Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
National Journal
January 26, 2008 By James Kitfield
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently instructed his top military commanders to prepare their best arguments for justifying troop levels around the world, he illuminated a long-simmering military dispute. To relieve some of the burden on its overstrained forces, can the United States afford to keep drawing down troop levels from Iraq past next summer without jeopardizing the fragile security gains there? And given the crisis in neighboring Pakistan and rising insurgent violence in Afghanistan, must the Pentagon add to the 3,300 marines recently deployed there to bolster the fight against terrorists? Which conflict is truly the central front in President Bush's "global war on terror?"
For that matter, how do operations in Iraq and Afghanistan play into the administration's efforts to isolate Iran, advance peace between Israel and the Palestinians, promote democratic reforms in the Arab world, and bring the cost of oil down from $100 a barrel?
Remarkably, six years after the 9/11 attacks, with U.S. troops engaged in two mammoth counter-insurgency and nation-building enterprises in the region, the Bush administration still lacks answers to those questions. The United States badly needs a strategy to connect the disparate efforts, experts say, to set priorities, and to help make sense of the inevitable trade-offs in juggling such an ambitious agenda. Indeed, the next president may well find that the most pressing issue in the Oval Office in-box is drawing up a blueprint for America's continued presence in the "arc of instability" that stretches from the Middle East to Southwest Asia.
"It's a tragedy that there is still no overarching strategy that codifies our interests in the Middle East region, pegs those to specific goals designed to protect our interests, and establishes common purpose and unity of effort within the government in terms of reaching those economic, military, and diplomatic goals," said a senior military official in the Pentagon. Instead, the government operates in an environment of constant "crisis management," he said, where problems are raised one by one in deputy-level meetings that frequently leave the military holding the bag. "Other agencies such as the State Department often tell us that to acquire the needed capability to work these issues, they would have had to submit a budget for it two years ago," the officer said. "So, to me, the failure to develop an overarching strategy is the single greatest dereliction of the Bush administration's foreign policy."
White House officials counter that the strategic goals in the war on terrorism, if not all the gritty details, are well understood. "On 9/11 we learned that terrorism in the Middle East can affect us at home," a senior administration source said. "So we're fighting terrorism and promoting freedom and democracy there. Because in our judgment the Middle East is an incubator for terrorism as a result of being left out of the great strides toward freedom and democracy that occurred in the 20th century."
The gold standard for strategic conceptualization was set 60 years ago by President Truman and his foreign-policy team of "wise men" drawn from the worlds of finance, statecraft, and military planning. Together, they successfully navigated the dangerous shoals of the post-World War II era, and anchored for future presidents the strategy of containment that won the Cold War.
Truman's wise men oversaw the establishment of the United Nations to avoid future world wars, the World Bank to fund postwar reconstruction, and the International Monetary Fund to promote free trade. In helping to rebuild Europe and reach out to defeated Germany, the Marshall Plan learned from the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, when the victors of the Great War ostracized the Germans and set the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler. George Kennan's 1947 article, published anonymously in Foreign Affairs, supplied the blueprint for the strategy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, and Paul Nitze erected the structure with National Security Council Directive 68, which reordered the vast U.S. national security apparatus. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the cornerstone of the NATO alliance was laid.
By contrast, the lack of a strategic overlay for the Middle East and the greater war on terrorism has not only stymied interagency cooperation and synergy, experts say, but has also produced a herky-jerky foreign policy that confounds America's allies and adversaries alike. One moment the United States is pressuring Arab allies to embrace democratic reforms, and the next it is widely seen as backing away from that emphasis to focus on winning support for isolating Iran and stabilizing Iraq.
Similarly, the administration has leaned on Iran to curtail its actions inside Iraq, but refuses to negotiate with Tehran on broader strategic issues. After rejecting NATO's offer of help after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush White House later encouraged the alliance to assume responsibility for nation building in Afghanistan and recently stirred controversy by criticizing the allies for not doing enough in that regard.
National Journal recently interviewed retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, with responsibility for the Middle East. "When you talk to leaders in the Middle East today, there's a strong perception that the United States lacks strategic focus, and that we tend to work things day to day and bounce around from issue to issue," he said. The administration treats Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as one-off issues, he said, rather than seeing them as component parts requiring a broader strategic framework.
"We're also seen as dealing with issues with a narrow view of our own interests, rather than working on building relationships and collective security arrangements that address mutual interests," Zinni said. "So we're really lacking a Truman- or Marshall-type strategic vision; and as a result Middle East leaders are really beginning to doubt our ability to manage regional affairs and get things done."
With one eye on next year's transition of political power and the prospect of briefing a new commander-in-chief, the Pentagon's Joint Staff has begun to develop a regional strategy for the Middle East as a first step in filling the void. A major goal of the exercise, one participant says, is to highlight the interrelatedness of many issues so that the next White House will understand the likely second- and third-order repercussions of various decisions. Or as this officer put it, "The next president will need to understand that when you poke country X, something is going to happen in countries Y and Z because the region is so geopolitically contiguous."
Another knowledgeable senior officer said, "There is going to be a change of administration next year, and we don't know or care whether a Republican or Democrat is going to come in behind President Bush, but we owe it to them, the American people, and our men and women in uniform to build a strategy that can make that transition as smooth as possible. My analogy is that there are a lot of pieces to this jigsaw puzzle of the Middle East," the officer continued, "but there's no picture right now on the front of the box. We want to clarify that picture so the next commander-in-chief understands how the various pieces fit together and influence each other and our overarching strategy, whether those pieces are individual nation states, the Arab League, NATO, the European Union, or whoever."
One harsh reality sure to emerge from such a strategic review is that much of the government has failed to adjust to the demands of globalization and the post-Cold War era in which terrorists, insurgents, narco-traffickers, and organized criminals are increasingly hijacking weak and failing states. As the 44th president will discover, such threats require rapid and coordinated responses that call for security assistance, diplomacy, nation building, and civil reconstruction. The government simply does not have those capabilities today.
"The 9/11 attacks, failed stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina -- these are not coincidental setbacks, but evidence of system failure," said Jim Locher, who is heading the independent Project on National Security Reform sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Presidency. The goal is to have suggested reforms ready to put on the president's desk immediately after the 2009 inauguration.
Locher, a key architect of the Goldwater-Nichols military reforms of 1986, argues that the national security structure shaped by World War II and put into place by Truman 60 years ago can no longer cope with today's rapidly evolving threats.
"The current interagency system simply cannot handle complex, rapidly unfolding security crises, because our departments are outmoded, stovepiped, bureaucratic, competitive, and frequently under-resourced," said Locher, speaking at a conference sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The nation urgently needs a new national security system, not as something nice to have but as an imperative. Because our performance will not improve without a new system, and future setbacks are likely to prove devastating."
January 26, 2008 By James Kitfield
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently instructed his top military commanders to prepare their best arguments for justifying troop levels around the world, he illuminated a long-simmering military dispute. To relieve some of the burden on its overstrained forces, can the United States afford to keep drawing down troop levels from Iraq past next summer without jeopardizing the fragile security gains there? And given the crisis in neighboring Pakistan and rising insurgent violence in Afghanistan, must the Pentagon add to the 3,300 marines recently deployed there to bolster the fight against terrorists? Which conflict is truly the central front in President Bush's "global war on terror?"
For that matter, how do operations in Iraq and Afghanistan play into the administration's efforts to isolate Iran, advance peace between Israel and the Palestinians, promote democratic reforms in the Arab world, and bring the cost of oil down from $100 a barrel?
Remarkably, six years after the 9/11 attacks, with U.S. troops engaged in two mammoth counter-insurgency and nation-building enterprises in the region, the Bush administration still lacks answers to those questions. The United States badly needs a strategy to connect the disparate efforts, experts say, to set priorities, and to help make sense of the inevitable trade-offs in juggling such an ambitious agenda. Indeed, the next president may well find that the most pressing issue in the Oval Office in-box is drawing up a blueprint for America's continued presence in the "arc of instability" that stretches from the Middle East to Southwest Asia.
"It's a tragedy that there is still no overarching strategy that codifies our interests in the Middle East region, pegs those to specific goals designed to protect our interests, and establishes common purpose and unity of effort within the government in terms of reaching those economic, military, and diplomatic goals," said a senior military official in the Pentagon. Instead, the government operates in an environment of constant "crisis management," he said, where problems are raised one by one in deputy-level meetings that frequently leave the military holding the bag. "Other agencies such as the State Department often tell us that to acquire the needed capability to work these issues, they would have had to submit a budget for it two years ago," the officer said. "So, to me, the failure to develop an overarching strategy is the single greatest dereliction of the Bush administration's foreign policy."
White House officials counter that the strategic goals in the war on terrorism, if not all the gritty details, are well understood. "On 9/11 we learned that terrorism in the Middle East can affect us at home," a senior administration source said. "So we're fighting terrorism and promoting freedom and democracy there. Because in our judgment the Middle East is an incubator for terrorism as a result of being left out of the great strides toward freedom and democracy that occurred in the 20th century."
The gold standard for strategic conceptualization was set 60 years ago by President Truman and his foreign-policy team of "wise men" drawn from the worlds of finance, statecraft, and military planning. Together, they successfully navigated the dangerous shoals of the post-World War II era, and anchored for future presidents the strategy of containment that won the Cold War.
Truman's wise men oversaw the establishment of the United Nations to avoid future world wars, the World Bank to fund postwar reconstruction, and the International Monetary Fund to promote free trade. In helping to rebuild Europe and reach out to defeated Germany, the Marshall Plan learned from the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, when the victors of the Great War ostracized the Germans and set the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler. George Kennan's 1947 article, published anonymously in Foreign Affairs, supplied the blueprint for the strategy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, and Paul Nitze erected the structure with National Security Council Directive 68, which reordered the vast U.S. national security apparatus. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the cornerstone of the NATO alliance was laid.
By contrast, the lack of a strategic overlay for the Middle East and the greater war on terrorism has not only stymied interagency cooperation and synergy, experts say, but has also produced a herky-jerky foreign policy that confounds America's allies and adversaries alike. One moment the United States is pressuring Arab allies to embrace democratic reforms, and the next it is widely seen as backing away from that emphasis to focus on winning support for isolating Iran and stabilizing Iraq.
Similarly, the administration has leaned on Iran to curtail its actions inside Iraq, but refuses to negotiate with Tehran on broader strategic issues. After rejecting NATO's offer of help after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush White House later encouraged the alliance to assume responsibility for nation building in Afghanistan and recently stirred controversy by criticizing the allies for not doing enough in that regard.
National Journal recently interviewed retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, with responsibility for the Middle East. "When you talk to leaders in the Middle East today, there's a strong perception that the United States lacks strategic focus, and that we tend to work things day to day and bounce around from issue to issue," he said. The administration treats Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as one-off issues, he said, rather than seeing them as component parts requiring a broader strategic framework.
"We're also seen as dealing with issues with a narrow view of our own interests, rather than working on building relationships and collective security arrangements that address mutual interests," Zinni said. "So we're really lacking a Truman- or Marshall-type strategic vision; and as a result Middle East leaders are really beginning to doubt our ability to manage regional affairs and get things done."
With one eye on next year's transition of political power and the prospect of briefing a new commander-in-chief, the Pentagon's Joint Staff has begun to develop a regional strategy for the Middle East as a first step in filling the void. A major goal of the exercise, one participant says, is to highlight the interrelatedness of many issues so that the next White House will understand the likely second- and third-order repercussions of various decisions. Or as this officer put it, "The next president will need to understand that when you poke country X, something is going to happen in countries Y and Z because the region is so geopolitically contiguous."
Another knowledgeable senior officer said, "There is going to be a change of administration next year, and we don't know or care whether a Republican or Democrat is going to come in behind President Bush, but we owe it to them, the American people, and our men and women in uniform to build a strategy that can make that transition as smooth as possible. My analogy is that there are a lot of pieces to this jigsaw puzzle of the Middle East," the officer continued, "but there's no picture right now on the front of the box. We want to clarify that picture so the next commander-in-chief understands how the various pieces fit together and influence each other and our overarching strategy, whether those pieces are individual nation states, the Arab League, NATO, the European Union, or whoever."
One harsh reality sure to emerge from such a strategic review is that much of the government has failed to adjust to the demands of globalization and the post-Cold War era in which terrorists, insurgents, narco-traffickers, and organized criminals are increasingly hijacking weak and failing states. As the 44th president will discover, such threats require rapid and coordinated responses that call for security assistance, diplomacy, nation building, and civil reconstruction. The government simply does not have those capabilities today.
"The 9/11 attacks, failed stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina -- these are not coincidental setbacks, but evidence of system failure," said Jim Locher, who is heading the independent Project on National Security Reform sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Presidency. The goal is to have suggested reforms ready to put on the president's desk immediately after the 2009 inauguration.
Locher, a key architect of the Goldwater-Nichols military reforms of 1986, argues that the national security structure shaped by World War II and put into place by Truman 60 years ago can no longer cope with today's rapidly evolving threats.
"The current interagency system simply cannot handle complex, rapidly unfolding security crises, because our departments are outmoded, stovepiped, bureaucratic, competitive, and frequently under-resourced," said Locher, speaking at a conference sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The nation urgently needs a new national security system, not as something nice to have but as an imperative. Because our performance will not improve without a new system, and future setbacks are likely to prove devastating."