Today the Senate unanimously confirmed General David Petraeus as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Among the most contentious issues addressed in yesterday’s confirmation hearing were, as expected, Petraeus’ plans for modifying the current rules of engagement (ROE) and the administration’s July 2011 withdrawal timeline.

With respect to ROE, Petraeus noted that he was “keenly aware of concerns by some of our troopers on the ground about the application of our rules of engagement and the tactical directive,” and insisted that it is a “moral imperative to bring all assets to bear to protect our men and women in uniform”—suggesting, as many had predicted, that a reevaluation is forthcoming.

On the issue of the timeline, the general reaffirmed his commitment to the president’s policy, with the understanding that “July 2011 will mark the beginning of a process, not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits.” Echoing President Obama’s comments last Sunday, Petraeus acknowledged that “it is going to be a number of years before Afghan forces can truly handle the security tasks of Afghanistan on their own.”  Nevertheless in his written response to questions submitted by the committee prior to the hearing, Petraeus maintained that the president’s policy as announced in December had effectively

convey[ed] two messages, one of enormous additional commitment and one of urgency. I believe there was value in sending a message of urgency—July 2011—as well as the message the President was sending of commitment—the additional, substantial numbers of forces.

But legitimate questions remain about the wisdom of imparting that sense of urgency upon Afghan officials. As Senator John McCain rightly noted in his opening statement yesterday, the withdrawal date has not served as an “incentive for the Karzai administration to make better decisions, and to make them more quickly,” as intended, but instead, “is causing Afghan leaders to hedge their bets on us.” The same goes for the Afghan population and Afghanistan’s neighbors in the region.

So what exactly has the timeline achieved thus far? Senator Carl Levin offered the following:

Lieutenant General Caldwell, who commands our training efforts in Afghanistan, told us that when President Obama announced the date, the Afghan leadership made a greater effort to reach out to the local leaders and elders, resulting in a surge in recruits for the Afghan Army.

Now, there was indeed a surge in Afghan Army recruits in the first weeks of December, following the president’s West Point speech. Reports at the time, however, suggested that it stemmed primarily from recent increases in Afghan soldiers’ salaries.

General Petraeus, for his part, has yet to articulate with any degree of specificity what “value” the president’s “message of urgency” has borne out thus far.

In the course of the hearing, Senator Levin also cited his concern about the disparity in the number of coalition and Afghan forces deployed in Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces—40,000 and 11,000, respectively, as reported by Petraeus’ staff prior to the hearing. If those numbers are accurate, the Senator has a valid point. The operations in Helmand, focused on the provincial Taliban stronghold of Marjah, have been a strategic sideshow as compared to those slated to unfold in the coming months in Kandahar, whose capital and key districts represent the Taliban’s center of gravity. While there was a certain logic to reinforcing ongoing operations in Helmand earlier this year (operations that had originally been planned and set in motion in the last days of General McChrystal’s predecessor) with the first of the president’s 30,000 surge forces, it’s now time to reapportion resources between Afghanistan’s contested southern provinces in better accordance with ISAF’s strategic priorities.

(Photo: flickr/lukexmartin)

At the G8 summit last weekend, President Obama and President Lee Myung-Bak stood united in their message on North Korea,  demonstrating why the alliance, sixty years after the start of the Korean War,  remains a model for success. While this is in large part due to great alliance management, North Korea and China—whose actions continue to drive the United States and South Korea closer to one another—deserve some of the credit, too.

With the decision this weekend to officially delay from 2012 to 2015 the planned transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) of South Korean forces from Washington to Seoul, Obama and Lee showed they share a pragmatic and flexible approach to maintaining a strong alliance. Obama put Lee’s concerns of a premature transfer above his commitment to an arbitrary timetable set back in 2007. This was a wise move for a number of reasons, but above all else, it reiterated U.S. commitment to peace and security in Northeast Asia at a time when the situation in North Korea is looking increasingly unstable. It also demonstrates that the alliance is moving substantively towards greater equality: South Korea now has more time to develop the necessary capabilities to successfully combat the threat from Pyongyang, a process which will ultimately lead to less dependence on the U.S.

With North Korea’s attack on the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan, Pyongyang gave the U.S. the impetus to respond to South Korea’s pleas to push back the OPCON transfer; for years the U.S. stood firm on the 2012 deadline despite various calls from Seoul urging its delay. The Cheonan attack reminded the countries in the region that the peninsula is ripe for crisis, making allied preparedness crucial. The current period of rising tensions and increased provocations is no time to experiment with the transfer of wartime command of forces.

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Fred and Kim Kagan have an excellent piece in the Weekly Standard on the state of play in Afghanistan as General David Petraeus takes command.

The Kagans first skewer some of the myths about the apparent failure of the ISAF offensive in Marjah, which had become a central element in the pessimistic narrative on Afghanistan which began to emerge in the weeks preceding General Stanley McChrystal’s departure:

The biggest problem with the Marjah operation, however, is that it was justified and explained on the wrong basis. Marjah is not a vitally important area in principle, even in Helmand. It is important because of its role as a Taliban base camp. It was so thoroughly controlled by the insurgents that the prospects for the rapid reestablishment of governance were always dim. It was fundamentally a military objective rather than a political one, and McChrystal made a mistake by offering Marjah as a test case of ISAF’s ability to improve Afghan governance. What matters about Marjah is that the enemy can no longer use it as a sanctuary and headquarters. ISAF’s military success there has allowed the coalition to launch subsequent operations in the Upper Helmand River Valley, particularly the more strategically important contested area around Sangin. The Marjah operation has so far succeeded in what it should have been intended to do.

They also draw upon lessons from Iraq to illustrate strategies for dealing with powerbrokers at various levels within the Afghan government—chief among which is Ahmad Wali Karzai, the half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose malign influence in Kandahar has been driving aggrieved Pashtuns into the arms of the Taliban, fueling the insurgency. In Iraq, the Kagans explain, the United States learned that curbing malign behavior among sectarian officials needn’t necessarily require their removal, but merely the clever and patient application of pressure:

Iraqi sectarian actors did not suddenly see the light and embrace diversity. They changed their behavior in response to a wide array of pressures brought on them and their patrons by the entire American team, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker down to soldiers in the streets. Petraeus and Crocker in particular adopted a highly nuanced approach to the problem. When they had strong information (not necessarily legal evidence) that particular leaders were behaving badly, they confronted the prime minister with that information as a policy matter rather than a legal one…

As these efforts were going on, Petraeus and Crocker inserted American forces into contested neighborhoods and effectively took control of the ground. Their presence changed the equation—local people reported on the misbehavior of Iraqi officials; American forces took notice and, when appropriate, took action. By simultaneously taking the fight into the safe-havens and strongholds of the Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda in Iraq, U.S. forces reduced the capability of those terrorists and began to bring down the violence

Fred and Kim report that ISAF has already begun to sever ties with some of Kandahar’s many private security companies, which double as militias for the provincial powerbrokers and represent one of their primary means of antagonizing the population. This is an encouraging development, and only part of what will hopefully be a broad set of creative counterinsurgency measures implemented under the leadership of General Petraeus.

(flickr/U.S. Central Command/DoD Photo by USAF Staff Sgt. Bradley A. Lail)

The firing of General Stanley McChrystal has been the occasion for the Pundit Class to trot its talking points on civil-military relations—and, in particular, the issue of “civilian control of the military,” as though the United States had become a banana republic or George McClellan has stepped out of his grave.

The modern Left is ever-vigilant against the threat of a Man on Horseback; thus Paul Begala demanded that the president “fire his [McChrystal's] ass.” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, even more given to rants than Begala, used the same phrase.  Both, no doubt, wished no more than to dress down McChrystal to his face.

The real issue is not control, however, but relations—the “unequal dialogue” between soldiers and statesmen, wherein the civilians have the power to decide, the military the obligation to obey, but the larger imperative is to communicate.  The health of the relationship is not measured by the amount of ass-kicking, but the amount of talking.

This imperative is never more on display than in irregular warfare and, in this case, the “Long War” in greater Middle East in which the United States has become engaged.  As Mackubin Thomas Owens points out in his essay (PDF) in the recent Center for Defense Studies’ book, Lessons for a Long War, the Obama Administration’s approach to Afghanistan has been unhealthy from the start, when, prior to the president’s decision to “surge,”

officers on General McChrystal’s staff and elsewhere [were] frustrated by the president’s failure to make a decision about how to proceed in Afghanistan, and about perceived attempts to muzzle the general by cutting off his legitimate access to Congress.  They wonder why, after having declared the conflict there a “war of necessity,” the president has not provided the necessary means to fight it properly.  They wonder why, having selected McChrystal to turn things around in Afghanistan, President Obama has not supported him the way that George Bush supported [Gen. David] Petraeus in Iraq.

Some of these questions remain unanswered even with the replacement of McChrystal by Petraeus.  As Owens observes, the administration has “sown distrust on the part of soldiers, thereby increasing civil-military tensions.”  These seeds have grown terribly into the McChrystal quotes in Rolling Stone, but lopping off the flower leaves the roots of distrust untouched.

Owens concludes his essay by noting that, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been involved in a painful renegotiation of the civil-military bargain, the compact between the few who serve and the many who enjoy the security and prosperity of American life.  The compact is at risk not only because of the indiscretion of some officers, or the insularity of the military community, but also from the incomprehension and failures of empathy of civilian elites and political leaders.  The arts of supreme command—which are interested in President Obama even if he is not interested in them—go well beyond issuing firm orders.  Better to lead the horse by the bridle than kick it from behind.

(flickr/U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Paul Villanueva II)

The nomination of General David Petraeus to replace General Stanley McChrystal is the best possible outcome of the flap that has consumed the attention of many in Washington and beyond for the last 36 hours. The speed and creativity of the president’s decision were rather remarkable. His speech was even-handed, giving praise to McChrystal for his record of accomplishments, but citing his ultimate failure to adhere to the strict code of civil-military conduct.

No word yet, of course, on the fate of McChrystal’s civilian colleagues. But the President’s comments about the importance of “unity of effort” suggest that while Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Richard Holbrooke’s jobs may not be in immediate jeopardy, there will be some serious scrutiny as to the effectiveness of the United States’ country team and governance strategy in Kabul. Petraeus, one would expect, will make sure of that.

Questions also remain about what will happen at the helm of U.S. Central Command. Will Petraeus retain command at CENTCOM and in Afghanistan? Tomorrow General Ray Odierno will appear before Congress for his confirmation hearings to become commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command. Wouldn’t Odierno’s considerable experience in Iraq be better applied as CENTCOM chief, given the critical period we’re entering in U.S.-Iraqi relations?

UPDATE: A White House spokesman has confirmed that General Petraeus will “give up CENTCOM.”

(Photo: flickr/lauren victoria burke)

CDS director Tom Donnelly argues today at AOL News that the McChrystal flap has provided the administration an opportunity to recommit to victory in Afghanistan. Doing so, however, will necessarily involve cleaning-house in Kabul:

The real test of Obama’s commitment to success in this war is not whether he rids himself of a troublesome general, but whether he rids himself of all the other troublesome elements of his “team of rivals” — Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, “AfPak Czar” Richard Holbrooke, to name two — and muzzles the vice president.

His breach of civil-military norms aside, McChrystal rendered himself operationally ineffective with his comments in Rolling Stone—there’s no way he could have returned to Afghanistan and sustained a productive working relationship with either Eikenberry or Holbrooke (although for what it’s worth, President Karzai seemed eager to have him back). But it’s critical to note that the U.S. “country team” in Kabul has been in shambles for the past year. For all the talk last December about implementing a “comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign,” there has yet to be a clear articulation of a coalition political and economic strategy to complement McChrystal’s plans for the military. Now is the time to make sure we get the civilian side of the equation in Kabul right.

(Photo: flickr/The White House)

Over at the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol and CDS director Tom Donnelly have penned a special editorial on this morning’s story about General Stanley McChrystal. The text is below:

If Stan McChrystal has to go—and he probably does—it will be a sad end to a career of great distinction and a low moment in a lifetime devoted to duty, honor, and country. But the good of the mission and the prospects for victory in Afghanistan may well now demand a new commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

While there are obvious issues of civil-military relations exposed by the general’s cringe-inducing quotes in the “Runaway General” article in Rolling Stone—and while his staff appear to be off the leash entirely, a command climate for which McChrystal is responsible—the original source of the problem is above the general’s pay grade.

So McChrystal should not be the only one to go.  Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and “AfPak” czar Richard Holbrooke should likewise either submit their resignations or be fired by President Obama.  Vice President Biden and his surrogates should be told to sit down and be quiet, to stop fighting policy battles in the press.  The administration’s “team of rivals” approach is producing only rivalry.

Most of all, the commander-in-chief must take command.  Barack Obama’s commitment is famously and publicly uncertain.  No one—not his lieutenants, nor his cabinet, nor his generals, nor the American people, nor our allies, nor the Afghans, nor our enemies—can be sure whether the president wants to win the war or just to end the war.

The McChrystal contretemps creates an opportunity to right many of these wrongs; the White House should not waste this crisis. Anything less than a clean sweep will leave the war effort impaired.

The imposition of a troop-withdrawal deadline, in particular, has poisoned our Afghanistan strategy. McChrystal has, understandably, behaved like a man under pressure to produce quick results to get good marks in the administration’s December Afghanistan strategy review.  Even the timetable for the review is premature and therefore transparently artificial: the last “surge” brigade won’t be deployed until November.

The shortage of time is also compounded by the shortage of forces.  McChrystal’s cardinal achievement to date has been the re-wiring of the dysfunctional ISAF structure, but it’s also required him to deploy forces in places such as Kunduz, north of Kabul but still a Pashtun area where the Taliban have been more active, because the German forces there are insufficient.

If the United States fails in Afghanistan, it won’t be because Gen. McChrystal or his staff were indiscreet or insubordinate (which, strictly speaking, they were not).  Indeed, if the war can’t be quickly won in Afghanistan, it won’t be quickly lost there, either. And in fact it can be won, though it will take some time. The war can, however, be lost rapidly in Washington.

(Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

The past week saw some important developments in the debate within the Beltway about the trajectory of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. Last Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Hearing with General David Petraeus and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy revealed a growing consensus among the committee’s leadership that the administration’s timeline for withdrawal stands to undermine the prospect of U.S. success in Afghanistan. As Senator McCain noted in his opening statement,

“No matter how much it has been explained and fixed with caveats, the decision to begin withdrawing our forces from Afghanistan arbitrarily in July 2011 seems to be having exactly the effect that many of us predicted it would:  It is convincing the key actors inside and outside of Afghanistan that the United States is more interested in leaving than succeeding in this conflict, and as a result, they are all making the necessary accommodations for a post-American Afghanistan.”

Senator Carl Levin likewise acknowledged his preference for doing the job right, rather than rushing to satisfy an arbitrary timeline:

“I trust General McChrystal’s judgment on the timing. He’s right that, quote, “it’s more important we get it right than we get it fast.” And then he’s also saying, correctly in my judgment, that when you go to protect people, the people have to want you to protect them. So I’d rather delay a few months and have a few more Afghan forces in the lead when the security presence is expanded and operations begin more forcefully than to have an ISAF-dominated force attempt to secure Kandahar a few months earlier.”

General Petraeus went on to clarify his interpretation of the July 2011 withdrawal date, carefully explaining that “what happens in July 2011 is a beginning of a process for transition that is conditions-based and the beginning of a, quote, ‘process of a responsible drawdown of U.S. forces.’” When pressed by Senator Levin as to whether his support for the July withdrawal policy represented his “best personal, professional judgment,” Petraeus paused, then offered the following:

“In a perfect world, Mr. Chairman, we have to be very careful with timelines. We went through this in Iraq, as you will recall. And I did set a timeline ultimately in Iraq. In fact, testifying before this body in September 2007, I said we would start the drawdown of our surge forces in December based on a projection of conditions that would be established. We are assuming that we will have those kinds of conditions that will enable that by that time in July 2011. That’s the projection. And that is what again we have supported.”

In other words, “a qualified yes,” said Petraeus. But a close parsing of his response reveals that the commencement of withdrawals, not just the pace or scale, is dependent upon the establishment of adequate conditions.

On “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend, Defense Secretary Bob Gates reiterated the administration’s commitment to the July 2011 withdrawal date, but disputed the rate, scope, and scale of the drawdown as described by Vice President Biden in Jonathan Alter’s recent insider-history, The Promise:  “In July of 2011,” Biden is quoted in the book as saying, “you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.”

“That absolutely has not been decided,” Gates told Fox.

On ABC’s “This Week,” meanwhile, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel offered a similar message:

“Everybody knows there’s a firm date. And that firm date…deals with the troops that are part of the surge, the additional 30,000. What will be determined at that date or going into that date will be the scale and scope of that reduction. But there will be no doubt that that’s going to happen.”

“Everybody agreed on that date. General Petraeus did. Secretary Gates did. And also Admiral Mullen agreed,” Emanuel noted, ominously.

Yet now with the ISAF commander signaling that critical operations in Afghanistan are proceeding more slowly than he expected, the CENTCOM commander giving only a heavily qualified endorsement of the withdrawal policy, and key Senators arguing that we should take the time necessary to ensure success, one wonders what it will take for the White House to reconsider the rigidity of its timeline.

The December Review

General Petraeus and Secretary Flournoy also took steps last week to downplay the importance of the administration’s planned December 2010 review of progress in Afghanistan, explaining that it will not be the ‘proof of concept,’ ‘go or no-go’ evaluation of Gen. McChrystal’s COIN strategy that administration officials had initially described. Last December, in testimony following President Obama’s West Point speech announcing the Afghan surge, Gates had warned that “we will have a thorough review in December 2010. If it appears that the strategy’s not working and that we are not going to be able to transition in 2011, then we will take a hard look at the strategy itself.”

According to Petraeus and Flournoy, however, that won’t necessarily be the case. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee last Wednesday, Petraeus explained that he did “not want to overplay the significance of this review which…will only be three or four months since the full deployment of all of the surge forces;” hardly enough time to judge the success of a strategy that depends significantly on adequate force-densities. Flournoy suggested that the December review would be rather routine—nothing to be alarmed about (although she noted that adjustments to the current strategy could be considered):

“We have a president who wants to keep abreast of what’s going on. He has a monthly review as it is. December will be a bit of a deeper dive: How are we doing? Where do we need to adjust—strategy, resources, et cetera—to achieve our objectives given the vital interest at stake?”

Flournoy also hinted that additional assessments beyond the December review would be conducted prior the withdrawal of any forces: “I expect there will be further review before we get to the point of actually making decisions about the scope and pace of what happens after July of 2011.”

This was all encouraging news, as Gates’ testimony from December 2009 seemed to suggest that the review at the end of the year could result in yet another wholesale revision of the United States’ Afghanistan strategy. As it happens, the Defense Secretary himself has been counseling patience on Afghanistan of late: on Sunday, Gates criticized the “recent rush to judgment” among commentators about the prospects for the current strategy, saying they fail to appreciate that “we are still in the middle of getting all of the right components into place,” including the remaining third of the surge forces.

Yet it seems reasonable to assume that General McChrystal nevertheless feels enormous pressure to demonstrate results by the time of the December review, so as to validate the effectiveness of his counterinsurgency strategy, shape assessments about the scope and pace of withdrawals, and perhaps put some time back on the “Washington clock.” McChrystal’s comments about the delays in the Kandahar operations suggest he is conscious that the clock is ticking; it would be a shame if he were forced to suboptimize his efforts or redefine his objectives in the province in an attempt to produce by the end of the year an outcome that would appear satisfactory to a Washington audience—but didn’t address the province’s real problems in a lasting way.

Photo: flickr/Lauren Victoria Burke

The BBC reports that senior Pakistani police commanders in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and a major regional resupply hub for NATO forces in Afghanistan, claim the Pakistani Taliban are growing stronger by the day, expanding their network and creating tiers of local leaders in areas under their control. A port city in Pakistan’s southern Punjab province, Karachi has come under increased scrutiny following the Mumbai attacks in November 2008 and, more recently, the failed Times Square attack on May 1. The Times Square suspect, Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin, is alleged to have received training and funding from the Pakistani Taliban during extended stays in Karachi before the attempted attack. Karachi, which is also Pakistan’s financial capital, appears to have become the Pakistani Taliban’s fundraising safe haven. Rather than committing attacks in Karachi, their efforts there are focused on raising money for their domestic and international terrorist operations through extortion, bank robberies, and kidnappings. These dirty monies are then transferred to terrorist training camps and local safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In a recent AEI Outlook, Ahmad Majidyar, keenly aware of Pakistan’s creeping Talibanization, asks whether the Taliban could take over Pakistan’s Punjab province:

While Washington and Islamabad have directed considerable attention and resources to fighting terrorism in Pakistan’s tribal areas, rising militant activity and growing Taliban and al Qaeda influence in the country’s most populous province of Punjab have largely been ignored. Under increasing pressure from U.S. drone attacks and the Pakistani Army’s continuing offensives in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the Taliban and al Qaeda are looking to Pakistan’s political and military heartland for refuge, revenge, and new alliances. Banned Punjabi terrorist groups—such as Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the alleged recruiter of Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), responsible for high-profile attacks in India and Afghanistan—are operating freely across the province and have deepened ties with the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and al Qaeda. Despite the growing threat, Punjabi politicians court the militants for votes, and the military and intelligence services protect them for “strategic depth” in the conflict zones of Kashmir and Afghanistan. Although Punjab is not in imminent danger of a Taliban takeover, the growth of terrorist activity in the region, if unchecked, could have serious consequences for Pakistan’s stability, the war in Afghanistan, India-Pakistan relations, and international terrorism.

Although the danger of Punjab falling into the hands of the Taliban is not an immediate concern, the creeping Talibanization of certain parts of Pakistan’s heartland should worry officials in Islamabad and Washington. The Pakistani Taliban are known to be actively seeking Western recruits, with members of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain and the United States believed to be of particular interest because of their perceived ability to fly under the radar of domestic security and immigration agencies. While it is up to U.S. officials to prevent the likes of Faisal Shahzad from traveling abroad and returning to the U.S. intent on committing a mass atrocity in our midst, it should be a vital U.S. national security priority to reverse the creeping Talibanization of a key ally in the fight against international terrorism. Presumably, a new, entrenched safe haven in Karachi would be a boon for the Taliban’s recruiting and training efforts.

(Photo: flickr/Peshawar)