1 Boring Old Man

The Choices That Closed a Window Into Afghanistan
New York Times
MICHIKO KAKUTANI
July 13, 2009
Book Review of:
IN THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES: America’s War in Afghanistan
By Seth G. Jones

It’s hard for the reader to finish this volume without being struck by the remarkable parallels between the American failure to prevent a re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and its failure to prevent the emergence of an insurgency in Iraq. In both cases the determination of Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to use a smaller deployment than others recommended [what Mr. Jones calls a “light footprint”] and to attempt to do reconstruction on the cheap resulted in a lack of sufficient troops and resources to maintain law and order and to provide the local population with basic services like electricity. In both cases these failures led to residents’ growing dissatisfaction with the United States-backed government and a tilt toward the insurgents, who rushed to fill the power vacuum.

Cobra II: PBS Interview with Gordon and Trainor
By Matt Armstrong
April 14, 2006

MARGARET WARNER: Now, the debate about troop levels is an old one. But you all also have some new information on that score, which was that it wasn’t just Army chief of staff, General Shinseki who had said we’re going to need a more robust force, but that there were a lot of military commanders who in the planning phase were saying you’re going to need more.

MICHAEL GORDON: The central point that General Shinseki made in congressional testimony in response to a question was that the force you need to control the country after the regime falls is larger than the force you need to destroy the regime.

And what we’ve discovered in this book is this was by no means his unique assessment, number one. There was an Army General, Steve Hawkins  who worked on planning issues for the land war command, who the day before General Shinseki testified told him that his internal estimate was that you could need in excess of 300,000 forces to control the country.

MICHAEL GORDON: Also, there was a Marine officer on the staff of the National Security Council who put together a study of the number of forces that have typically been required for postwar situations. And he looked at Bosnia, and he looked at a whole host of them. And he said based on past experience, he took the Balkans, for example, as your model. How many would we need in Iraq? And what he discovered is you need 300,000 to 400,000…

The decision to invade Iraq was ill considered, beside being based on deceit. The deployment in Iraq was mismanaged and detracted from our "real war" in Afghanistan. The conduct of both wars was inept. The issue is why were they able to garner so much power to do things so badly. The only battle they won was their fight for control of our government in order to lead us down their road to failure.

The reason to exhume their methodology is clear. It’s the same reasons doctors push for autopsies in difficult cases – to find out what they missed and what went wrong, in order to learn from bad experience so as not to make the same mistakes. Most physicians involved in critical care have made fatal mistakes – myself included [and the ones that sting the most are the ones where I didn’t get outside help when I needed it]. We physicians have a rule, "Do no harm." It’s an impossible rule, but it’s a worthy goal. When we fail, it’s incumbant on us to look at why – in detail. When a country makes a mistake this large, we need the autopsy to look at our failure squarely in the eye. It’s not just about the Bush Administration. It’s about the American people and the American system that allowed this to happen…