The Obama Administration's social media
prowess has been a novelty among latter day political media machines. It helped
to crowd-source the campaign funding needed to put Barack Obama in the White
House, and generated a populist gloss that was, at the time, convincingly fresh
and transparent. What was equally admirable was its apparent internal
discipline over when information made the transition from government secret to
press release. Controlling the flow of data and keeping secrets secret is a
challenge under any circumstance. Combine that with a predilection for Facebook
and Twitter, and a hyperactive security officer might expect policy waters to
muddy more quickly than they would under normal circumstances.
So when U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan
Karl Eikenberry's expressed his "discomfort" last week over a possible troop
surge, via diplomatic cable to Washington, it's no wonder that the message
ended up dominating headlines. The New
York Times reported "U.S. Envoy Urges Caution on Forces for Afghanistan."
The BBC offered a characteristically staid "U.S. Envoy Opposed to Afghan
Surge." The other Times (of London) headline was less
sanguine: "Rift in U.S. War Cabinet as Obama Throws Out All Options in Debate
Over Troop Surge." How exactly the cables ended up fodder for public
consumption is anyone's guess. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for one, is
not amused. "I have been appalled," he told reporters last week, "by the amount
of leaking that has been going on in this process" -- an allusion to diplomatic
decorum inspired, no doubt, by more than just untimely revelations to the
press.
If recent events are any indication, one
might be forgiven for thinking that the Administration is hemorrhaging while
its chief executive dithers. In September, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top
general in Afghanistan and Commander of NATO's ISAF mission in the country, advocated
his proposed troop surge in public. He did it on his own, speaking out of turn
while decisions were still being made, and got rapped on the knuckles for it.
In late October, Matthew Hoh, a 36 year old State Department official serving
as Senior Civilian Representative in Zabul
Province, resigned
in protest over U.S.
involvement in Afghanistan.
His letter of resignation, later published
by the Washington Post, caused a
stir.
It would be naive to suggest that Hoh may
have inspired others -- like Eikenberry, his former boss in Afghanistan, whose
more recent act of dissension has both ruffled feathers and acted as a
counterweight to military lobbying. Moreover, according to an in-depth profile
of Gates in The New Republic last
week the Secretary, normally a font of composure, has been no stranger to the
game in his long career as a CIA intelligence analyst and civil servant. Now,
he thinks "everyone out there ought to just shut up." The BBC reported that
Eikenberry's tactics have left McChrystal fuming, and an unnamed "senior NATO
official" told the Financial Times
"it's safe to say that Ambassador Eikenberry and Stanley McChrystal will not be
exchanging Christmas cards this year."
Whatever the state of intra-departmental
relations, the "war of leaks" doesn't play well on the international stage.
Fellow FP columnist David Rothkopf put
it into context, writing that "This is not a weakness of the Obama
Administration per se," but more a symptom of the "culture of Washington." David Betz, a friend, colleague and Senior Lecturer in War
Studies at King's College London, took the criticism in a slightly different
direction, writing
"this may, one day, make a really great movie... but it's a pretty dismal way
to make strategy." Indeed, while the U.S. has yet to make up its mind on
Afghanistan, NATO has already endorsed McChrystal's plans. That suggests there
may be some additional discomfort ahead, either for the Alliance, which will
have to go through yet more bureaucratic deliberations in the event of any
major change of approach -- even if only to rubber stamp it -- or for U.S.
leadership in Afghanistan, which will have to shoulder the burden of
implementation.
Non-U.S. contributors to the NATO mission
will be affected either way the shoe drops, and public support for the war
among some of the Alliance's European members is anything but unified. Worse,
diplomatic efforts to smooth out the appearance of difference are unconvincing.
In an interview last week, for example, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon told Der Spiegel that "restoring the unity of the Atlantic Alliance is
an important thing that in some ways has already been accomplished. On the key
issues of the day, I think there is more trans-Atlantic unity than at almost
anytime in the post-World War II period." One assumes that the key issue of the
day is Afghanistan; if so, Gordon's assertion is only true if he meant that we
can agree to disagree.
In the U.K. a small majority of
respondents in a recent
BBC poll felt that they "have a good understanding of the purpose of
Britain's mission in Afghanistan," but that "All British forces should be
withdrawn from Afghanistan as quickly as possible," "the war is unwinnable,"
and "the levels of corruption involved in the recent Presidential election show
the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting for." In a separate Financial Times/Harris Poll, respondents
in Spain, Italy, France and Germany were generally split on whether the U.S.
should send more troops, were somewhat more positively inclined towards giving
NATO more time to accomplish its mission, and in the U.K., were distinctly
pessimistic about whether troops are adequately equipped for the task. Numbers
never tell the whole tale, but one thing is certain: the longer U.S. leadership
waffles and stumbles, the greater the likelihood that that kind of pessimism
will come to replace indecision as our strategy in Afghanistan.
Michael A. Innes is a PhD Candidate at
University College London and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of
Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. From 2003 to 2009 he was a civilian staff
officer with NATO, and spent the months of April and May this year as a staff
liaison to ISAF HQ in Kabul.
If the
Obama Administration is serious about Afghanistan, it should leave NATO
out of the equation. The organization has survived a Cold War, genocide in the
Balkans, piracy off the horn of Africa,
cigarette smuggling, human trafficking, WMD proliferation, transnational
terrorism, and cyberwar. It has been called the "most successful Alliance in history,"
though that success has been achieved through a combination of dogged
persistence and bureaucratic dysfunction -- a form of longevity and presence
earned not through glorious battlefield victories, but rather arrived at on the
cusp of consensus. Its lowest-common denominator politics have meant that the
organization has been well positioned to withstand the tests of time, though
they have been honoured in the breach more often than in the observance. Until Afghanistan.
NATO staff
officers sometimes joke of its involvement in out-of-area operations,
suggesting that the erstwhile "North Atlantic Treaty Organization"
might as well be rebranded "Nearly Anywhere Terrorists Operate";
standing in the way of operational effectiveness, others quip, is the fact that
in the absence of a diplomatic and military hive-mind, its (now) 28 member
states are "Not Able To Organize". In the nearly two decades since
the end of the Cold War, it has embraced, through its Strategic Concept, a
veritable smorgasbord of threats. Former NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer memorably spoke to problems of "global security" in the
post-911 world -- an opportunity not lost on some empire-building bureaucrats
within NATO's convoluted chain of command to shore up fiefdoms and justify
bloated budgets dedicated to short-term deliverables, measurable successes, and
career-enhancing outcomes.
Many of
those same staff officers, bequeathed with limited resources, equipped with
even less patience, and facing innumerable obstacles to internal cooperation,
have only too readily rolled their eyes at such chicanery. They mutter
"ahhhh, NATO..." knowingly to one another, shrug, and continue on
their merry way... all the while failing to acknowledge that the organization's
dysfunctions are nothing if not a composite of their own national and
individual shortcomings. The most potent threat to the Alliance has more often than not been the
national interests of its own member states and their representatives. The
greatest evidence of this is the fact that there are very few individuals who
ever actually work for NATO. Most are simply assigned to it for a few short
months or years, and the national flags pinned to their uniformed shoulders or
tailored lapels remain firmly affixed for the duration.
NATO's own
civil servants, however -- ensconced in protected, well-paid, tax-exempt posts --
hardly compensate for those divided loyalties. The trench-level view is that
the REMFs and Fobbits in Brussels and The Hague are out of
touch with the realities of the Afghan war. People sitting in offices argue that the
gunfighters couldn't plan their way out of a wet paper bag. And so it is with
NATO: a schismatic, schizophrenic beast torn between national and institutional
interests, between the NATO of soldiers and civilians, of diplomacy and battle,
of bankers' hours and IED strikes, of the immediacy of Afghanistan and
the more ponderous bureaucratic requirements of future security cooperation.
NATO is what its member states want it to be and allow it to become. They
rightly demand value-added for their commitments of cash, materiel, and
personnel -- but only insofar as what in turn emerges from the NATO machine
does not interfere with or supersede state interests.
This is
both the promise and the price of a regional security organization that has
endured for sixty years. The Alliance, however, has also shifted increasingly
from a political-military club convened in the interest of collective
self-defense, to an all-purpose surrogate for other organizations -- including
its own member states -- unwilling to deal with or incapable of resolving the
problems that are their remit. NATO was not meant for either the peacekeeping
of the 1990s or the counterinsurgency dilemmas of Afghanistan. It is capable of
awesome might, a war-fighting machine in the traditional sense of the term, and
excels as a diplomatically empowered platform for destroying threats to the
collective good. It is, however, ill-suited to the vicissitudes of nation
building, with all the long-term occupation, reconstruction, development, and
policing projects that that entails.
Gone are
the days when NATO had the luxury to indulge in extracurriculars, as it did and
continues to do in the post-war Balkans. In Afghanistan, where troops fight and
die as a matter of course, there is neither patience nor justification for such
experiments. The member states have never been unified on the country's
strategic significance, and very few of them believe Afghan soil and stability
is worth the blood and treasure expended on it. That is their right. Let the
nations, whose prerogative it is to do what they will, play with the
intricacies and challenges of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. They can
do this on the basis of unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral cooperation --
forms of which, indeed, have already been exercised among NATO's Scandinavian
and English-speaking countries and their non-NATO allies.
The U.S. in
particular, as NATO's largest contributor, should exercise greater caution and
restraint in the demands it places on the organization and its members.
Leveraging the institution for the patina of multilateralism that it affords
its members comes at a cost in good relations between them, erodes their
capacity to live up to their original obligations, promotes unrealistic
expectations of NATO's capacity for irregular warfare, and frays the bonds that
have held the Alliance together for so long. Failure in Afghanistan,
should it come to that, will be treated as NATO's failure. Surely the Alliance, for all its
limitations, is worth more than that; surely it is more than just a whipping
post or scapegoat for the shortcomings of its national parts. If Afghanistan is
NATO's undoing, its member states ultimately will have only themselves to
blame.
Michael A. Innes is a PhD Candidate at
University College London and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of
Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. He edited Making Sense
of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates and the Use of Force (Potomac Books, 2010),
and is the author of The Sanctuary Complex (Hurst Publishers, 2010). From 2003 to 2009 he was a civilian staff
officer with NATO, and spent the months of April and May this year as a staff
liaison to ISAF HQ in Kabul.
As the U.S.
has gone into high gear trying to decide what to do about Afghanistan, NATO itself has been
conspicuously silent. The commander of the International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF), Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- for those who might not know -- has two
military chains of command that he's responsible to. One of them is exclusively
American, via CENTCOM. The other is his NATO chain, which as far as the public
is concerned, has been next to invisible over the last couple of weeks.
McChrystal reports through JFC Brunssum to Stavridis
at SHAPE, who wears the grand title of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR
-- pronounced "Sack-Yer"). U.S. National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones
occupied the role until his retirement from the Marine Corps in 2006; Wesley
Clark was SACEUR during the Kosovo campaign in the late 1990s. There have been
more than a few exalted names assigned to the post,
and theirs have more often than not been the faces of NATO when the
organization has gone to war.
Stavridis has only been SACEUR for a few months, and
has already made a mark as a diplomat and communicator, taking pains to open
NATO up to social media like Facebook and Twitter,
and even penning his own blog, "From the Bridge." NATO
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has taken a similar approach with his
own Facebook page, a Twitter account,
and an official video blog, The Secretary
General's Corner.
Stavridis and Fogh Rasmussen have both been busy over
the last two weeks, doing the usual circuit of meetings and official visits.
Stavridis took the time to post "15 Things For
Leaders" on his blog, and Fogh Rasmussen extended
congratulations via official press release to U.S. President Barack Obama
on his Nobel Peace Prize.
On the troops debate? Not so much. The absence of
public commentary isn't necessarily a bad thing, since NATO isn't usually wont
to publicly pass judgement on the internal politics of its member states. There
are prominent exceptions, of course, like when it comes to paying the bill or
national caveats on rules of engagement, for example. Stavridis is a U.S. officer,
though, which makes steering clear of the troops debate a wise career move. There's
a big "however" to that: as the NATO representative on all things operational,
he has a clear responsibility to the Alliance and to 27 other member states to
speak out on issues that might concern even the least among them.
Or does he? At issue isn't whether or not the
discussion is happening. At Fogh Rasmussen's most recent monthly press
conference, on October 7, he briefly told those
attending that "We are now in the process of studying General McChrystal's
assessment. This is under discussion in the Military Committee and in the NATO
Council. These have been initial discussions, and we reached no conclusions
yet... but I can say the exchange of views on approach has already begun." Staff
officers up and down the NATO chain of command have no doubt been burning the
midnight oil, generating stacks of memoranda, point papers, and PowerPoint
presentations on all aspects of a potential troop increase of such magnitude.
The real question is whether or not anyone in the NATO
hierarchy besides McChrystal himself, who only really answers to Washington, should have
engaged the public on the issue. What does it mean for the Alliance, for example, when the Supreme
Allied Commander Europe takes the fifth? He is, after all, responsible for a
lot more than just ISAF, so expecting him to weigh in on troop counts is
probably unfair. And like any military officer, Stavridis has a duty to advise
his superiors; if the apparent political frictions over McChrystal's recent
public appearances are any guide, he'll stick to doing that through private and
classified channels.
That's understandable, even acceptable, but it comes
at a cost in strategic communications and public diplomacy, particularly for an
organization whose two most senior leaders have appeared so keen to interface
with the public.
Throwing an additional 40,000 to 60,000 troops into
the ISAF mission would be sure to radically alter things in Afghanistan,
one way or the other. It's possible that some of those forces, if they come at
all, will hail from among the 28 NATO member states. It's more likely that they
would almost all come from the U.S., but the consequences that that kind of
change precipitates won't be limited to U.S. forces alone. A mission of ISAF's
scale, almost overwhelmingly resourced by a single member state, is sure to
become an increasingly sensitive pressure point within the Alliance -- generating more sticky questions
about its character and relevance.
Michael A. Innes
is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Politics and International
Studies, University of Leeds, a Research and Practice Associate with the
Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSCT) at Syracuse
University, and a PhD candidate in political science at University College
London. He blogs at Monkwire.
James Stavridis bids farewell to Anders Fogh Rasmussen. NATO 2009.
At the end of a New York Times
article on the apparent lack of direct face time between President Obama
and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Brookings Institute's Michael O'Hanlon is
quoted as saying, "I don't think I can defend him for being out of touch
with his commander... He has other people who advise him. But there's no
one else with the feel on the ground that McChrystal has."
Andrew
Exum, of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) agrees, suggesting
that the disconnect, if there is one, is "indefensible." Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired's uber-national security blog,
Danger Room is sympathetic to the criticism. "Given how dire the situation is in Afghanistan,"
he writes, "and given Obama's willingness to dive head-first into
relatively-trivial matters like the Olympics -- I think I'd like to see that
Commander-in-Chief more deeply involved." Jason Sigger, a Washington defense policy analyst, and
Bernard Finel, a Senior Fellow at the American Security Project, on the other
hand, were bothheavily critical of O'Hanlon's
comments.
This stems from McChrystal's response to questioning on 60 Minutes a few days ago
that he'd only met with Obama once since taking command, via video
teleconference (or "VTC"). Framed in that light, devoid of context -- or common
sense consideration of it -- it seems mildly disturbing. But it shouldn't be.
The Danger Room piece, which turns to U.S. military historian Mark ("Blog Them Out Of the Stone Age")
Grimsley for some expert advice, lays bare the silliness, making the critical
point that there are a number of people in important positions between Obama
and McChrystal, and the flow of communications between Kabul and the White
House has generally remained true to historical form.
After watching the 60 Minutes segment, though, I'm slightly
surprised that out of all the points raised, it was McChrystal's face time with
Obama that's got everyone in a tizzy. That one blurb occupied a few seconds
near the end of a 13 minute interview. McChrystal was straightforward in his
response, but he certainly didn't come across as if he was trying to drive an
agenda -- at least, not with that particular point. McChrystal has been lobbying publicly for
increased troop commitments, essentially forcing the White House into a
reactive position on the subject. One can only assume that one of the talking
points on the agenda of today's meeting between the two on Air Force One will
include a reference to who sets policy and who follows orders.
For the most part, I didn't have any serious objections,
either to the questions that 60 Minutes' David Martin put to McChrystal, or to
the general's answers to them. Breaking bad habits was a heavy theme, including
the symbolic importance of not flying the NATO flags outside his headquarter
building at half mast every time a soldier is killed. "We've gotten to the
point where the flags were at half mast all the time," he told Martin. "And I
believe that a force that's fighting a war can't spend all it's time looking
back at what the costs have been, they've got to look ahead and they've got to
have their confidence, and I thought it was important that the flags be up
where they belong."
That's a fair point on such an emotive issue -- but it also
misses another symbol inherent in the lowered flags, and the point of the
practice: that when a soldier from any one of the ISAF member states was
killed, all the flags were lowered.
That sort of blatant solidarity does not come easily within the Alliance. At one
point, Martin asked McChyrstal what he thought of the Destille Garden
outside his staff offices, where people can "sip cappuccino under the shade."
He wryly suggested he'd like to "turn it into a rifle range" -- though he
probably knows, despite all the guilty comforts that a staff headquarters
represents to those out in the forward operating bases (FOBs) and combat
outposts (or COPs), that with everyone in his staff headquarters working on
marksmanship skills, he'd have no one left to draft the unending crush of
briefings and memoranda and paperwork that make big field missions tick.
The one serious point I'd pick at is this: so what if "there's no
one else with the feel on the ground that McChrystal has"? McChrystal himself
warned in the interview against ever believing that we really know the ground
truth, basically because we're (he was including himself) not the ones walking
it. More than that, though -- and taking O'Hanlon literally at his word --
McChrystal's not an intelligence or special forces operator out sniffing at the
bushes and tracking boot prints in the dust. He's the mission commander, which
is not a leisurely paced job, and doesn't -- shouldn't -- leave all that much
time for getting down into the weeds. Which suggests that neither should Obama.
The implied criticism over the last couple of days has been
that senior leaders should be tightly wired into ground truths -- into
maintaining fine-grained situational awareness of conditions in Afghanistan.
That's ridiculous. Taking the time to go deep is for spooks and
anthropologists; the time to network, gladhand, and swap stories over beers at
the Sunday BBQ is for another life, and a luxury that neither Obama nor
McChrystal has, at least when it comes to fighting this war. More importantly,
questions about the relationship between Obama and his general in Afghanistan,
fixated as they are on communication channels, occlude a lesson that's now been
conveniently forgotten about technologically-enabled
micromanagement: just because Obama and McChrystal can communicate more frequently that
they have been doesn't mean that they need to.
Michael A.
Innes is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Politics and International
Studies, University of Leeds. From 2003 to 2009 he was a civilian staff officer
with NATO, and spent the months of April and May this year as a staff liaison
to ISAF HQ in Kabul.
MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images and Gary Fabiano-Pool/Getty Images
