SARAH CHAYES
Former State Department Advisor Vali Nasr has set Washington abuzz with his gloves-off denunciation of the Obama administration’s conduct of foreign policy, in particular the war in Afghanistan. Rarely does a recently former government official let loose with such an unalloyed vilification of the administration he served - especially when it is still in power.
But “The Inside Story of how the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan” is more conventional than it may at first appear. Nasr’s is merely the latest salvo in ongoing interagency skirmishing to define the narrative on Afghanistan, to tell a story that lays the blame for the policy’s failure at someone else’s door.
In this case, the originality is that the tale’s main villain is not the military, but the White House (albeit described as bewitched by the military). The hounded victims are former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the late Richard Holbrooke - who happen to have been Nasr’s friends and bosses.
What this account is missing - what so many such accounts are missing - is the humility and intellectual honesty to take a candid look inward, to strive for a nuanced assessment of our shared missteps, in what I, like Nasr, believe will be a grim outcome for Afghanistan, and ultimately for international security.
When Nasr was senior advisor to Holbrooke, I was serving in a similar capacity, first for two commanders of the international troops in Afghanistan, and then for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I took up these positions on the heels of seven years working in downtown Kandahar, where I ran an NGO and then a manufacturing cooperative.
So my perspective on the events Nasr describes, and in which I participated, differs from his in two respects. I came to them bathed in the aspirations of ordinary Afghans, in their attitudes to what was happening in their country, and to the international intervention. And I was privy to the actual views of senior military officials regarding the appropriate balance between military and civilian instruments of power in conducting the Afghanistan mission.
Like many civilians, Nasr paints the military in primary colours, as a monolithic, power-hungry leviathan. “The military,” he declares, “wanted to stay in charge.” Somewhat more remarkably, he depicts President Obama as enthralled by the Pentagon, “not keen on showing daylight between the White House and the military.”
That is not how many officers I worked with experienced it. I myself remember a White House scepticism of top military officers and their recommendations that, while perhaps justified, was every bit as visceral as Holbrooke’s. The instantaneous firing of one of the Army’s most prized officers, Gen Stanley McChrystal, after offensive remarks by his staff were featured in a Rolling Stone article, does not attest to a president welded to the military.
Far from railroading the bureaucracy to gain unfettered control of the Afghanistan campaign, military officers I encountered, to a one, called for more civilian input, not less. At every echelon - from battalion commanders who begged the State Department officials sharing their bases for a better picture of local political dynamics, to senior officers and Defence Department officials who pushed for (and offered to help fund) a civilian surge, to the top brass in Kabul and Washington waiting in vain for a coherent strategic policy to emerge from US civilian leadership - I saw military officers dismayed, not delighted, at being the lead, and sometimes the only, actors.
In the first half of 2009, for example, Holbrooke and US Embassy officials pooh-poohed the notion that fraud might characterise the upcoming presidential election. I would whip out the 10 voter registration cards I had bought in Kandahar in a vain effort to attract their attention. The diplomatic leadership persistently refrained from imagining any steps that might deter the electoral violations before it was too late.
Increasingly alarmed, as evidence mounted that the fraud would be so massive, so egregious, and so humiliating to Afghan voters as to risk undermining the credibility of the entire mission, some colleagues and I drew up a list of ways the thousands of international soldiers and officers under Nato command (ISAF) might make a positive impact. I will never forget the look on then-ISAF commander Gen David McKiernan’s face when presented with that list. A dull ache clouded his eyes. “I have to fight a war,” it conveyed. “And I have to secure an election in the midst of it. And you want me to see to its credibility, too?”
This type of reaction, versions of which I got from numerous officers over the years, points to one of the shortcomings in the standard military analysis. There was a tendency among many of my colleagues in uniform to see military and civilian action as unconnected, a notion that the military could enter a zone, “bring” security, and then stand aside while an army of civilians swarmed in and “brought” development and governance.
Of course, Afghan dynamics were more interconnected than that. But it was hard for military commanders to take accurate stock of the impact their relationships with Afghan counterparts, military and civilian, might have on security and good governance. Officers contracted for work and supplies, delivered development resources through local agents, purchased intelligence and gravel and gasoline - without thinking through the potentially distorting impact of these arrangements.
I don’t disagree, in other words, - and not a single military officer I know would disagree - with Nasr’s contention that the Afghanistan mission suffered perhaps fatally from a lack of input by diplomatic leaders. But the real question is, input to what end? What was, and what should have been, the content of that input?
Nasr narrates the gleeful launch of Holbrooke’s SRAP office at Foggy Bottom, the “creative chaos” of eager young men and women spawning designs for the placement of cell-phone towers or the use of virtual bank accounts for Afghan National Police salaries. A lot of those ideas were good, many made a difference. But they were, to a large extent, hopelessly lost in the weeds.
So was much of Holbrooke’s input to interagency debate. Nasr decries his boss’ exclusion from important meetings. But while the girth of the folders Holbrooke regularly table-dropped at such meetings is accurately recorded, Nasr misses the takeaway. The SRAP office’s contributions to policy debates were so compendious, so full of arcane, not to say loony, detail on the specifics of, for instance, how instant messaging should be used for information operations, or how a specific agricultural development project should be structured, as to be completely impenetrable.
–Foreign policy