The United States of Fear

with troops perceived to be leaving shortly.”

Inflection Points and Aspirational Goals

Barely had 2014 risen into the headlines before that date, too, began its vanishing act. As a start, it turned out that American planners weren’t talking about just any old day in 2014, but its last one. As Lieutenant General William Caldwell, head of the NATO training program for Afghan security forces, put it while holding a Q&A with a group of bloggers, “They’re talking about December 31st, 2014. It’s the end of December in 2014… that [Afghan] President Karzai has said they want Afghan security forces in the lead.”

No one, officials rushed to say, was talking about 2014 as a date for all American troops to head for the exits, just combat troops—and maybe not even all of them. Possibly tens of thousands of trainers and other so-called noncombat forces would stay on to help with the “transition process.” This follows the Iraq pattern where fifty thousand American troops remained after the departure of U.S. “combat” forces to great media fanfare.

In November 2010, behind “closed doors” at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Afghan War commander Petraeus presented European leaders with a “phased four-year plan” to “wind down American and allied fighting in Afghanistan.” Not surprisingly, it had the end of 2014 in its sights and the president quickly confirmed that “transition” date, even while opening plenty of post-2014 wiggle room. By then, as he described it, “our footprint” would only be “significantly reduced.” (He also claimed that, post-2014, the United States would be maintaining a “counterterrorism capability” in Afghanistan—and Iraq—for which “platforms to… execute… counterterrorism operations,” assumedly bases, would be needed.) Meanwhile, unnamed “senior U.S. officials” in Lisbon were clearly buttonholing reporters to “cast doubt on whether the United States, the dominant power in the 28-nation alliance, would end its own combat mission before 2015.” As always, the usual qualifying phrases were profusely in evidence.

The “tweaking”—that is, the further chipping away at 2014 as a hard and fast date for anything—has only continued. Mark Sedwill, NATO’s civilian counterpart to Petraeus, insisted that 2014 was nothing more than “an inflection point” in an ever more drawn-out drawdown process. That process would likely extend to “2015 and beyond,” which, of course, put 2016 officially into play. And keep in mind that this is only for combat troops, not those assigned to “train and support” or keep “a strategic over watch” on Afghan forces. On the eve of NATO’s Lisbon meeting, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declared 2014 nothing more than an “aspirational goal,” rather than an actual deadline. As the conference began, NATO’s secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that the alliance would be committed in Afghanistan “as long as it takes.” And British Chief of the Defense Staff General Sir David Richards suggested that, given the difficulty of ever defeating the Taliban (or al-Qaeda) militarily, NATO should be preparing plans to maintain a role for its troops for the next thirty to forty years.

On Ticking Clocks in Washington and Kabul

Up to now, only one of General Petraeus’s two campaigns has been under discussion here: the one fought out not in Afghanistan, but in Washington and NATO capitals, over how to schedule a war. Think of it as the war for a free hand in determining how long the Afghan War is to be fought. It has been run from General Petraeus’s headquarters in Kabul, the giant five-sided military headquarters on the Potomac presided over by Secretary of Defense Gates, and various think tanks filled with America’s militarized intelligentsia scattered around Washington—and it has proven to be a classically successful “clear, hold, build” counterinsurgency operation. Pacification in Washington and a number of European capitals has occurred with remarkably few casualties. (Former Afghan War commander general Stanley McChrystal, axed by the president for insubordination, has been the exception, not the rule.)

With the ratification in Lisbon of that 2014 date “and beyond,” the political clocks—an image General Petraeus loves—in Washington, European capitals, and American Kabul are now ticking more or less in unison.

Two other “clocks” are, however, ticking more like time bombs. If counterinsurgency is a hearts-and-minds campaign, then another target of General Petraeus’s first COIN (counterinsurgency) campaign has been the restive hearts and minds of the American and European publics. In February 2010, the Dutch government fell over popular opposition to Afghanistan and, even as NATO met that weekend in November 2010, thousands of antiwar protestors were marching in London and Lisbon. Europeans generally want out and their governments know it, but (as has been true since 1945) the continent’s leaders have no idea how to say no to Washington. In the United States, too, the Afghan War grows ever more unpopular, and while it was forgotten during the election season, no politician should count on that phenomenon lasting forever.

And then, of course, there’s the other ticking bomb, the actual war in Afghanistan. In that campaign, despite a drumbeat of American/NATO publicity about “progress,” the news has been grim. American and NATO casualties have been higher from 2010 to 2011 than at any other moment in the war. The Taliban seems, if anything, more entrenched in more parts of the country; the Afghan public, puzzled and unhappy with foreign troops and contractors traipsing across the land. And President Hamid Karzai, sensing a situation gone truly sour, has been regularly challenging the way General Petraeus is fighting the war in his country. (The nerve!)

No less unsettling, General Petraeus himself has seemed unnerved. He was reportedly “irked” by Karzai’s comments and was said to have warned Afghan officials that their president’s criticism might be making his “own position ‘untenable,’” which was taken as a resignation threat. Meanwhile, the COIN-meister was in the process of imposing a new battle plan on Afghanistan that left counterinsurgency (at least as usually described) in a roadside ditch. No more was the byword “protect the people,” but smash, kill, destroy. The war commander has loosed American firepower in a major way in the Taliban strongholds of southern Afghanistan.

In early 2010, then-commander McChrystal had significantly cut back on U.S. air strikes as a COIN-ish measure meant to lessen civilian casualties. In a striking reversal, air power was called in massively. In October 2010, U.S. planes launched missiles or bombs on a thousand separate Afghan missions, numbers seldom seen since the 2001 invasion. The army similarly loosed its massively powerful High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in the area around the southern city of Kandahar. Civilian deaths rose rapidly. Dreaded special operations night raids on Afghan homes by “capture/kill” teams tripled. With them, the body count also arrived. American officials eagerly began boasting to reporters about their efficiency in taking out midlevel Taliban leaders (“368 insurgent leaders killed or captured, and 968 lower-level insurgents killed and 2,477 captured, according to NATO statistics”).

In the districts around Kandahar, a reported American tactic was simply to raze individual houses or even whole villages believed to be booby-trapped by the Taliban, as well as tree lines “where insurgents could hide.” American troops were “blow[ing] up outbuildings, flatten[ing] agricultural walls, and carv[ing] new ‘military roads,’ because existing ones are so heavily mined… right through farms and compounds.” The marines, reported Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, were also sending the first contingent of M1 Abrams tanks (with a “main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away”) into the south. Such tanks, previously held back for fear of reminding Afghans of their Russian occupiers, were, according to an unnamed U.S. officer he quotes, bringing “awe, shock, and firepower” to the south. None of this had anything to do with winning hearts and minds, just obliterating them. Not surprisingly, such tactics also generated villagers fleeing embattled farmlands, often for “squalid” refugee camps in overcrowded cities.

Flip of the COIN

Suddenly, this war for which General Petraeus had won his counterinsurgency warriors at least a four- to six-year extension was being fought as if there were no tomorrow. Here, for instance, is a brief description from a Guardian reporter in Kandahar of the night war from a distance: “After the sun sets, the air becomes noisy with jets dropping bombs that bleach the dark out of the sky in their sudden eruptions; with the