U.S. Military Prevails over the President

Obama Misleads the American People, as America Escalates, in Preparation for Indefinite Occupation of Afghanistan, and Open War on Pakistan

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Barack Obama holds a briefing on Afghanistan and Pakistan with his National Security Team. Photo: Getty

“Waiving all considerations of right and wrong, I ask is it common sense to use force against the Afghans? Not 20,000 troops, not treble that number, fighting 3,000 miles away from home and supplies could hope to conquer a nation fighting for liberty… For God’s sake, Remember Rehoboam! Remember Philip the Second! Remember King Charles the First!”

—    Methodist leader, John Wesley, in a letter to Lord Dartmouth, 14 June 1774
(with only the word “Afghans” substituted for “Americans”)

There is less to U.S. President Obama’s long-awaited speech on Afghanistan than meets the eye. Anyone who seeks clarity on America’s real goals, strategies, and likely courses of action would be better served by trying to decipher the inchoate signals that continue to emerge from U.S. Defence Secretary Gates and company, a task left to a future post.

In this post, we examine Mr. Obama’s speech, not as a statement of military and diplomatic strategy, but as the lead event in a marketing campaign on behalf of the U.S. military and its assorted allies, friends, and beneficiaries (let us call them American Militants, for short). Its significance lies in Mr. Obama’s formal acceptance, like his predecessor, of the president’s role as the head of public relations for the military, subordinate to the military leadership. Its value, in the clues it provides primarily on the American government’s perception of how an unpopular war can be sold to the American people and yet win elections, and secondarily on the long negotiations between the military and their president that held up the speech for some three months.

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The War on American Public Opinion

The central front in both Mr. Obama’s and the American Militants’ war is not in distant Afghanistan, but in the United States of America. While liberals have looked upon the Vietnam war as folly, an influential section of the U.S. military has always thought that victory was snatched away from them by mismanagement of domestic public opinion. In the war on public opinion therefore the Militants have made common cause with Mr. Obama.

Electoral Strategy

While he sells the war to the American public, Mr. Obama has been given leeway in preparing for the two major mileposts that lie ahead for him:

• Elections to the 112^th Congress on 2 November 2010 (to be conducted for all 435 seats representing the 50 states in the House of Representatives; plus at least 36 of the 100 seats in the Senate – of which 34 are for 6-year terms; and for 36 of the 50 offices of governors of the states); and
• Presidential elections on 6 November 2012 (less than 36 months away).

The 2010 Gubernatorial Elections

While Mr. Obama’s Democratic Party enjoys a comfortable majority in the lower house (258 to 177) and a smaller one in the Senate (58 to 40), a host of recent polls herald a potential reversal of this position in 2010. According to a November 2009 Gallup poll of registered voters, in election to the House, Republicans are preferred to Democrats by 48% to 44% (see graph below).

Republicans Edge Ahead of Democrats in 2010 Vote

In many ways, the outcome of the congressional and gubernatorial elections of 2010 will determine the outcome not only of the 2010 presidential election but of the near-term future of the Democratic Party. In both sets of elections, victory will depend largely on domestic economic conditions – mainly the availability of jobs and credit – at the time, and the containment of American fatalities and casualties. What the American military and diplomats do abroad has no moral or material impact on American public opinion, as long as it is managed reasonably well. American military and foreign policy choices therefore are now largely determined by military, with the president’s sphere of influence confined to cost considerations: mainly in treasure (affecting the rich), but also in blood (affecting the poor).

Scraped of the whipped cream of rhetoric, then, Mr. Obama’s agreements with his military reflect his best judgment of where budgetary savings (needed to shore up the economy and fund his social programmes) can be maximised, while minimising U.S. fatalities and casualties.

Military Decisions

After filtering out the extensive justifications in support of his sales pitch, mainly to the American people, only two hard military decisions that can be gleaned from Mr. Obama’s speech are that:

1. “[A]n additional 30,000 U.S. troops [would be sent] to Afghanistan” (on top of the 36,000 added by Mr. Obama to the 32,000 troops in Afghanistan when he took office, to bring the total to 98,000 by June 2010), “in the first part of 2010” (reportedly, at an additional budgetary cost of “$ 30 billion for the military this year” – but this clearly excludes the costs of complementary mercenaries, and other affiliated costs) (speech);
2. “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home” (speech; notice that he said “begin” without saying when the process would end; reportedly, thought to be in “four to five years” on present official thinking; Mr. Obama set no further schedule for withdrawals and no target date for ending the war.).¹

Obviously, not all decisions taken are announced. They will become apparent as events unfold in the coming months. While we may or may not be persuaded by Mr. Obama’s appeal to history, military strategy, and high purpose, which in any case may be largely tactical, the logic of these two decisions is immediately obvious in relation to the timing of U.S. elections.

In the 2008 presidential elections, Barack Obama managed to eat his cake and have it too: by differentiating his candidature from the Republicans by opposing the war in Iraq, while appeasing the Militants by promising not just a bigger and better war in Afghanistan, but an expansion of hostilities across an international boundary into allied Pakistan, as well. On election, however, he was met with dire predictions of failure and the inevitable positioning to shift blame in the event of defeat. The U.S. military – one of the most politicized, media-savvy militaries in U.S. history, led under Mr. Obama for obscure reasons by the same men who ran it for Bush – in a CMA manoeuvre tabled, publicized, and lobbied for an unfeasible demand for 40-45 thousand troops, in direct opposition to the President’s highly publicized “Af-Pak” strategy.

Not to have provided the troops, even if he had been strong enough to do so, would have provided the military with the perfect excuse, and exposed Mr. Obama to the risk of being blamed, in the event of defeat. To have met their demand in full would not only have risked higher U.S. fatalities and casualties, but would have imposed politically unsustainable burdens on the government’s social programmes (mainly healthcare) and the prospect for economic recovery. Besides, given logistic constraints, the deployment of 40-45 thousand troops before the winter of 2010 would have been a near impossible task.

In sum, under the compromise reached:

• Effectively, he has funded their logistically feasible request in full (while rejecting criticism of “dithering” by pointing out that: “[t]here has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war during this review period” – speech) ;
• Whatever gaps remain, after supplementary troop contribution by allies, should be filled by greater recourse to mercenaries (or “contractors” – 104,100 of them bein present in Afghanistan, according to latest figures provided by U.S. Central Command: 9,300 U.S. nationals, 16,400 third country nationals, and a whopping 78,400 Afghans.²; providing a robust electoral platform, not unlike the winning 2008 platform, to Democratic party candidates in the November 2010 elections; and
• They have 18 months to show results (specified no doubt in secret metrics worked out over the last few months), enabling Mr. Obama either to redeem his promise of making a token show of beginning withdrawal of combat troops (notice: beginning, and combat), or provide a second revision of his “Af-Pak” strategy – in a major review scheduled for December 2010 – in either case, serving him well in the last 18 months or so of his 2012 presidential re-election campaign.

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