A Presidential Moment, A Foreign Policy Dilemma

Democracy is a disorderly form of government, often inefficient, always frustrating. Maintaining liberty and security, governing in such a manner as to achieve desirable political outcomes and at the same time military effectiveness, is among the most difficult dilemmas of human governance. – Professor Richard H. Kohn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (An Essay on Civilian Control of the Military, 1997).

President Obama was right to dismiss General Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It is a fundamental principle of all free and democratic societies that military authority be subordinate to civilian rule and a government elected by the people. The General’s disdain for his civilian counterparts and the lack of respect on display by McChrystal’s staff in the Rolling Stone profile were alone cause for dismissal; worse was McChrystal’s poor judgment in allowing the reporter such unguarded access. It is no surprise that certain uniformed personnel – military officials, police officers, and those on the front lines of dangerous missions – out of frustration or fatigue sometimes speak contemptuously of civilian leaders. But such conversations are expected to occur in private, away from journalists and microphones.

The purpose of the military is to defend society, not to define it. Civilian control allows a nation’s popular will to define its values and to set policy, even if contrary to the desires of its military leaders, whose institutional values are, by necessity, anti-democratic. The United States Constitution makes explicit this premise. The President is the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” (Art. II, Sec. 2). Congress alone is granted the power to “declare War”, “[t]o raise and support Armies,” and “[t]o provide and maintain a Navy” (Art. I, Sec. 8). “The greatest danger to liberty is from large standing armies,” declared James Madison during the constitutional convention in 1787. The Founding Fathers countered the threat of an unfettered military by embedding in the Constitution the principle that military authority remains subservient to the two branches of government elected by the people.

Essential to civilian control is the military’s embrace of its Constitutional limits. We are endowed in the United States with a highly trained and professional military establishment; one committed to political neutrality, with unhesitating loyalty to the Constitution and the democratic system of government its job it is to defend. Of course, military leaders in democracies often possess great public credibility; this has been true throughout most of America’s history. And given the complexity of modern day warfare, military technology, and geo-political strategy, the military’s expertise is called upon, and often relied upon, by the president and Congress in setting strategy and deploying resources to counter threats to American security. A good president must know when to defer to military advice and when to push back. But in the final analysis, it is always the president’s call. Military leaders can and should forcefully advocate their positions and reasoning to the President and his advisers, but they must willingly accept and faithfully execute the President’s decisions. Once the line is crossed and a general’s disagreements become publicly aired, he or she risks and usually deserves reprimand or dismissal.

American history is replete with examples of presidents displaying the upper hand in public spats with their generals. During the Civil War, President Lincoln fired Union General George McClellan after McClellan repeatedly refused Lincoln’s orders to more aggressively fight Confederate forces (it did not help matters that McClellan often referred to the president in letters as an “idiot” and a “gorilla”). In 1951, President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur after MacArthur publicly assailed Truman’s refusal to invade and attack China directly during the Korean War. Similar incidents of lesser fame include President Lyndon Johnson’s dismissal of General Curtis LeMay in 1965 after LeMay publicly criticized the White House for not carpet-bombing North Vietnamese cities. And just two years ago, President George W. Bush forced the resignation of General William J. Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, after Esquire magazine profiled Fallon as the Administration’s sole voice opposing an attack on Iran (a matter that, even if true, was not for public consumption and potentially undermined Bush’s strategic planning).

Although some commentators have compared Obama’s firing of McChrystal with the Truman-MacArthur feud, I do not believe this analogy apt. Truman was concerned that broadening the Korean conflict would provoke the Soviet Union and raise the specter of nuclear war, a very real concern in 1951. MacArthur wanted to take the war to China and, possessed of an inflated ego exacerbated by his popularity following World War II, believed he was essentially immune from presidential authority. After publicly criticizing the president’s conduct of the war on several occasions, MacArthur wrote a blistering attack on the president’s strategy in a letter to the House Minority Leader, declaring that Truman’s refusal to expand the war into China imposed “an enormous handicap, without precedent in military history.” When MacArthur then publicly threatened Beijing with “imminent military collapse,” Truman finally had enough and relieved the general of his military command. “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch – although he was,” Truman later explained. “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president.”

The Obama-McChrystal incident does not rise to the level of the Truman-MacArthur feud. Indeed, the President commended General McChrystal for his past service and emphasized that theirs was not a policy disagreement. But Obama believed that McChrystal’s actions constituted a serious enough breach of respect for the Office of the President and the entire civilian leadership that it warranted his dismissal.

Overlooked in the McChrystal affair, however, is not the general’s contemptuous and public disrespect of civilian command; it is, instead, the questionable strategy being employed in Afghanistan – counterinsurgency – a policy endorsed by the President and McChrystal’s successor, General David Petraeus. Counterinsurgency calls for sending large numbers of ground troops to both sniff out and destroy the enemy, while also living among the civilian population and slowly rebuilding the nation’s government. Even its staunchest advocates admit that this is a process that will require years, if not decades, to achieve. It demands of the U.S. military not that it defend a nation, but that it build one. It requires our armed forces to handle not only the military and security side of warfare, of which they are very good, but also the diplomatic and political side of governance, of which they are neither equipped nor particularly skilled.

Vice President Biden has contended, correctly I believe, that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan will plunge the United States into a military quagmire without weakening the international terrorist network, which is presently more extensive in places like Yemen. The question becomes, therefore, not who is in charge, but what is America’s endgame in Afghanistan? And how do we measure progress?

The military conflict in Afghanistan has been officially declared the longest war in American history. While this is true only if one measures the Vietnam War from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, our involvement in Afghanistan extends longer than World War II and the Korean War combined. Afghanistan is not the deadliest of American conflicts, but the costs have nonetheless been substantial, costing the lives of over 1,000 American servicemen and women, tens of thousands of Afghan civilians, and hundreds of billions of dollars from the public treasury. Yet we risk having in the end achieved very little from when we first invaded Afghanistan. According to recent reports in the British press, prior to his dismissal, General McChrystal acknowledged that progress over the next six months is unlikely and that serious concerns continue to exist over the levels of security, violence, and corruption of the Afghan administration.

The problem with the McChrystal incident, then, is not so much about a disrespectful general as it is a failed policy with little chance of success. The president’s critics are likely correct that setting a firm deadline for withdrawal is counter-productive to our stated mission. But I do not believe for a minute that we will be ending our occupation of Afghanistan any time soon, even if some troops start to come home in July 2011. Nine years into the conflict, it remains difficult to detect much improvement to American security. For every innocent civilian we kill through collateral damage, mistake, or an errant missile (even as precise and careful as our military professionals try to be), the seeds of further terrorism are planted.

If victory has not been achieved after nine years, I fail to see how we can ever accomplish it under current strategy. Terrorist cells continue to exist around the world; al-Qaeda leaders continue to hide in the mountainous terrains of northwestern Pakistan, a country that we do not fully trust and that is, at best, lukewarm to our efforts in the region. We have diverted badly needed funds to a failed military effort that could otherwise help educate our children, create jobs, rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, promote a green economy, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. As I have said before on these pages, we could do so much more to enhance the security of the United States if we instead focused our efforts on building schools for Afghan children. The long-term solution to terrorism and militant fundamentalism in general, and Afghanistan in particular, is education and economic opportunity. A policy that relies upon long-term military power to bolster a corrupt government is destined to fail.