On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail)
Why Washington Can’t “Stand Up” Foreign Militaries
By Andrew J. BacevichOctober 13,
2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "TomDispatch"
- First came
Fallujah, then
Mosul, and later
Ramadi in Iraq. Now, there is
Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. In all
four places, the same story has played out: in cities that newspaper
reporters like to call “strategically important,” security forces
trained and equipped by the U.S. military at great expense simply
folded, abandoning their posts (and much of their U.S.-supplied
weaponry) without even mounting serious resistance. Called upon to
fight, they fled. In each case, the defending forces gave way
before substantially outnumbered attackers, making the outcomes all
the more ignominious.
Together, these setbacks have rendered a verdict
on the now more-or-less nameless Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).
Successive blitzkriegs by ISIS and the Taliban respectively did more
than simply breach Iraqi and Afghan defenses. They also punched
gaping holes in the strategy to which the United States had reverted
in hopes of stemming the further erosion of its position in the
Greater Middle East.
Recall that, when the United States launched its
GWOT soon after 9/11, it did so pursuant to a grandiose agenda. U.S.
forces were going to imprint onto others a specific and exalted set
of values. During President George W. Bush’s first term, this
“freedom agenda” formed the foundation, or at least the rationale,
for U.S. policy.
The shooting would stop, Bush vowed, only when
countries like Afghanistan had ceased to harbor anti-American
terrorists and countries like Iraq had ceased to encourage them.
Achieving this goal meant that the inhabitants of those countries
would have to change. Afghans and Iraqis, followed in due course by
Syrians, Libyans, Iranians, and sundry others would embrace
democracy, respect human rights, and abide by the rule of law, or
else. Through the concerted application of American power, they
would become different -- more like us and therefore more inclined
to get along with us. A bit less Mecca and Medina, a bit more “we
hold these truths” and “of the people, by the people.”
So Bush and others in his inner circle professed
to believe. At least some of them, probably including Bush himself,
may actually have done so.
History, at least the bits and pieces to which
Americans attend, seemed to endow such expectations with a modicum
of plausibility. Had not such a transfer of values occurred after
World War II when the defeated Axis Powers had hastily thrown in
with the winning side? Had it not recurred as the Cold War was
winding down, when previously committed communists succumbed to the
allure of consumer goods and quarterly profit statements?
If the appropriate mix of coaching and coercion
were administered, Afghans and Iraqis, too, would surely take the
path once followed by good Germans and nimble Japanese, and
subsequently by Czechs tired of repression and Chinese tired of
want. Once liberated, grateful Afghans and Iraqis would align
themselves with a conception of modernity that the United States had
pioneered and now exemplified. For this transformation to occur,
however, the accumulated debris of retrograde social conventions and
political arrangements that had long retarded progress would have to
be cleared away. This was what the invasions of Afghanistan
(Operation Enduring Freedom!) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi
Freedom!) were meant to accomplish in one fell swoop by a
military the likes of which had (to hear Washington
tell it) never been seen in history. POW!
Standing Them Up As We Stand Down
Concealed within that oft-cited “freedom” -- the
all-purpose justification for deploying American power -- were
several shades of meaning. The term, in fact, requires decoding. Yet
within the upper reaches of the American national security
apparatus, one definition takes precedence over all others. In
Washington, freedom has become a euphemism for dominion. Spreading
freedom means positioning the United States to call the shots. Seen
in this context, Washington’s expected victories in both Afghanistan
and Iraq were meant to affirm and broaden its preeminence by
incorporating large parts of the Islamic world into the American
imperium. They would benefit, of course, but to an even
greater extent, so would we.
Alas, liberating Afghans and Iraqis turned out to
be a tad more complicated than the architects of Bush’s freedom (or
dominion) agenda anticipated. Well before Barack Obama succeeded
Bush in January 2009, few observers -- apart from a handful of
ideologues and militarists -- clung to the fairy tale of U.S.
military might whipping the Greater Middle East into shape.
Brutally but efficiently, war had educated the educable. As for
the uneducable, they persisted in taking their cues from Fox News
and the Weekly Standard.
Yet if the strategy of transformation via invasion
and “nation building” had failed, there was a fallback position that
seemed to be dictated by the logic of events. Together, Bush and
Obama would lower expectations as to what the United States was
going to achieve, even as they imposed new demands on the U.S.
military, America’s go-to outfit in foreign policy, to get on with
the job.
Rather than midwifing fundamental political and
cultural change, the Pentagon was instead ordered to ramp up its
already gargantuan efforts to create local militaries (and police
forces) capable of maintaining order and national unity. President
Bush provided a
concise formulation of the new strategy: “As the Iraqis stand
up, we will stand down.” Under Obama, after his own stab at a “surge,”
the dictum applied to Afghanistan as well. Nation-building had
flopped. Building armies and police forces able to keep a lid on
things now became the prevailing definition of success.
The United States had, of course, attempted this
approach once before, with unhappy results. This was in Vietnam.
There, efforts to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces
intent on unifying their divided country had exhausted both the U.S.
military and the patience of the American people. Responding to the
logic of events, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had a
tacitly agreed upon fallback position. As the prospects of American
forces successfully eliminating threats to South Vietnamese security
faded, the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese to defend
themselves became priority number one.
Dubbed “Vietnamization,” this enterprise ended in
abject failure with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet that failure
raised important questions to which members of the national security
elite might have attended: Given a weak state with dubious
legitimacy, how feasible is it to expect outsiders to invest
indigenous forces with genuine fighting power? How do differences
in culture or history or religion affect the prospects for doing so?
Can skill ever make up for a deficit of will? Can hardware replace
cohesion? Above all, if tasked with giving some version of
Vietnamization another go, what did U.S. forces need to do
differently to ensure a different result?
At the time, with general officers and civilian
officials more inclined to forget Vietnam than contemplate its
implications, these questions attracted little attention. Instead,
military professionals devoted themselves to gearing up for the next
fight, which they resolved would be different. No more Vietnams --
and therefore no more Vietnamization.
After the Gulf War of 1991, basking in the
ostensible success of Operation Desert Storm, the officer corps
persuaded itself that it had once and for all banished its
Vietnam-induced bad memories. As Commander-in-Chief George H.W. Bush
so memorably put it, “By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once
and for all.”
In short, the Pentagon now had war figured out.
Victory had become a foregone conclusion. As it happened, this
self-congratulatory evaluation left U.S. troops ill-prepared for the
difficulties awaiting them after 9/11 when interventions in
Afghanistan and Iraq departed from the expected script, which
posited short wars by a force beyond compare ending in decisive
victories. What the troops got were two very long wars with no
decision whatsoever. It was Vietnam on a smaller scale all over
again -- times two.
Vietnamization 2.0
For Bush in Iraq and Obama after a brief,
half-hearted flirtation with counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,
opting for a variant of Vietnamization proved to be a no-brainer.
Doing so offered the prospect of an escape from all complexities.
True enough, Plan A -- we export freedom and democracy --
had fallen short. But Plan B -- they (with our help)
restore some semblance of stability -- could enable Washington to
salvage at least partial success in both places. With the bar
suitably lowered, a version of “Mission Accomplished” might still be
within reach.
If Plan A had looked to U.S. troops to vanquish
their adversaries outright, Plan B focused on prepping besieged
allies to take over the fight. Winning outright was no longer the
aim -- given the inability of U.S. forces to do so, this was
self-evidently not in the cards -- but holding the enemy at bay was.
Although allied with the United States, only in
the loosest sense did either Iraq or Afghanistan qualify as a
nation-state. Only nominally and intermittently did governments in
Baghdad and Kabul exercise a writ of authority commanding respect
from the people known as Iraqis and Afghans. Yet in the Washington
of George Bush and Barack Obama, a willing suspension of disbelief
became the basis for policy. In distant lands where the concept of
nationhood barely existed, the Pentagon set out to create a
full-fledged national security apparatus capable of defending that
aspiration as if it represented reality. From day one, this was a
faith-based undertaking.
As with any Pentagon project undertaken on a crash
basis, this one consumed resources on a gargantuan scale --
$25 billion in Iraq and an even more staggering
$65 billion in Afghanistan. “Standing up” the requisite forces
involved the transfer of vast quantities of equipment and the
creation of elaborate U.S. training missions. Iraqi and Afghan
forces acquired all the paraphernalia of modern war -- attack
aircraft or helicopters,
artillery and armored vehicles, night vision devices and drones.
Needless to say, stateside defense contractors
lined up in droves to cash in.
Based on their performance, the security forces on
which the Pentagon has lavished years of attention remain visibly
not up to the job. Meanwhile, ISIS warriors, without the benefit of
expensive third-party mentoring, appear plenty willing to fight and
die for their cause. Ditto Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The
beneficiaries of U.S. assistance? Not so much. Based on partial but
considerable returns, Vietnamization 2.0 seems to be following an
eerily familiar trajectory that should remind anyone of
Vietnamization 1.0. Meanwhile, the questions that ought to have been
addressed back when our South Vietnamese ally went down to defeat
have returned with a vengeance.
The most important of those questions challenges
the assumption that has informed U.S. policy in the Greater Middle
East since the freedom agenda went south: that Washington has a
particular knack for organizing, training, equipping, and motivating
foreign armies. Based on the evidence piling up before our eyes,
that assumption appears largely false. On this score, retired
Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, a former military commander and
U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, has rendered an authoritative
judgment. “Our track record at building [foreign] security forces
over the past 15 years is miserable,” he
recently told the New York Times. Just so.
Fighting the Wrong War
Some might argue that trying harder, investing
more billions, sending yet more equipment for perhaps another 15
years will produce more favorable results. But this is akin to
believing that, given sufficient time, the fruits of capitalism will
ultimately trickle down to benefit the least among us or that the
march of technology holds the key to maximizing human happiness. You
can believe it if you want, but it’s a mug’s game.
Indeed, the United States would be better served
if policymakers abandoned the pretense that the Pentagon possesses
any gift whatsoever for “standing up” foreign military forces.
Prudence might actually counsel that Washington assume instead, when
it comes to organizing, training, equipping, and motivating foreign
armies, that the United States is essentially clueless.
Exceptions may exist. For example, U.S. efforts
have probably helped boost the fighting power of the Kurdish
peshmerga. Yet such exceptions are rare enough to prove the rule.
Keep in mind that before American trainers and equipment ever showed
up, Iraq’s Kurds already possessed the essential attributes of
nationhood. Unlike Afghans and Iraqis, Kurds do not require tutoring
in the imperative of collective self-defense.
What are the policy implications of giving up the
illusion that the Pentagon knows how to build foreign armies? The
largest is this: subletting war no longer figures as a plausible
alternative to waging it directly. So where U.S. interests require
that fighting be done, like it or not, we’re going to have to do
that fighting ourselves. By extension, in circumstances where U.S.
forces are demonstrably incapable of winning or where Americans balk
at any further expenditure of American blood -- today in the Greater
Middle East both of these conditions apply -- then perhaps we
shouldn’t be there. To pretend otherwise is to throw good money
after bad or, as a famous American general
once put it, to wage (even if indirectly) “the wrong war, at the
wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." This we
have been doing now for several decades across much of the Islamic
world.
In American politics, we await the officeholder or
candidate willing to state the obvious and confront its
implications.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a
TomDispatch regular, is professor emeritus of
history and international relations at Boston University. He is the
author of
Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their
Country, among other works. His new book, America’s War
for the Greater Middle East (Random House),
is due out in April 2016.
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Copyright 2015 Andrew Bacevich