It's Seymour Hersh's birthday today, so let's take a look at his thorough, but depressing, assessment of the state of affairs in Afghanistan in this week's New Yorker, "The Other War: Why Bush's Afghanistan problem won't go away."
Hersh cites Richard Clarke's summary of the current situation:
As of today, Clarke said, "the U.S. has succeeded in stabilizing only two or three cities. The President of Afghanistan is just the mayor of Kabul."
That perspective is also supported by retired Army Col. Hy Rothstein, who can't be accused of just trying to sell books:
Clarke's view of what went wrong was buttressed by an internal military analysis of the Afghanistan war that was completed last winter. In late 2002, the Defense Department's office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SOLIC) asked retired Army Colonel Hy Rothstein, a leading military expert in unconventional warfare, to examine the planning and execution of the war in Afghanistan, with an understanding that he would focus on Special Forces. …
His report was a devastating critique of the Administration's strategy. He wrote that the bombing campaign was not the best way to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qaida leadership, and that there was a failure to translate early tactical successes into strategic victory. In fact, he wrote, the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all. …
The report describes a wide gap between how Donald Rumsfeld represented the war and what was actually taking place. …
Rothstein wrote that Rumsfeld routinely responded to criticism about civilian casualties by stating that "some amount" of collateral damage "is inevitable in war." It is estimated that more than a thousand Afghan civilians were killed by bombing and other means in the early stages of the war. Rothstein suggested that these numbers could have been lower, and that further incidents might have been avoided if Special Forces had been allowed to wage a truly unconventional war that reduced the reliance on massive firepower.
The Administration's decision to treat the Taliban as though all its members identified with, and would fight for, al-Qaida was also a crucial early mistake. "There were deep divisions within the Taliban that could have been exploited through a political-military effort which is the essence of unconventional warfare,"1 Rothstein said. "A few months of intensive diplomatic, intelligence and military preparations between Special Forces and anti-Taliban forces would have made a significant difference."
Instead, Rothstein wrote, the American military campaign left a power vacuum. The conditions under which the post-Taliban government came to power gave "warlordism, banditry and opium production a new lease on life." He concluded, "Defeating an enemy on the battlefield and winning a war are rarely synonymous. Winning a war calls for more than defeating one's enemy in battle." He recalled that, in 1975, when Harry G. Summers, an Army colonel who later wrote a history of the Vietnam War, told a North Vietnamese colonel, "You never defeated us on the battlefield," the colonel replied, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."*
Rothstein's paper was not well received by the DoD:
Rothstein delivered his report in January. It was returned to him, with the message that he had to cut it drastically and soften his conclusions. He has heard nothing further. "It's a threatening paper," one military consultant told me. The Pentagon, asked for comment, confirmed that Rothstein was told "we did not support all of his conclusions," and said that he would soon be sent notes. In addition, Joseph Collins told me, "There may be a kernel of truth in there, but our experts found the study rambling and not terribly informative." In interviews, however, a number of past and present Bush Administration officials have endorsed Rothstein's key assertions. "It wasn't like he made it up," a former senior intelligence officer said. "The reason they're petrified is that it's true, and they didn't want to see it in writing."
The rest of Hersh's long report describes the chaos and violence that dominates most of Afghanistan. He explores the resurgent heroin production that funds warlords and terrorists, while also leading to problems of addiction among U.S. personnel. As I said, it's thorough, but depressing. It's worth reading all the way through, however — particularly for the example of Afghan gallows humor he provides as a kicker.
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* I first read that anecdote from Vietnam in Larry Beinhart's cynical satire of the first Gulf War, American Hero, which, as I've said before, is edgier and vastly superior to the film it inspired, Wag the Dog. I like Barry Levinson, but his movie is a Nerfball version of this story.
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