Conway does a Dannatt (sort of)

At the Pentagon yesterday, the Commandant of the US Marine Corps established an unequivocal link in a meeting with journalists between the need to draw down quickly in (at least some parts of) Iraq and the manpower needs of the US military in Afghanistan.
Here’s how the WaPo’s Ann Scott Tyson reported it:

The Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. James T. Conway, said [Iraq’s Anbar province] no longer requires such a large number of Marines, who would be better employed fighting in Afghanistan, where he said the Taliban insurgency is “growing bolder.”
… While pointing to security gains in Iraq, Conway voiced concern over increased violence in Afghanistan, where he said insurgent attacks and U.S. troop casualties have increased since 2004.
“The Taliban are growing bolder in their tactics and clearly doing their best to exploit security gaps where they exist,” he said…
Conway made a strong pitch to send thousands of additional Marines or other U.S. troops to Afghanistan, voicing agreement with U.S. commanders there who have said for years that they have too small a force and have called for as many as 10,000 more troops. “The economy of force is not necessarily working,” Conway said.

Conway– and also, we have to assume, the chiefs of staff of the other US armed services, and indeed, the political echelon that sits above them– thus seems to have arrived at the same judgment that former British Chief of the General Staff Sir Mark Dannatt arrived at expressed publicly in October 2006, when he said (a) that the “war” in Iraq was not winnable by the western military occupiers and (b) that the situation in Afghanistan needed western troops much more urgently than that in Afghanistan.
To be sure, Conway is not saying flat-out, as Dannatt did, that the US-led western coalition forces can’t win in Iraq… But he was saying very clearly that US military resources need to be significantly shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan.
For some time now, I have been arguing that that is the main dynamic behind the shifting balance between the US and Iraqi leaderships in Iraq. The Iraqis still have an internal political system marked by a lot of incoherence and internal disagreement. But they are all (except the Kurds) fairly strongly united around a fundamentally Iraqi-nationalist and anti-occupation stand, and since– ahem, did anyone in Washington notice this?– it is actually the Iraqis’ country there, their willpower to fight for it and the cost they are prepared to pay to regain control over it is far, far higher than the willpower of the US to maintain its control, and the cost the US citizenry is prepared to pay to do that.
So the US drawdown/exit from Iraq is not (yet) on the order of the humiliating rush of the last US people off the roof of the Saigon Embassy… but it is sliding some distance toward that. For their part, many Iraqis– even among those strongly opposed to the US– might continue for quite some time yet to be content to allow the US’s drawdown/exit to be non-humiliating… And I am sure that right through November 4, the Bush administration will continue to be happy to pay out large amounts of money to a wide variety of different forces in Iraq to ensure that no big humiliation of the US occurs before that day.
Of course, a formal negotiation of the exit would be far preferable to this approach of sort of slithering out while claiming that everything’s going really well there… as Gen. Conway was. And at a certain point in the slithering out, negotiating the remainder of the process with all relevant parties inside and outside Iraq will become absolutely necessary if the whole Gulf region is not to go up in flames.
Baker-Hamilton report, anyone?
Meanwhile, it is evident that the situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating very seriously indeed in recent weeks and months. Key dimensions of the governance crisis there, nearly seven years after the US invaded and started occupying the country, are that

(1) the US and its NATO allies have been unable to hand security duties in most of the country over to the US-installed administration of Hamid Karzai;
(2) large portions of the country, including portions very close to the capital, Kabul, and major portions of the country’s national highway system, are quite hospitable to the Taliban and other anti-US forces;
(3) the US is has continued to strive to single-handedly dominate all important aspects of Afghanistan’s domestic and foreign policies, and has refused to allow Karzai to pursue his preferences in either internal political reconciliation policies or anti-drug policies;
(4) US and NATO forces are trapped in Afghanistan at the end of extremely vulnerable supply lines that run through either Russia or Pakistan;
(5) the US and NATO forces are so understaffed and overstretched there that they often feel they have no alternative but to use airpower to try to control complex situations on the ground– and as a result, casualties among Afghan civilians have been rising horrendously; and
(6) the Afghan crisis has seeped seriously over the border into Pakistan since the get-go; but right now Pakistan is in its own, quite paralyzing crisis of governance, which poses a serious threat to the US/NATO position in Afghanistan.

Paul Rogers, who has watched the Afghan/Pakistani situation very carefully for many years now, has a good description of the current situation in Afghanistan, here. It’s titled Afghanistan: on the cliff-edge.
Back in early August I wrote a column in the The Christian Science Monitor arguing that, to win a decent outcome in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US would need to involve the UN Security Council, at the highest levels, in the decisionmaking and thorny peace diplomacy both countries require. So far, the Bush administration has shown few signs of doing that. Conway and some others in the decisionmaking echelons may have started to favor a troop-drawdown in Iraq, but regarding Afghanistan, just about everyone in the policy elite in Washington still continues to act as though simply throwing more US troops into the mix there will do the trick.
In good part, that point of view is buttressed by the argument that it was the “surge” in troop numbers that “succeeded” in Iraq, so therefore a similar approach should be used in Afghanistan. But in Iraq, the surge in US troop numbers made only a small contribution (if any) to the reduction in violence witnessed over recent months. It has been political developments among the Iraqis themselves, and the cautious, wily policy pursued by big neighbor Iran that have made the bigger difference.
A “surge” in the numbers of US and NATO troops is even less likely to do any good in Afghanistan. Indeed, if the additional troops sent there continue to act in the same gung-ho, shoot-from-the-air way the existing troops have acted, then the situation can only be expected to become a lot worse.
Nevertheless, the increasing recognition among US policymakers that in Iraq, at least, more US troops are not going to solve the problem is a good first step.