US military finally has “Dannatt moment” on Iraq/Afghanistan?

The Bush administration finally seems to be waking up to the need to (1) find a more effective policy in Afghanistan, and (2) if necessary, recalibrate its commitments in Iraq in an attempt to salvage/stabilize the situation in Afghanistan. (Read further down this post to learn why I judge that this latter task can’t actually be accomplished.)
In an important story in today’s WaPo, M. Abramowitz and P. Baker indicate very clearly that in Washington the pressure for an Iraq/Afghanistan recalibration is coming primarily from within the US military. This makes the decisionmaking process in Washington DC look strikingly like that in London in fall 2006, when British Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt spoke out forcefully in public in favor of a swift shifting of British troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
(Except that Dannatt seemed to have more guts and self-confidence in speaking out openly than anyone in the US military leadership currently seems to have.)
Britain handed over control of security in Basra province to the Iraqi “government” yesterday, retaining only a small British force at Basra airport. Read this commentary from Patrick Cockburn on why Britain’s five-year-long mission in Basra could never have succeeded, and on the damage it inflicted on the people of the province– and on Britain’s own military reputation.
Once you’ve read that, expand the concept of “Basra” to the level of “the whole of Iraq” and you can see that the US’s campaign in Iraq could similarly never have succeeded— and also that the damage it has inflicted on the people of Iraq and on the US’s military reputation (and its raw capabilities) have all been correspondingly much larger in scale than what happened to the Brits in Basra.
Back in October 2006, I was hopeful that the “Dannatt effect” had already, back then, started to spread to the US generals. Maybe it did, somewhat, in terms of their own internal analysis of the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the corresponding need to shift emphasis from the former theater to the latter. But in terms of infusing the US Joint Chief of Staff with the courage needed to stand up for their professional standards and the confidence they had in their analytical/strategic judgments? No. Sadly, no serving US military leaders has shown anything like the forthright courage that Dannatt displayed last year.
In Baker and Abramowitz’s piece, for example, no serving military officer is quoted by name as saying anything that indicates a need to draw resources and attention away from Iraq to Afghanistan. The only relevant reference to statements coming from a named, serving officer is this one:

U.S. Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, is asking for an additional three battalions of troops from NATO countries — the equivalent of another brigade combat team — but colleagues believe that would not be enough…

“Colleagues”, huh? Un-named, un-identified.
Well, be that as it may, there is obviously a lot that needs to be said about the realization that is now, finally, starting to dawn within the Bush administration that invading Iraq may well all along have been, at a strategic level, a very damaging “bridge too far”— even for the world’s (now rapidly declining) Uberpower.
We need to look carefully at these key aspects of this issue:

1. Can increased troop levels, on their own, bring about the US-led stabilization in Afghanistan that most US commentators now seem to be urging? And if this is not enough on its own, what else is needed there? (Also, as a further corollary, we should examine the validity of the calls that several US presidential candidates, from both parties, have been making for increasing the size of the US military as a solution for all our ills.)
2. The validity of the judgment-call so many people seem to be making that the US-led effort in Afghanistan should take priority over the US-led effort in Afghanistan. What, actually, are the geostrategic issues at stake in each theater? Can the US hope to “win” in Afghanistan by a continuation of its current “Coalition of the Willing” approach there?
3. If the US does draw down its force level in Iraq significantly faster than Bush has so far been planning, what are the prospects for the strategic balance of the Persian Gulf region?

Make no mistake, these are extremely important issues. The way they get resolved will determine many key aspects of the global political/strategic balance for the next 50-70 years.
On the first question, this post that Barnett Rubin had over at the Informed Comment Global Affairs blog over the weekend contains some useful background information.
He notes the recent calls that some people have made for a new, and possibly non-US “high-level coordinator” to be appointed for Afghanistan. (Is Paddy Ashdown, my sister’s former MP from in Somerset who was thenthe “high level coordinator” for Bosnia, running activelyfor this job?) But then, Rubin comments:

calling someone a “high level coordinator” does not enable him to produce high-level coordination. The position is reported to include being appointed both UN SRSG [Special representative of the Secretary-General] and the NATO Senior Civilian Representative and perhaps eventually EU Special Representative as well. But the UN SRSG has no budgetary authority over the UN agencies, let alone the bilateral donors (led by the U.S.) that provide aid through their own parallel (and very wasteful) channels. The NATO SCR has authority over neither military activities nor the civilian assistance provided by the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The EUSR has no authority over the aid provided by the European Commission. Unless the “coordinator” presides over a pooled international budget for Afghanistan, including security sector reform, development aid, and counter-narcotics, he will just become another agency that needs to be coordinated. Inevitably, he will be tempted to spend his time hectoring the Afghan government rather than coordinating the international actors.

This is wise analysis, as far as it goes. However, Rubin would have done better to have spelled out more emphatically than he did that the “security” (or insecurity) presence inside post-2001 Afghanistan is specifically not a UN presence. Instead, it is yet another example of that strange– and intentionally UN-sidelining– phenomenon in global affairs called the US-led “Coalition of the Willing” (COTW.) Specifically, in Afghanistan there is both the US-led “ISAF force”, to which many NATO members and also deputy sheriff Australia all contribute, and a direct US “Special Forces” presence tasked with huntin’, shootin’, and killin’ terrorists, both real and imagined.
(In the comments section on Rubin’s post, Don Bacon writes pithily: “Multilateral armed Euro-centric colonialism. Once they work the bugs out it’ll be coming to a theater near you… “)
In contrast to Bacon, far too many western commentators still think and write about Afghanistan and related matters in a totally west-centric and self-referential way.
Just remember, dear readers, where Afghanistan lies on the map. It has a short direct border with China, and a long border with the former Soviet Union– that is nowadays occupied by a clutch of “Stans” that act as, essentially either buffer-states or zones of contention and competition between the US-led COTW forces in Afghanistan and the Russian Republic itself.
Afghanistan is many thousands of miles from the US and Australia, and also pretty darn far from Europe.
The thinking in Washington and Brussels currently seems to be trending toward the idea that the COTW needs to cut its losses so that it can then go on and “win” in Afghanistan. I certainly support the idea that the COTW needs to withdraw completely, and speedily from Iraq– though for very different reasons.
However, I also judge that the idea that the COTW can “win” in Afghanistan is completely chimeric– for a number of reasons, including these:

1. Afghanistan is huge, hard to control, and far distant from the COTW’s homelands or supply bases; also, the COTW is deeply dependent on Pakistan to be able to sustain its presence in Afghanistan, and Pakistan itself is in an extremely problematic state.
2. The COTW has certainly not yet shown that it has the leadership skills– including the internal-coordination skills, the “vision”, or the raw counter-insurgency skills– that would be needed to “win” in Afghanistan.
3. It is anyway very hard to define what it would mean to “win” there. Stabilization? Democratization? Eradication of the Taliban? Their successful inclusion in the governing coalition? Other?
4. Russia and China are rising powers that both have strong interests in the Afghanistan region and veto power on the Security Council. What is their incentive to see a US-led COTW “win” in Afghanistan? Would they not, almost certainly, prefer to be “cut in” on a deal to stabilize Afghanistan and to do so through a pan-UN initiative rather than a Washington-dominated COTW? And so long as they (and the UN) are marginalized from any effective role in decisionmaking regarding Afghanistan, why would they not prefer to see NATO pull itself part there, and US power-projection capabilities similarly being degraded there?

In sum, therefore, I think it virtually impossible that any set-up like the current COTW can “win” in Afghanistan– even if it has many thousands more troops, even if (miraculously) Washington and the European capitals could all come to agreement, even if they came up with a truly compelling vision of how to “win” and a sound plan for achieving that victory.
Bottom line: even if the COTW took all its forces from Iraq and sent them to Afghanistan, even if the US public and economy were able to raise an additional 100,000 troops to send there or NATO countries were somehow able to come up with that number of new troops– the COTW still can’t on its own “win”in Afghanistan.
We might remember, too, that for most of the 19th century, Afghanistan was the key locus of the contest between Russian, Chinese, and British (in India) power called the “Great Game.” In the 1980s, it was the key locus in the global Cold War. It will most likely play a similarly crucial role in the global politics of the 21st century. It’s time that the US punditocracy stopped thinking in such an unrealistic (and provincially minded) way about the place.
Time, too, that the US political elites as a whole stopped living with the dangerous delusion that projection of military power to distant places is an effective way to secure our people’s true national interests…
Okay, on reviewing this, I see I still haven’t even started to deal with a number of the points raised in the above survey. (Including but not limited to the question of what happens in the Gulf region after a US withdrawal from Iraq.)
Basically, the analysis I’m starting to come to is that, just as there are now increasing numbers of people talking about the need, at the level of the Gulf and the greater Middle East, to explore the terms of a possible US-Iran “grand bargain” that would address and resolve all the many remaining issues of contention/concern between them, so too is there a need at the broader level for an entirely new US-world “grand bargain” that would address the many thorny security/political problems outstanding between “the west and the rest” concerning the Gulf, Afghanistan, and many other issues.
This is, as it happens, one of the big themes that I address in my upcoming book, on US foreign policy after Bush. But maybe the acuity of the situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan means we need to do a lot more rigorous thinking about this issue right now.