The following is an editorial written by a colleague of mine. Give it a read, give it a thought, and whatever conclusions you reach, please vote. This is your chance to be part of the process...and a lot of people in this nation's history have given greatly so that you and I can have that right today. Use it.
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I believe that the President has been horribly wrong in both his planning and execution of the mission in Iraq, the war on terror, and the mission here at home. For the past five years I worked in Washington DC for a wide range of federal, DOD, intelligence, and commercial clients - trying to help them understand, plan, and respond to the complex strategic challenges they faced. My team worked on everything from wargaming homeland security threats, to developing real rapid response plans for drug delivery in the face of a pneumonic plague attack, to integrating operations planning for National Missile Defense. We also helped the Army game out what threats might exist in 2020 and authored the final report issued by the Hart-Rudman commission on national security. In short, I worked closely with the people whose expertise EVERY administration needs to keep America secure.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration has deliberately marginalized the very people who know the most about counter-terrorism, global diplomacy, and military planning. These folks (within DOD, the intelligence agencies, and the State Department) are not all a bunch of bleeding heart liberals - many of them are dyed in the wool conservative republicans who were overjoyed when Bush won the election. Unsurprisingly, most if not all of my former clients are quietly revolting against their political masters. The reason is simple. These hard working civil servants within the military, intelligence, and federal agencies are worried that the President has opened a Pandora's box with his ill conceived policies of pre-emption and unilateral action. These policies are giant shifts away from how the US has led the world for the past sixty years, and they have decreased our global prestige, influence, and security. In fact a coalition of senior policymakers and military leaders from across the political spectrum has come together to articulate their opposition to the foreign policy of this administration, and to explain how the current administration has put all American?s at greater risk.
One example of the administration?s short term thinking is reflected in Afghanistan. If something does not change (meaning security and real economic aid) - Afghanistan will again be a failed state in 18 months. The optimism expressed by this administration in Afghanistan is simply not justified by the facts. The drug lords are back, security for aid groups and citizens remains sketchy outside of major cities, and the central government has little real power. Afghanistan is case study in failure, not hope. The planners for Afghanistan were not allowed to present the real costs of stabilizing the country along with a timetable to secure the peace because Iraq was on deck. Those individuals that spoke out were told to shut up and sit down because Pakistan and the Northern Alliance would make our jobs easier. Once any and all criticism was silenced, the required planning for securing the country, disarming the population, and moving towards reconstruction and maintenance operations was shelved. No one within the planning community is surprised by the ongoing violence, resurgence of the Taliban, and record opium crop. These are simply the results of not being permitted to plan for the peace, because there was a rush to shift resources and capital to Iraq.
Unfortunately, this recipe of political expediency trumping the need for critical analysis and planning was repeated for Iraq. The only difference was that a number of senior officers raised their voices in an effort to ensure that the US did not win a battle, but lose the war. Individuals like Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki were actively punished for providing honest assessments about what was needed to wage war and achieve peace in Iraq. General Shinseki?s estimate that we needed between 200,000 and 300,000 troops has been validated by war planners and experts across the services. More importantly, the estimates he provided were the result of years of study. The military plans for every contingency, and there was a real plan on file for invading, stabilizing, and rebuilding Iraq if the US was ever threatened. That plan had been tested over a number of years with the participation of the military services and the intelligence community. The current administration ignored those experts in an effort to sell the war to the public, arguing that large numbers of troops and extensive preparations were unnecessary because the Iraqis would greet us as liberators. When individuals like Gen. Shinseki did their duty in speaking truth to power, they were castigated as unpatriotic and uninformed.
The hubris and lack of perspective of this administration are directly responsible for many of the miscalculations not just in Iraq, but in the war on terror. One simple example is Pakistan. President Musharraf has been given complete freedom to manipulate the US. The Bush administration allowed him to outlaw and ultimately jail all opposition candidates and parties, except the Islamic extremists that have infiltrated his army and intelligence services. The result has been an inability to apply real pressure for cooperation in eastern Pakistan. President Bush and his advisers set all of this in motion when they lifted sanctions against Pakistan in exchange for vague promises of cooperation. If the President had listened to any of the experts at the Defense Intelligence Agency, State Dept., or even the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, they would have been told how such plans would alienate the Indian government (the sole democracy in the region), embolden extremists within Pakistan, worsen the risks of proliferation, and curtail our strategic options. But none of the people who have spent their lives studying this region were consulted. Such myopia is par for the course in this administration, and I believe it comes from an inability to walk in anyone else's shoes. I do not believe our country can afford such ignorance much longer.
Many people have argued that President Bush has the right argument about taking the offensive against terrorism. Such language makes a wonderful sound bite, but it conceals a failed policy that relies almost entirely on conventional military action. Our enemies are non-state actors committed to asymmetric warfare. That warfare depends on fresh recruits, a global finance system, and continued political repression in the middle east. As long as Egypt annually receives billions of dollars in US aid that is then used to help suppress the Egyptian people (often with US weapons and training); and the sole form of permissible political protest is burning the American flag, there will be more people willing to die than we can ever deter, kill, or capture. The same pattern of repression and exportation of extremism is going on in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and many of our other ?allies? in the middle east. We do need to attack the leadership nodes of terrorist organizations, but we also need to drain the camps of volunteers. Our ?allies? in the middle east are helping grow more extremists than we can ever bomb out of existence.
We need a different strategy, one that leverages alliances across the globe to enlarge the problem and engages allies in law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and when appropriate, military activities. Al Qaeda is supposedly active in over 60 countries. We cannot invade or even conduct operations in all 60, because there is no more slack left in our military network. There is an acute lack of air and sea lift, and frankly there are no more ready divisions to send. And all the predator drones in the world don't equal a platoon of marines on patrol, delivering food, guarding an ammo dump, or simply controlling an area.
Winning the war on terror isn't about pre-emptive military strikes, its about shutting down illegal global financial networks that enable terrorists, developing new sources of human intelligence, actually processing and sharing the intelligence we do have, and yes hunting down and killing the terrorists. But the majority of all this work is not glamorous, and does not require M1 tanks or Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Most of it is grinding out solutions day in and day out: sharing and analyzing intelligence among US and allied agencies, tracking and freezing terrorist funding across international boundaries, and conducting joint simultaneous counter-terrorism operations. To succeed in all of these endeavors we need allies who trust us and are willing to share the burden in this fight. Right now, its clear that the US is bearing ninety percent of the burden in both the financial and human costs of this war. This must change. No economy, no society, no matter how successful, can continue to pay such a high price in blood and treasure.
In the end, I don't think the President understands how crippling his policies have been, and as such he has no hope of changing course. And not changing course will prove much worse than 9/11 ever was. I believe that John Kerry understands all of these issues and can succeed in getting the allies we need on board. Kerry will have plenty of chips to trade with- with most of Bush's unilateral policies on the line. And let's not forget that our traditional allies want us to lead. Kerry can remind them of the successful disruption of the millennium plots, when European and US investigators shared information to thwart a number of planned attacks across the globe. Both Europe and the US need to return to a similar multi-pronged strategy, where intelligence and diplomacy help generate and support successful counter-terrorism operations. Ultimately, our allies in Europe and Asia want us to succeed in both Iraq and against Al Qaeda - we just need to give them something that makes sense and that they can explain to their people. In my mind, Kerry's capabilities in this regard make him a clear choice.
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