Andrew Bacevich on Douglas Feith

There should be literary prizes for putting the boot into targets who deserve it. Christopher Hitchens tipped a wonderful bucket over Henry Kissinger recently (see Hitchens on Kissinger).

In his The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2008, Andrew J. Bacevich has this to say about Douglas Feith, who from 2001 to 2005 served as the Under-Secretary of Defence for Policy, the  third-ranking position in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon:

Trained as a lawyer, Feith possessed the temperament of an ideologue. He specialized in enforcing preconceived notions.  Rumsfeld felt certain, for example, that Saddam Hussein had links to the 9/11 hijackers.  He was also convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction hidden away.  Feith’s job was to confirm what his boss already knew. Toward that end, he devoted personal attention to the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which duly told Rumsfeld what he wanted to hear.   OSP’s analysis turned out to be completely wrong, but Feith had accomplished his purpose – and his boss’s.

As the countdown toward the invasion proceeded, Rumsfeld didn’t want anyone outside of his own shop mucking around with the war planning.  The defence secretary found especially irritating concerns expressed by the State Department and some military officers that occupying Iraq might pose some challenges.  He counted on Feith to shut out the meddlers and to base Pahse IV planning on best-case assumptions.  Once again, Feith delivered.  Small wonder that Rumsfeld described his subordinate as “a rare talent”.  Rumsfeld had every reason to be satisfied.

Yet Rumsfeld’s assessment seems unlikely to stand.  Whatever Feith may achieve during the remainder of his life and whatever epitaph he chooses for inscription on his gravestone, history will remember him as “the stupidest fucking guy on the planet.”

The source of that judgement, which is likely to remain definitive, is General Tommy Franks.

When will they ever learn?

The opening paragraphs of an article in the 7 October edition of The New York Times (see Afghans Linked to the Taliban Guard U.S. Bases, accessible here) make interesting reading on the eve of our first Parliamentary debate about what we are doing in Afghanistan, and our prospects of achieving an acceptable outcome.  They beg the question of whether our major ally is conducting this war in a manner conducive to success:

WASHINGTON — Afghan private security forces with ties to the Taliban, criminal networks and Iranian intelligence have been hired to guard American military bases in Afghanistan, exposing United States soldiers to surprise attack and confounding the fight against insurgents, according to a Senate investigation.

The Pentagon’s oversight of the Afghan guards is virtually nonexistent, allowing local security deals among American military commanders, Western contracting companies and Afghan warlords who are closely connected to the violent insurgency, according to the report by investigators on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The United States military has almost no independent information on the Afghans guarding the bases, who are employees of Afghan groups hired as subcontractors by Western firms awarded security contracts by the Pentagon. At one large American airbase in western Afghanistan, military personnel did not even know the names of the leaders of the Afghan groups providing base security, the investigators found...

It gets worse – read the full article here.

This is yet further evidence of the problems with using military contractors to do the work of soldiers – of which there is abundant evidence from the Iraq experience. Contractors do not have the same motivations, they are not under military command, they are often operating in a legal limbo –indemnified against local law but somehow not subject to US law. Military units are supposedly in the area of operations to fight and win; contractors are explicitly in the area of operations to make a profit.

The extensive use of contractors is driven by cost considerations – soldiers are expensive. But can a nation that wishes to deal effectively with the sensitivities of counter-insurgency operations, where having the locals on side is of fundamental importance, afford to employ contractors?  There is nothing quite so expensive as losing a war.

Afghanistan: the WikiLeaks

The 92,000 documents relating to the war in Afghanistan  which were leaked to WikiLeaks, 75,000 of which are published as The War Diary on the WikiLeaks website (www.wikileaks.org), are reports written by soldiers and intelligence officers, which mainly describe lethal military actions involving the United States military. They also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.

The document collection is posted on a dedicated webpage.  They are the raw material of intelligence, and making sense of them would take an experienced and diligent reader a very long time.

The New York Times has had several weeks’ start on the rest of us and has deployed significant resources to reviewing the material. In its 25 July 2010 edition it published an overview of the material, with links to specific documents which illustrate the points made in the overview. In the words of The New York Times, the documents illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.  The reports portray a resilient, canny insurgency that has bled American forces through a war of small cuts. The insurgents set the war’s pace, usually fighting on ground of their own choosing and then slipping away. The NYT overview may be accessed here.

The Pentagon and the Presidency

One of my military colleagues recently lent me a fascinating book on the relationship between the US military leadership (Chiefs of Staff) and the Presidency, covering every President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

It is written by Dale R. Herspring, who served in the State Department in Washington (running the Office of Security Affairs) and various Embassies including in Moscow, where he was responsible for political-military affairs. He also had two assignments in the Pentagon – one in the office of the Secretary of Defense, and one in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published books on the Soviet High Command, on Russian civil-military relations, on Putin’s Russia, and on “Rumsfeld’s Wars”.

In each chapter of The Pentagon and the Presidency: Civil Military Relations from FDR to George W. Bush, University Press of Kansas, 2005, Herspring analyses the leadership style of the President (they vary greatly) and how that style fits with the military leadership culture. He then analyses the relationship through the lens of the major issues of the day – the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the attempted rescue of the embassy hostages from Tehran, the First Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, and a host of others – usually two or three for each presidency.

This book is essential background reading for anyone who is following the emerging story of the relationship between President Obama and the current military leadership. On 2 February columnist Gareth Porter reported in the political newsletter Counter Punch that Central Command commander General David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, tried on 21 January to persuade the President that he had to back down on his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 18 months.

The President did not agree and according to Porter Petraeus was visibly unhappy when he left the Oval Office. Porter reports that Obama's decision to override Petraeus's recommendation has not ended the conflict over the troop withdrawal and that there are indications that Petraeus and his allies in the military and the Pentagon, including General Ray Odierno, now the top commander in Iraq, have already begun to try to pressure Obama to change his withdrawal policy.

The key political risk for Obama in all of this is, of course, the risk that any adverse developments in Iraq will be attributed to his failure to listen to his military advisers, and Porter reports that a network of military opponents is already preparing a campaign against the withdrawal, which will begin with adverse backgrounding of the media. Porter’s full report can be found here.

A convenient way to access book titles that are out of print or unlikely to be in the local bookstore is Abebooks, which offers second hand and new books from world-wide booksellers. It has a good search engine – you can search by author and/or title, do not need to put in a complete title (eg searching on “Pentagon” will throw up every offering with the word Pentagon in the title), you can narrow your search within the results of a search, you can ask for Australian and New Zealand booksellers to be listed first, and you can ask for titles to be listed in ascending order of price so that the cheapest offerings come first. In my experience the descriptions of the condition for second hand books is reliable.