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The Second Coming of Petraeus
June 30, 2010
Ivan Eland

With the justified firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his replacement with Iraq water-walker David Petraeus, it’s as if people are hoping for a second coming of Jesus in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the replacement may be similar to the second coming of the water-walking Joe Gibbs as coach of the Washington Redskins.

Although McChrystal’s derisive comments about high-level Obama administration officials weren’t as bad as Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s attempts to undermine President Harry Truman’s effort to keep the Korean War from turning into a nuclear war against China, such insubordination by a military officer toward the civilian command structure cannot be tolerated in a republic. If it is, the country may not be a republic for long. Thus, even many Republicans didn’t squawk about McChrystal’s sacking.

They, and almost everyone else in Washington, were comforted, even elated, that Gen. David Petraeus, the hero of the Iraq war, was recycled to command U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Everyone is hoping for a replay of the reductions in violence in Iraq.

Of course, Petraeus is partially responsible for that reduction in that violence, but not for the reasons commonly believed. The conventional wisdom is that Petraeus’ anti-guerrilla warfare strategy—winning the hearts and minds of the local population instead of blasting the insurgents to smithereens and also killing many civilians (this strategy is now being transplanted to Afghanistan)—was the cause of increased stability in Iraq. In fact, paying the Iraqi Sunni insurgents to fight al-Qaeda instead of U.S. forces and prior ethnic cleansing that separated the warring Sunni and Shi’ite groups were the main factors leading to the reduction in violence in Iraq, according to many counterinsurgency experts. Petraeus’ short-term bribery will probably not even hold in Iraq. The real problem is the ethno-sectarian fissures that will likely reignite once the United States leaves. By funding and arming the Sunnis, as well as Iraqi Shi’ites and Kurds, Petraeus, to achieve short-term gains in stability, may end up inadvertently worsening post-U.S. ethno-sectarian warfare.

Even if we accept the dubious propositions that Iraq’s worst days are behind it and that Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy was primarily responsible for the reduction of violence, the skeptical media keeps asking the question of whether it can be transplanted to Afghanistan. After all, even many U.S. troops complain that their casualties are going up because they are not allowed to take the fight to the enemy, thus endangering civilians and ruining the “hearts and minds” strategy. The counterinsurgency strategy has been adopted to such an extent that the United States even announces offensives in advance, hoping that both the Taliban and civilians will flee the area.

American troops are right that there is a tradeoff between U.S. casualties and local civilian casualties; when civilian casualties are reduced, the U.S. military takes more of them, and vice versa. The two most important “centers of gravity” in any anti-guerrilla war are civilian opinion in the occupied nation and public opinion back home for the occupier. But to win local popularity, the U.S. military must incur higher casualties—as is now occurring—which leads to erosion of support for the war back home. Predictably, a majority of Americans have soured on the Afghan war after nine years of quagmire.

Despite taking higher casualties, however, the United States doesn’t seem to be winning many Afghan hearts and minds either. Counterinsurgency campaigns are rarely effective for several reasons, the principal one being that it is difficult to get around being regarded as a foreign occupier. In Afghanistan, even the brutal Taliban has much support in the Pashtun community—the tribes that historically have been dominant in the country—because the group is regarded as a defender of the tribes against the Afghan government, which is perceived to be controlled by Uzbeks and Tajiks.

Other problems that foreign occupiers face include the fact that counterinsurgency is much more expensive to conduct than insurgency, foreigners usually have difficulty understanding the local culture, locals know that the foreigners will eventually leave and they will have to deal with the local insurgents, government organizations specializing in combat are ill-suited to the difficult task of nation-building, and nimble non-bureaucratic guerrillas can adapt faster to changes in the battlefield than the governments of the host nation and foreign occupier.

Thus, the second coming of Petraeus may instead resemble the return of storied coach Joe Gibbs to the Washington Redskins. Although he had been in four Super Bowls during his first tenure as coach, his resurrection fizzled because the NFL he returned to was not the same one he left. For Petraeus, Afghanistan is not Iraq.

New from Ivan Eland! THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition) Most Americans don’t think of their government as an empire, but in fact the United States has been steadily expanding its control of overseas territories since the turn of the twentieth century. In The Empire Has No Clothes, Ivan Eland, a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security, examines American military interventions around the world from the Spanish-American War to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Learn More »»

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The G-20: Has Everyone Lost It?
June 30, 2010
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

WASHINGTON—The governments, institutions, and personalities who should be providing guidance in the aftermath of the financial and economic debacle of 2007–08 are still recommending the very policies that got us here in the first place. The G-20 summit in Toronto exposed this truth quite poignantly.

Before and during the sessions, President Obama urged nations to postpone fiscal tightening and debt reduction for fear of stifling the weak recovery. His assurances that the participants were in “violent agreement” on their final communique about reducing deficits in half by 2013 and stabilizing debt ratios by 2016 actually concealed more violence than agreement. Canada’s Stephen Harper, Germany’s Angela Merkel and, yes, even France’s Nicolas Sarkozy argued for fiscal retrenching. But given opposition from the United States and Japan, and ambiguity on the part of emerging powers such as Brazil, the compromise was a toothless statement of good wishes.

Respected financial publications that should be offering moral clarity now that government debt amounts to 92 percent of the size of the economy in France and 83 percent in Britain, and that the U.S. budget deficit is at near-record levels, are instead warning against monetary and fiscal restraint. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times thinks “it is right for central banks to keep printing.” Clive Crook of the same publication writes that it is fair to call “Germany a bad global citizen for tightening fiscal policy despite its external surplus and unstressed borrowing capacity.” Forbes, a supposedly pro-market publication, published an article railing against the austerity measures announced by George Osborne, the British chancellor of the exchequer, who wants to slash the budgets of various government departments by 25 percent. Financier George Soros, commenting on Bloomberg, calls the spending-reduction measures in some European countries “a disaster.”

The case these normally authoritative voices make is essentially this—that the recovery continues to depend on government stimulus, and that in order to redress the balance between surplus nations such as Germany or China and deficit nations such as the United States or, say, Spain, the former need to be made to save less and spend more.

If this advice, which blames the prudent for the conduct of the imprudent, were postulated only by the usual suspects—i.e., Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and company, it would be bad enough. But coming from the world’s superpower, the business community’s most influential gurus and outlets that call themselves conservative, one thing is clear: The world is a crazier place than one feared.

Deficits, debt, and loose money are what caused the bubble. They also caused the Hitchcockian movie in which Europe has been living for the past few months. Making policy decisions necessary to create the environment for a sustained recovery and avoid future bubbles is tough enough when any remotely responsible measure is met with the national howling we have seen against pension-fund reform in France or spending cuts in Greece and Spain. Making them when international leaders and respected observers seem to have lost it requires truly titanic efforts.

Thank God, some have kept their heads. As soon as the G-20 coven ended, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Switzerland-based central bank of central banks, spoke out in its annual report against keeping loose monetary and fiscal policies. It maintains that the artificially low interest rates are distorting investment decisions and leading market participants to take excessive risk. An austerity program would build trust, shore up the financial system and provide low long-term borrowing costs to the benefit of sound investments.

Profligate fiscal and monetary policies, the BIS argues, could replicate the easy money environment that led to the present crisis by encouraging financial institutions to engage in too much short-term borrowing and long-term lending, a gap that would result in a credit crunch at the first sign of scarce liquidity. More essentially, the current policies will delay confronting the demographic challenge facing the welfare state in rapidly aging countries and restructuring inefficient industries kept on life support by access to easy money.

You know something really is rotten when the BIS, which in the last couple of years cheered the measures it now debunks, starts to warn of impending disasters if governments maintain the course.

New from Alvaro Vargas Llosa! LESSONS FROM THE POOR: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit Half the people in the world live on two dollars or less per day and roughly 600 million live on no more than one dollar per day. With thousands of international relief organizations, strategic government programs, and billions of dollars in foreign aid, why do so many underdeveloped countries remain unable to grow their economies beyond mere survival? Learn More »»

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