.” Such bombing raids “might well accelerate the theocracy’s final unraveling at the hands of an already boiling population.”

These views are hardly dispositive. There is always good cause to wonder how authoritative are the opinions offered by Iranians abroad, many of whom presumably have not lived in Iran for years. Nevertheless, their views should be factored into the equation as the U.S. and its allies debate whether and what kinds of sanctions to impose, and as Israel debates whether to employ force against Iran’s nuclear program.

Before I came to Afghanistan, I thought that a runoff would be a good way to deal with the fallout from the disputed presidential election that took place in August. Now that I’ve been here a week, I’m not so sure. All the problems that plagued the first round of presidential balloting — fraud and insecurity — are likely to be present in the second round. They could even be worse because there will be less time to prepare for the second election. It would have to take place by mid-November at the latest, otherwise the onset of winter will make it impossible to distribute and collect the ballots. With little time to prepare or publicize, the turnout would be low, and fraud would no doubt occur — just as it did last time. The general feeling here is that Karzai would come out on top but that the voting would do little to enhance his legitimacy.

A better solution would be a power-sharing accord that brings his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, into the government. It is also important to appoint a chief of staff or some other senior official who would be charged with increasing the efficiency of Karzai’s highly inefficient administration. Ultimately, the people of Afghanistan will judge their government based not on the procedures that put it into office but on what it does in power. If Karzai can govern more competently and defer less to corrupt politicos and warlords, he will win the people’s trust.

The worst thing the Obama administration could do is throw up its hands in despair and claim we can’t win in Afghanistan because of Karzai’s problems. In fact, every counterinsurgency effort in history has faced a problem of governmental legitimacy; if the government were generally accepted as legitimate and efficient, there would be no insurgency to begin with. Enhancing governmental credibility is a tough task but by no means a mission impossible — we’ve helped achieve that outcome in countries as varied as Greece, the Philippines, and El Salvador. We can do it in Afghanistan, too, if we work behind the scenes with Karzai to rectify some of his government’s shortcomings.

I agree with Pete Wehner about the brilliance of Charles Krauthammer’s address on “Decline Is a Choice,” which I was privileged to witness as one of the attendees at the Manhattan Institute’s annual Wriston Lecture. In essence, Krauthammer takes President Obama to task for taking actions — from weakness on the foreign front to excessive growth of government on the home front — that could lead to American decline. I couldn’t agree more with Krauthammer about the beneficial role of American hegemony in safeguarding the international system. I also agree with him in his indictment of many specific Obama policies. But I would add two modifications.

First, I think Krauthammer is placing too much stock in Obama’s words renouncing American dominance and exceptionalism and apologizing for past American misdeeds. Krauthammer writes that “the fundamental consequence” of Obama’s speeches “is to effectively undermine any moral claim that America might have to world leadership, as well as the moral confidence that any nation needs to have in order to justify to itself and to others its position of leadership.” I think that’s right, but — and here is the wrinkle that Krauthammer seems to miss — I also don’t think it’s intended. Obama’s speeches spotlighting a new, humble America are, paradoxically, a ploy designed to enhance American power. The president seems to believe that his public presentation of a “kinder, gentler” America (to borrow the formulation of his favorite Republican president) will make other nations more likely to accept our leadership on the issues he cares about — from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to global warming to cutting a deal with Iran. His policy priorities are not those that I would choose or that Krauthammer would choose, but nevertheless they reflect a desire for America to maintain a leadership role in world affairs.

The Nobel Peace Prize is likely to confirm Obama in his view that he is succeeding in winning over the world. The problem is that, while he is undoubtedly winning a popularity contest in Europe and other regions, he has not had much success in translating his personal popularity into policy success — not even with minor forays such as trying to win the Olympics for his hometown.

Second, I am so fundamentally bullish on America that I doubt whether Obama’s policies, no matter how deleterious, can seriously affect our primacy for the next few decades. The U.S. economy remains the most dynamic among all the industrialized nations; our defense budget remains the largest in the world — bigger, by some measures, than the rest of the world put together; and our population remains young and energetic — not aging as rapidly as Europe, Russia, Japan, or even China. Perhaps I am being overly sanguine, but I tend to think that the president’s ability to tamper with these fundamental ingredients of American success are limited. Even if he makes disastrous policy choices, the political system will quickly correct — as it did in 1980, with Reagan’s election after four years of Carter “malaise,” and in 1994, with the Republican congressional landslide after two years of Clinton missteps on health care, gays in the military, and Somalia.

While America has tremendous underlying strength, all our potential competitors have great weakness. Even China, which is widely (and probably correctly) pegged as the only country that can knock us off our perch, must deal with corruption, pollution, social unrest, an aging population, and myriad other complications that could interrupt the straight-line growth it has witnessed over the past three decades. I would not go so far as to claim that American dominance is predetermined and inevitable. Certainly disastrous policy choices could shake our hegemony; just imagine the consequences of terrorists setting off a series of nuclear bombs in American cities. But the Obama presidency will have to be a disaster on an unprecedented scale to do terminal damage to a country that has been the mightiest in the world economically since 1900 and militarily since 1942.

Bruce Riedel is a career CIA officer who is now at the Brookings Institution. He was an adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and earlier this year served as head of the “Afpak” policy review for the administration, which resulted in the dispatch of 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. He is, in short, not a person who can be dismissed as a conservative ideologue, so his views on the current Afghanistan debate are particularly noteworthy.

In this interview with the Council on Foreign Relations website (full disclosure: I work for the Council), he defends President Obama for doing another review just six months after the one that he completed, but he also warns,  ”At some point there is a cost to delay. And that cost comes in how our partners and how our enemies respond. Our NATO partners are already a bit squeamish. The Pakistanis are already beginning to wonder about the seriousness of the American commitment.”

He also dismisses as a “fairy tale” the notion that the Taliban could be separated from al-Qaeda or that al-Qaeda could be eliminated simply by bombing its leaders in Pakistan — both notions that are said to be gaining traction in the White House. “It’s a fairy tale,” Riedel concludes, “and it’s a prescription for disaster.”

I can only hope the president is listening to him again, as he did back in March.

You can’t make this kind of stuff up: the New York Times reports that among the paintings the Obamas have borrowed from Washington-area museums to hang in the White House is “I Think I’ll . . .” by California artist Ed Ruscha. As the Times notes, it deals with “indecision.”

Indeed it does. The painting features a reddish background, and floating on it are phrases such as “Wait a Minute,” “Maybe . . . No,” and “On Second Thought.” Hard to imagine a better metaphor for the tortuous Afghanistan-policy debate now going on in the White House.

They’re not great art, but somehow it would be more inspiring of confidence if Obama were to festoon the White House with these motivational posters featuring images and quotations of Winston Churchill.

Give E.J. Dionne points for honesty. In his Washington Post column, he makes the argument that few Democrats dare speak aloud. In essence, he writes, we should accept a high risk of failure in Afghanistan because trying to win the war will take away momentum from Obama’s domestic agenda, notably health-care reform. “The last thing he should do is rush into a new set of obligations in Afghanistan that would come to define his presidency more than any victory he wins on health care,” Dionne concludes.

If the president reaches a similar conclusion, he will define his presidency as “Carter Redux” — the last thing that Democrats interested in the long-term health of their party should want.

Ah, for the days when Democrats were castigating President Bush for supposedly not listening to his generals. See, for example, this Democratic National Committee press release from December 20, 2006, which claimed:

After insisting that troop levels in Iraq would be determined by the commanders in the field, President Bush said today during his news conference that the recommendations of his military leaders are just one of many factors that will determine whether he orders an upsurge of thousands more American troops in Iraq. President Bush is reportedly leaning toward a surge, despite reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously oppose Bush’s proposal to send more troops to Iraq without a clear mission.

But indeed President Bush was listening to some generals on the surge — generals like Odierno and Petraeus, even if their advice did run counter to those of other generals, such as Casey and Abizaid. But now Democrats seem to think that not only should they not bother listening to the generals but that the generals are actually exceeding their authority by making their views known.

The liberal Yale professor Bruce Ackerman, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, takes General McChrystal to task for making “public pronouncements” (such as his comments in London) that a counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan wouldn’t work. He believes this is evidence of McChrystal going public to “pressure the president . . . to adopt his strategy.” “This is a plain violation of the principle of civilian control,” he fumes.

Ackerman would have a point if McChrystal were acting contrary to his orders or publicly disagreeing with his orders. But he hasn’t. He has simply commented on the best way to carry out his orders. The intent of the commander in chief was made clear on March 27, when President Obama announced a “comprehensive strategy” for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan. His aim, he said, was “to enhance the military, governance, and economic capacity of Afghanistan and Pakistan” and to “reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government.” “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban or allows Al Qaeda to go unchallenged,” Obama said, “that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

All that McChrystal is doing is telling the president — and the public — what it will take to prevent that dire scenario from unfolding. There is no indication that he violated any presidential or Pentagon directive by speaking in London; if he had, surely we would have heard about it by now. The message he is sending may not be one the president wants to hear. No doubt, Obama would prefer to achieve our ends without having to send more troops, but McChrystal’s professional military judgment is that more troops will be required to avoid defeat, and it is his responsibility — not only to the commander in chief but also to the troops under his command — to tell the truth. The general is not setting new policy; he is merely offering his judgment about what it will take to implement the existing policy. If Obama wants to change the policy, that’s his prerogative, but McChrystal would be shying away from his duty if he failed to note that a different strategy would be unlikely to accomplish the president’s objectives.

Following up on the theme of listening to generals, I was struck by the comments of retired General Tony Zinni, a former head of Central Command, on Face the Nation today. He urged President Obama to make a rapid decision in favor of giving General McChrystal the troops he needs. “I think we have to be careful how long this goes on,” he said. “It could be seen not only out there in the region but our allies, even [by] the enemy, as being indecisive, unable to make a decision.”

Why isn’t the White House listening to its own handpicked general, he demanded to know? “We have a general out there who is probably the best qualified we could have that’s telling us what we need on the ground to have the security space and the time to get those non-military things done. I just don’t understand why we’re questioning that judgment at this point. I hope this doesn’t go on much longer.”

Zinni, who has been known for his cutting attacks in the past on “neocons” and his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, is not someone who can be conveniently pigeonholed. He is very much an idiosyncratic, independent thinker. The White House should find it significant that he is joining the chorus of respected generals, active-duty and retired, who urge the president to support General McChrystal.

General Sir David Richards, head of the British Army and  a well-respected former head of NATO’s force in Afghanistan, has added his voice to that of General Stanley McChrystal and other senior military figures warning that the West needs to make a bigger commitment in Afghanistan to avoid a disastrous defeat. The Daily Telegraph quotes him as saying that the consequence of defeat would be “enormous” and “unimaginable”:

If al-Qaeda and the Taliban believe they have defeated us – what next? Would they stop at Afghanistan? Pakistan is clearly a tempting target not least because of the fact that it is a nuclear-weaponed state and that is a terrifying prospect. Even if only a few of those (nuclear) weapons fell into their hands, believe me they would use them. The recent airlines plot has reminded us that there are people out there who would happily blow all of us up.

Sir David said Britain was prepared to put in more troops but only if the U.S. began to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. “If you put in more troops we can achieve the objectives laid upon us more quickly and with less casualties,” he said. He added that success was “certainly difficult” but not “mission impossible”: “Having spent the last five years more focused on Afghanistan than anything else, I’m convinced it is most certainly doable.” But Sir David, in common with American generals, does not believe the mission can be accomplished by Vice President Biden’s small-footprint counterterror strategy: “Sir David said this was a strategy which would not work.”

Generals are rarely unanimous about anything, but insofar as I can tell, there is a striking unanimity among senior generals, American and allied, familiar with the war in Afghanistan. They are in favor of giving McChrystal the resources needed to carry out his strategy. Wasn’t it only a few  years ago that Democrats were chiding President Bush for supposedly not listening to his generals? Well, who’s not listening now?

That was an outstanding speech that Gen. McChrystal gave in London. In light of the debate now going on in the administration, this part especially resonates:

We must show resolve. Uncertainty disheartens our allies, emboldens our foe. A villager recently asked me whether we intended to remain in his village and provide security, to which I confidently promised him that, of course, we would. He looked at me and said, “Okay, but you did not stay last time.”

It would be a tragedy–for us as well as for the Afghans–if we deserted them again.

It’s bad enough that many liberals are turning against the Afghanistan war that they once wholeheartedly supported. Such faintheartedness is to be expected, alas, since the Vietnam War. What’s truly dismaying, at least for me, is to see a small number of conservatives join the liberal chorus in sniping at our battle-hardened commander and his time-tested war plan.

I have already replied to the criticisms of George Will, Ralph Peters, Diana West, and Byron York. (See this op-ed and this COMMENTARY post.) Now along comes Andy McCarthy in National Review with another misguided attack on General McChrystal—and implicitly on General David Petraeus, the greatest American military commander since Eisenhower, who fully endorses McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy.

Echoing the views of Peters et al., McCarthy sneers that McChrystal—who gained a legendary reputation in Special Operations circles as head of the elite unit that tracked down and eliminated big-time terrorists between 2003 and 2008—is a “a progressive big-thinker on geopolitics, having been a military fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard’s Kennedy School.” As a fellow at the council myself, perhaps I too qualify as a “progressive big thinker,” although I have more often been labeled a “propagandist and apologist for war crimes” (Palestinian Chronicle) and a “warmonger” (the Nation). But let me nevertheless briefly try to explain why McCarthy and his ilk are so wildly off-base in criticizing McChrystal’s strategy as a “a well-meaning social experiment masquerading as a counterinsurgency.” Read the rest of this entry »

Is piracy off Somalia declining or not?

This Washington Times article claims that it is: “In the past three months, there has been just one successful hijacking in the Somali Basin, a swath of ocean stretching from the Gulf of Aden into the Indian Ocean that is criss-crossed by tens of thousands of commercial vessels each month. There were 17 hijackings In the comparable period last year.”

This press release from the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is in charge of our anti-piracy patrols, claims otherwise:  “Pirate activity has increased recently off the coast of Somalia with four attempted attacks occurring on motor vessels in the Gulf of Aden since Sept. 19. Three separate unsuccessful attacks occurred Sept. 19 and 20, while the most recent attack occurred Sept. 26 on the Panamanian-flagged Motor Vessel Handy V, in which seven pirates were arrested by the Turkish ship TCG Gediz (F-495), assigned to NATO’s Piracy Task Force. This brings the total number of piracy attacks on merchant vessels in 2009 to 146, 28 of which have been successful.”

I suppose that the two statistics cited are not necessarily incompatible: the former focuses on successful hijackings, the latter includes those that didn’t succeed. Beyond the numbers, however, it is clear that piracy remains a serious problem—one of many that we will face if Somalia remains an ungoverned space where criminals and terrorists can afford free run. Even if the international community isn’t up to doing more to bring law and order to Somalia, it can certainly do more to police the seas.

There are, it is true, a substantial number of naval vessels committed to the task but they continue to operate under crippling rules of engagement that forbid them from opening fire on suspected pirate vessels unless first fired upon—this greatly restricts their ability to bring the perpetrators to justice unless they are caught in the act. The Fifth Fleet release hints at the problem while summing up the achievements of American-organized Combined Joint Task Force 151: “Since August 2008, CTF  151 and other cooperating naval forces have disarmed and released 343 pirates, 212 others have been turned over for prosecution, and 11 were killed.”

Thus, even among the pirates who were caught, far more were released than imprisoned or killed. Presumably once freed, they went back to piracy. There aren’t many alternative jobs on offer in Somalia other than serving as gunmen for Islamist militant groups. If the U.S. and its allies took the gloves off and allowed the kind of unfettered pirate-hunting that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—when pirate vessels could be sunk on sight and captured pirates inevitably executed after a swift trial—piracy would likely disappear as a serious problem. But we are apparently too enlightened these days to do what works.

Why did the U.S. come close to defeat in Iraq? Many reasons played a role—one of the most prominent being the failure of senior U.S. commanders to speak truth to power. Tommy Franks, Ricardo Sanchez, George Casey, and John Abizaid presided over a failing war effort between 2003 and 2006 and yet never told President Bush that they could not achieve success through a light footprint. Instead of requesting more troops in service of a counterinsurgency strategy, they made do with what they had and hoped, against hope, that somehow everything would turn out alright in the end.

And why did they refrain from requesting more troops? In part because they knew such a request would have strained the army they loved. But also because they knew Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld would not welcome it. Although Rumsfeld never told his commanders not to ask for more troops, he made clear in his needling way that such a request would lead to what the current national security adviser, General Jim Jones, has called a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” (If you don’t get it, think about what “WTF” stands for.) Casey and Abizaid could take a hint, and refused to make the necessary adjustments in strategy that would also have called for adjustments in force size.

The situation began to reverse in Iraq when we got two generals not afraid to speak their minds—first Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, then Gen. David Petraeus, who both realized it would take more troops to win and were not afraid to say so despite the furor that such a request would provoke in Washington. Both men and Petraeus in particular took considerable heat. Recall the infamous moveon.org ad that labeled our most successful military commander since Eisenhower “General Betray Us.”

Now Gen. Stan McChrystal finds himself in the hot seat. Like Petraeus and Odierno in Iraq, he is speaking truth to power—the truth being that we need more troops to prevail in Afghanistan. He was in London today and according to the New York Times account, was asked whether the approach advocated by Joe Biden—to downsize our troop commitment and focus on killing selected terrorist leaders—could work. His answer was blunt and honest:

“The short answer is: no,” he said. “You have to navigate from where you are, not where you wish to be. A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”

This is a courageous statement for him to make, because Gen. McChrystal knows he is speaking against the views of the vice president and most likely those of the national security adviser as well—not to mention the views of most Congressional Democrats. At least when Gen. Petraeus told the truth regarding the Iraq War, he knew he had the solid support of the president. McChrystal cannot be confident of any such support because all indications suggest that the man in the Oval Office hasn’t made up his mind on what to do.

If Obama rejects McChrystal’s advice and chooses the narrow counter-terror option, McChrystal will be placed in an uncomfortable, possibly untenable, place. That might have caused a lesser officer to trim his sails, but not McChrystal. He is carrying out the responsibilities of his command assignment in the finest tradition of the American armed forces—a tradition of truth-telling that has been honored, sadly, more in theory than in practice.

American intelligence officials are crowing about all the success they’ve had with strikes against al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan. According to this Washington Post article, “‘surgical’ missile attacks on terrorist leaders in their inaccessible Pakistani mountain sanctuaries and elsewhere had been increasingly successful and had largely avoided the civilian casualties that had been a source of anti-American sentiment. A total of 39 such attacks have been launched between January and mid-September, according to news reports, compared with 36 under the Bush administration in 2008.”

Such success is being cited by those like Vice President Biden who want to revert to a limited counterterror strategy in Afghanistan and who oppose sending more ground troops. If counterterror is working in Pakistan, why not in Afghanistan?

In the first place, I would treat claims of success against al-Qaeda and its affiliates with a grain of salt. Such claims have been made before, and inevitably we have been unpleasantly surprised by those groups’ ability to regenerate themselves. Even if true, however, the success of the “surgical” strikes does not obviate the need for a large-scale counterinsurgency. It is no coincidence, surely, that we are having more success picking off terrorists in Pakistan, given the offensives that the Pakistani army is staging with tens of thousands of troops into the terrorists’ lairs. Pressure from ground troops is undoubtedly disrupting insurgent communications and command-and-control networks and forcing them to relocate, all of which makes them more vulnerable to Predator strikes. The only way to consolidate those gains and to prevent terrorists from moving back is to occupy their former havens. That’s something that the Pakistani army can do on its side of the Durand Line, but who will do the comparable task on the Afghan side of the border? Only the U.S. has the needed capability.

If we were to leave Afghanistan, it would make it impossible to chase terrorists effectively not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan also. Our terrorist-hunting in Pakistan is made possible by the presence of secure U.S. bases from which we can fly Predators. If we had to revert to weapons platforms based in the Indian Ocean—as occurred in the 1990s—it would be virtually impossible to pick off terrorist kingpins because of the many hours’ flight time required to act on intelligence of their whereabouts. If we start pulling out of Afghanistan, it is doubtful that we could keep secure bases in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Those states would come under such great pressure from the militants that they would be forced to cut deals. Then all our vaunted “success” against al-Qaeda could vanish in a puff of smoke.

It’s hard to know what to make of this Wall Street Journal article: “Gates Doubts U.S.’s Afghan Strategy.” It reveals that “a senior defense official said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates now worries that counterinsurgency might no longer be a viable approach for countering the Taliban violence roiling once-stable parts of north and west Afghanistan.” But at the same time, the very last paragraph quotes Gates’s spokesman as saying that Gates is opposed to a narrow “counterterror” strategy of the kind pushed by Vice President Biden, because he “does not think that is a path to success in Afghanistan.”

I can only hope that this does not mean that Gates is coming to favor some kind of halfhearted compromise—maintaining a counterinsurgency strategy but not sending enough troops to fully implement it. Such options are outlined in this New York Times article and in this Washington Post article, which reports that many Hill Democrats are coalescing around what might be called the Levin Plan, after Senator Carl Levin, who favors doing more to train Afghan forces but not sending more American troops.

This approach ignores what we learned in Iraq—that training alone does not produce an effective military. What really increases effectiveness is joint operations between American and indigenous forces so that the locals can see how it’s done. That, however, requires a substantial American troop presence—one that we had in Iraq but don’t yet have in Afghanistan. Those American troops are also needed to deal with the hardest fights because, initially, Afghan troops, just like their Iraqi predecessors, won’t have the capability to defeat the most formidable insurgents. Throwing them into the fight by themselves before they’re ready, which is what the Levin Plan would do, is a recipe for failure. I agree entirely with a Bush administration NSC veteran who is quoted therein as saying, “The middle options are either high risk or they’re status quo or they’re unworkable.”

The Texas politico Jim Hightower famously said, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” In the case of Afghanistan, that might be amended to read “dead Americans” because a middle-of-the-road option is going to get more American servicemen killed without producing the same chance of success as a full-fledged counterinsurgency. If we are going to risk the lives of our troops and our allies’ troops, it had better be in the pursuit of victory—not for some kind of lame holding action that results from ambivalence and indecision in Washington.

While professing a tough anti-terrorist stance, Israel continues to make concessions to terrorists who are responsible for killing or kidnapping its soldiers. The latest example is the deal whereby Israel has released 20 female prisoners to Hamas in return for a video showing that Sgt. Gilad Shalit is still alive. I can see making such a deal to actually get Shalit back, but just to get a video? That seems pretty lopsided, but it’s part of a longstanding pattern.

Wikipedia (admittedly not the most reliable source) claims: “Over the last 30 years, Israel has released about 7,000 Palestinian prisoners to secure freedom for 19 Israelis and to retrieve the bodies of eight others.” If accurate, that figure would suggest that one Israeli, dead or alive, is worth 259 living, breathing terrorists. I can see why Israel makes such deals—because of the dictates of humanity and the pressure from family members. For similar reasons did the Reagan administration trade arms for hostages with Iran. But such deals are a bad idea in the long run because they reward terrorism.

Prime Minister Netanyahu knows this well. Usually he advocates uncompromising anti-terror policies. But in office, he seems to be succumbing to some of the same sentimentality as his predecessors did. That is an understandable, and in many ways a laudable, response; but still a dangerous one for a state facing enemies who make much of the fact that they “love death” while Israelis (and Americans and Europeans) “love life.”