Mediaboss Marketing

I took over a mess, President Donald Trump said Thursday, and were going to make it a lot less messy. | Evan Vucci/AP

President Donald Trump said Thursday hes very close to deciding whether he will approve a plan for more troops in Afghanistan.

Were getting close. Were getting very close, Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to a pool report. Its a very big decision for me.

Story Continued Below

POLITICO reported earlier Thursday that U.S. and Afghan military commanders have run into an unexpected roadblock, as Trumps indecision has lingered for months.

Military leaders were caught off guard when the commander in chief questioned whether the 16-year effort to stabilize Afghanistan is still worth it, rather than immediately approving their plan to increase troop levels.

I took over a mess, Trump said Thursday, and were going to make it a lot less messy.

The president is also mulling replacing the top U.S. commander in the region or allowing private contractors to take over the everyday task of advising the fading Afghan security forces, according to media reports.

Missing out on the latest scoops? Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning in your inbox.

More here:
Trump: We're 'very close' to a decision on Afghanistan troops - Politico

The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, and I have urged the Pentagon to consider new strategies. It's time to act creatively and aggressively so that all of America's sacrifices there since 9/11 will not have been in vain.

So, if what we've been doing isn't working, let's talk about some creative alternatives.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. John Nicholson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff responded to creative suggestions and unconventional approaches with a refusal to even have a conversation. They even claimed it would be illegal to discuss them, which is total nonsense.

As Americans die year after year, the Pentagon has managed the war in Afghanistan bureaucratically, and it has not succeeded. Obama's Pentagon seemed to think failure was an option. It wasn't, and now we are finally having the conversation about new approaches. I urge the Trump Pentagon to take these new ideas seriously.

Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame, has an alternative strategy that will work. Prince first got involved in Afghanistan through his former company, but his experience goes way back. In 1998, through his financial support for the Inter-Afghan Dialogue Process, he tried to bring peace to the war-torn country.

Prince also played a largely unknown but critical role immediately after 9/11, when he put the CIA in direct contact with Americans who were highly trusted by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. General's Abdul Rashid Dostum's famous horseback charge, which broke the back of the Taliban, may never have happened if not for Prince's knowledge and activism in helping his country.

Blackwater's accomplishments in Afghanistan are legendary. Prince has credibility and a proven track record on Afghanistan and in other trouble spots.

President Trump inherited a total mess in Afghanistan. After 16 years, 2,300 lives lost, 22,000 maimed, and nearly a trillion dollars spent, America finds itself stuck in the longest war in our history with no end in sight for thousands of U.S. troops still engaged there. If changes aren't made soon, radical Islamic terrorism will be more threatening than after or before 9/11.

Of course, one option is to pull out quickly and completely, which would soon lead to a complete jihadi victory within a year or two. As the black Taliban flag is raised over the U.S. embassy, the ultimate recruiting call for every terrorist wannabe in the world would have been sounded.

Another approach is to do what most conventional generals want: Send tens of thousands more U.S. troops back to do more fighting with the requisite costs of American blood and treasure rising together, only to maintain the status quo.

Wisely, the president so far has rejected this all-or-nothing choice, because neither approach is in the interest of our country.

As the Pentagon has been cycling generals in and out of Afghanistan, it now has become evident that no one is really in charge and no one is really held responsible. We are losing the war, but the generals all get promoted, not fired. A return to the old system of having one person in charge of policy, rules of engagement, spending by all agencies and departments, including military operations and budgets, makes the most sense.

A common sense approach is to embed highly qualified trainers with Afghan military units for sustained periods. Few Americans realize that when our troops go to Afghanistan to train indigenous soldiers, they typically spend only about eight hours a week doing so. They never go into harm's way with them, instead staying safely holed up on U.S. bases most of the time.

This is incredibly expensive and inefficient. And the current approach does not ensure that Afghan troops get paid on time, are equipped properly, and are effectively supported on the battlefield with logistics, intelligence, ammunition, and air support. The new approach would accomplish this.

This isn't about privatizing this conflict so that someone like Prince can make money. His suggested plan would save taxpayers some $40 billion each year. Besides that, concerns about private-sector actors making money on conflict seem to overlook those companies already benefiting from the status quo.

This approach also enables the leadership for much needed changes: the recalibration of the Afghan political system to a more decentralized structure; destroying the poppy crop; recognizing the border with Pakistan; instituting proper governance, including national carbon and mining laws; enacting proper patent rights and intellectual property protections; even establishing a system of clear title to property.

The jihadists got out of the bottle in the wake of the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Another Islamist victory in Afghanistan now this time over the United States would guarantee that our children will be dealing with radical Islam the rest of their lives. Rather, we need to start to get the jihadists back in the bottle by breaking their will in Afghanistan.

As Prince put it, "This is a Wollman Ice Rink moment for the Trump Presidency. We owe the American people a method to deny terror sanctuaries while also not spending outrageous of blood and treasure for years to come. The moderate approach provides a dignified offramp to the longest war in our history."

He may be right.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher represents California's 48th congressional district and chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats.

Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.

Read the original:
Dana Rohrabacher: We need a new Afghanistan strategy - Washington Examiner

President Trump is not wrong on Afghanistan. During a contentious July meeting with his top military and national security advisors, he repeatedly questioned the quality of advice he was given, asserted that we were losing in Afghanistan, and repeatedly berated the American commander in Afghanistan, General Nicholson, as a loser.

On the first two points Trump is absolutely right. We are losing in Afghanistan and it is past time to ask hard questions of those who seek to double-down on the failed strategy of the past 16 years. However, on the third point he is wrong to paint Nicholson as the loser of Afghanistan. Our failures cannot be laid at the feet of one commander. Our failures have been executed by bureaucratic committee, with enough different commanders rotated through Afghanistan that each can claim incremental success without anyone owning the overall failure.

Over the last 10 years there have been eight different commanders in Afghanistan, with the average tenure being just over a year each. And while it is true that these rotations of senior commanders have never been entirely within the militarys control, this is a problem that the military has compounded by rotating subordinate commands through even more often. In practice this has meant that the chain of command from senior leader to soldiers on the ground has never been stable for longer than three to six months making it impossible for the military to focus beyond short-term tactical gains.

McCain unveils strategy for Afghanistan while attacking Trump for inaction: "Americans deserve better" https://t.co/piPX1UtqkH pic.twitter.com/HAErIrBgIL

This rotation policy has led to many inside jokes, as everyone can claim, We were winning the war when I left while the sum total of our efforts has been a slow glidepath to failure. For senior commanders and the architects of our current strategy, it has always been easier to blame corruption, or the Afghans supposed lack of will to fight, than to ask the hard questions about the fundamentals of our approach. This is another way of saying that our strategy for Afghanistan would be working perfectly, if only Afghanistan was a different country.

For years the United States has been propping up Afghan security forces with American airpower and fire support. In doing so we have given a false impression of Afghan capabilities and ignored the fundamental weaknesses of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

Despite our efforts, the Afghans have been unable to hold their own against an enemy with zero air assets and dramatically less firepower. This is because that while, on paper, the ANSF looks like a western security force with a clear chain of command, in practice it is managed through informal and long-standing patronage networks. These networks are opaque to American advisors and often run counter to the stated mission and structure of the ANSF. It is because of this mismatch in structure and practice that the Taliban are able to win local battles for political legitimacy and continue to gain ground.

This failure of the ANSF to hold ground against the Taliban highlights the futility of trying to establish a western-style military within a state without the bureaucratic structure, rule of law, educational system, and supply chains necessary to support one. But for years we have stuck with this plan because it is the easiest template to follow as units rotate in and out of Afghanistan, and losing slowly has been easier than reconciling the differences between American ideals and Afghan capabilities.

US to send more Marines to Afghanistan: report https://t.co/DHrd2ozh95 pic.twitter.com/S6GvFkDzx0

Thus far into his presidency, Trump has failed, as the two presidents did before him, to make the hard choices about what is truly attainable in Afghanistan, leaving our default setting as trying to achieve everything, for everyone. At least in this the advocates for current troop increases are correct, building an Afghanistan that looks like the United States will take at least a generation, if it is even possible. And while Trump has made it clear that hed prefer not to be there much longer, pulling out sooner will require deep understanding of the conflict and hard trade-offs between American values and our security interests.

These are the hard decisions that only he can make, and Trump cannot complain about not winning without first defining exactly what winning means.

Given his limited exposure to the intricacies of the Afghanistan and reported lack of interest in understanding the nuances of the conflict, it is clear that he will need someone he can trust at the helm someone who can help him understand the conflict, articulate clear goals for our involvement, and to take our efforts to fruition. Through no fault of his own, this personwill likely not be Nicholson, as it needs to be someone Trump trusts.

Luckily for Trump, and for us, the right man for the job is already in the administration. National security adviser H.R. McMasterhas forcefully argued for an extended presence in Afghanistan, and spent a previous tour there in an anti-corruption task force, meaning that he likely has a better understanding of the realities of Afghan politics than most. So instead of just doubling down on the same policies that led to this failure, Trump should send McMasters to Afghanistan, give him the latitude to direct the fight, and keep him there until we win.

Jason Dempsey is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, an organization that develops national security and defense policies.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.

Follow this link:
OPINION | Trump's right we are losing in Afghanistan - The Hill (blog)

20th Century Angel of Mercy. D. R. Howe (Glencoe, MN) treats the wounds of Private First Class D. A. Crum (New Brighton, PA), H Company, 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, during Operation Hue City, Vietnam, 1968. (Public Domain/USMC)

Just shy of fifty years ago on November 7, 1967, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, met in executive session to assess the progress of the ongoing Vietnam War. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was the sole witness invited to testify. Even today, the transcript of Rusks remarks and the subsequent exchange with committee members make for depressing reading.

Responding to questions that ranged from plaintive to hostile, Rusk gave no ground. The Johnson administration was more than willing to end the war, he insisted; the North Vietnamese government was refusing to do so. The blame lay with Hanoi. Therefore the United States had no alternative but to persist. American credibility was on the line.

By extension, so too was the entire strategy of deterring Communist aggression. The stakes in South Vietnam extended well beyond the fate of that one country, as senators well knew. In that regard, Rusk reminded members of the committee, the Congress had performed its functionwhen the key decisions were madean allusion to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a de facto declaration of war passed with near unanimous congressional support. None too subtly, Rusk was letting members of the committee know that the war was theirs as much as it was the administrations.

Yet Fulbright and his colleagues showed little inclination to accept ownership. As a result, the back-and-forth between Rusk and his interrogators produced little of value. Rather than illuminating the problem of a war gone badly awry and identifying potential solutions, the event became an exercise in venting frustration. This exchange initiated by Senator Frank Lausche, Democrat from Ohio, captures the overall tone of the proceedings.

Senator Lausche: The debate about what our course in Vietnam should be has now been in progress since the Tonkin Bay resolution. When was that, August 1964?

Senator Wayne Morse (D-Ore.): Long before that.

Senator Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.): Long before that.

Senator Fulbright: Oh, yes, but that was the Tonkin Bay.

Senator Lausche: For three years we have been arguing it, arguing for what purpose? Has it been to repeal the Tonkin Bay resolution? Has it been to establish justification for pulling out? In the three years, how many times has the Secretary appeared before us?

Those hearings, those debates, in my opinion, have fully explored all of the aspects that you are speaking about without dealing with any particular issue. Now, this is rather rash, I suppose: If our presence in Vietnam is wrong, [if] it is believed we should pull out, should not one of us present a resolution to the Senate[?] . [Then] we would have a specific issue. We would not just be sprawled all over the field, as we have been in the last three years.

Put simply, Senator Lausche was suggesting that Congress force the matter, providing a forum to examine and resolve an issue that had deeply divided the country and that, Rusks assurances notwithstanding, showed no signs of resulting in a successful outcome. No such congressional intervention occurred, however. As a practical matter, Congress in 1967 found it more expedient to defer to the wishes of the commander in chief as the exigencies of the Cold War ostensibly required.

So the Vietnam War dragged on at great cost and to no good effect. Not until the summer of 1970 did Congress repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Even then, the gesture came too late to have any meaningful impact. The war continued toward its mournful conclusion.

To characterize congressional conduct regarding the Vietnam War as timorous and irresponsible is to be kind. There were individual exceptions, of course, among them Senator Morse who had opposed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and Senator Fulbright who by 1967 openly regretted his vote in favor and recognized Vietnam for the disaster it had become. Collectively, however, legislators failed abjectly.

Well, with the passage of a half century, here we are again, back in the soup (or perhaps more accurately, the sand). With the United States currently mired in the longest armed conflict in the nations historyconsiderably longer than VietnamSenator Lausches proposal of 1967 just might merit a fresh look.

Of course, the Afghanistan War (ostensibly part of a Global War on Terrorism) differs from the Vietnam War (ostensibly part of the Cold War) in myriad ways. Yet it resembles Vietnam in three crucial respects. First, it drags on with no end in sight. Second, no evidence exists to suggest that mere persistence will produce a positive outcome. Third, those charged with managing the war have long since run out of ideas about how to turn things around.

Indeed, the Trump administration seems unable to make up its mind about what to do in Afghanistan. A request for additional troops by the senior U.S. field commander has been pending since February. He is still waiting for an answer. James Mattis, Trumps defense secretary, has promised a shiny new strategy. That promise remains unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the news coming out of Kabul is almost uniformly bad. The war itself continues as if on autopilot. Lausches sprawled all over the field provides an apt description of where the United States finds itself today.

Where is the Congress in all of this? By all appearances, congressional deference to the putative prerogatives of the commander in chief remains absurdly intactthis despite the fact that the Cold War is now a distant memory and the post once graced by eminences like Truman and Eisenhower is now occupied by an individual whose judgment and attention span (among other things) are suspect.

A citizen might ask: What more does the Congress need to reassert its constitutional prerogatives on matters related to war? Surely there must be at least a handful of members who, setting aside partisan considerations, can muster the courage and vision to offer a rash proposition similar to Senator Lausches. Doing so has the potential not only to inaugurate debate on a conflict that has gone on for too long to no purpose, but also to call much needed attention to the overall disarray of U.S. policy of which Afghanistan is merely one symptom. Otherwise, why do we pay these people?

Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam Veteran, is TACs writer-at-large.

Go here to see the original:
Yes Congress, Afghanistan is Your Vietnam - The American Conservative

In a recent meeting, President Trump correctly told his generals that they were losing the war in Afghanistan, rejected their proposed strategy, and sent them back to the drawing board to create a new one.

Like chronic alcoholism, compulsive American meddling in the affairs of other countries can only be recovered from by admitting the problem exists in the first place.

President Trump has partially accomplished this first step by recognizing what has been obvious for years, but an even more enlightened conclusion would be that the war has been lost for quite some time now and the only solution is to withdraw U.S. forces as quickly as possible.

Daily Emails and Alerts - Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox

However, that is not the new strategy that the generals will likely come up with. Instead, as in Vietnam, they will continue to sayand probably even believethat a turnaround is still possible. They have had 16 years to win the war, but have abjectly failed to do so.

In any counterinsurgency war, if the insurgents are not losing, they are winning. Fighting guerrilla style means that insurgents use hit and run tactics against the weak points of a generally stronger enemy (usually government or foreign forces) and then flee before the stronger side can catch them.

Over time, the guerrillas are hoping to make the stronger party exhausted, and if it is a foreign occupier, make the war so costly in lives and money that that participant eventually goes back home.

The Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan are not only winning by not losing and hanging on, they are winning absolutely by capturing and holding more of the Afghan governments territory.

Thus, after 16 years of fighting, approximately 2,400 American military deaths, more than 20,000 wounded, 1,200 U.S. civilian contractor deaths, and a whopping half trillion dollars wasted in this quagmire, instead of cutting its losses, the Trump administration seems to be willing to let the military re-escalate the war by sending 3,000 to 5,000 additional U.S.troops in.

Such forces would continue to advise and assist chronically illiterate, incompetent, corrupt, and AWOL Afghan security forces. And despite their job description, U.S. forces do fight in combat and still continue to take casualties.

If 100,000 U.S. troops could not subdue Afghanistan, the only way U.S.-trained Afghan forces could do so is if they were impeccably honest and competent forces who knew the pulse of the Afghan peopleso they could get good intelligence on who the clandestine insurgents are and neutralize them. Yet, this pipe dream is not even worth fantasizing about.

But if the United States withdraws completely from Afghanistan, wont the country go back into chaos and be a haven for future terrorist attacks against the United States? After all ISIS is now in Afghanistan, and some sources say the group is now cooperating with the Taliban to attack U.S. and Afghan targets.

Also, in western Afghanistan, Iran is now trying to keep Afghanistan unstable by supplying the Taliban with weapons, funds, and fighters to use against U.S. and Afghan forces. (U.S. ally Pakistan has always supported the Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan to do the same.)

The major problem with U.S. foreign policy is that, like an addict in perpetual denial, no questions have been asked about why Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan in the first place.

President George W. Bush told us that al Qaeda had attacked us because of our freedoms, which enraged bin Laden, who then rhetorically asked why he hadnt attacked Sweden instead.

No one chose to hear what bin Laden kept repeating: he attacked the United States because of the U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land of Saudi Arabia and U.S. treatment of Muslim countries U.S. meddling in the Middle East.

To understand bin Ladens motivation for the attacks is not to condone such brutal atrocities but to attempt to find a quieter change in U.S. policy that might take the fire out of the Islamist jihad.

The US government should have introspectively reached the conclusion that U.S. interventionism in the Middle East had helped create the problem, or at least exacerbated it, and had directed it more against the United States.

Donald Rumsfeld, then George W. Bushs secretary of defense, famously asked after 9/11, Are we creating more terrorists than we are killing?

No one has ever answered that question, but the correct answer was and is Yes, especially after the invasion of Muslim soil in Iraq and the air wars against terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria that have now spanned three U.S. presidential administrations.

Even before that, the Carter and Reagan administrations helped create al Qaeda by funding the radical Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas in the 1980s and George H.W. Bush motivated bin Laden to begin his war with the United States by unnecessarily leaving U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War.

The United States also created what eventually became ISIS, which arose as resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In Pakistan, the U.S. war in Afghanistan spilled over into that country and thus created the Pakistani Taliban.

US soldiers walk at the site of a Taliban suicide attack in Kandahar on August 2, 2017, after a Taliban suicide bomber rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of foreign forces in Afghanistan's restive southern province of Kandahar. JAVED TANVEER/AFP/Getty

In Somalia, U.S. support for an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia created the virulently Islamist al Shabab group.

In Yemen, empirical documentation has shown that U.S. bombing of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has increased the number of fighters being recruited by the group.

Currently, the United States is at war in at least seven Islamic countries. Non-Muslim forces fighting on Muslim land angers even moderate Muslims.

Before the American fracking boom, even when the United States was more dependent on foreign oil, it was cost-ineffective to use massive military forces to safeguard what was best provided by the world oil market, but now that policy is even more absurd.

If anyone doubts that a lower U.S. profile in Muslim countries would reduce blowback terrorism, the case of Lebanon in the 1980s needs to be examined. The Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah was attacking U.S. targets regularly, but after the United States withdrew its forces from that country, the attacks gradually attenuated.

The United States needs to get out of Afghanistan for good and end its other air wars in Muslim countries. None of these countries are strategic to the United States, and wars there merely generate unwanted blowback. These brushfire wars left over from the War on Terror, which actually increased terrorism, distract and take resources from U.S. efforts to counter a much more important potential foreign policy problem: a rising China.

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of "The Failure of Counterinsurgency: Why Hearts and Minds Are Seldom Won."

See the original post here:
We Have Lost the War in Afghanistan. We Should Get Out Now - Newsweek