In a fascinating story today in the New York Times, ELISABETH BUMILLER reports that there is broad and intense debate among the faculty of West Point on whether or not the War Doctrine by which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still relevant given the massive cost in financial and human terms of the decade long wars and the very limited results.
Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars.
“Not much,” Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point’s military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. “Certainly not worth the effort. In my view.”
At West Point the arguments are more public than those in the upper reaches of the Pentagon, in large part because the military officers on the West Point faculty pride themselves on academic freedom and challenging orthodoxy. Colonel Gentile, who is working on a book titled “Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace With Counterinsurgency,” is chief among them.
Colonel Gentile’s argument is that the United States pursued a narrow policy goal in Afghanistan — defeating Al Qaeda there and keeping it from using the country as a base — with what he called “a maximalist operational” approach. “Strategy should employ resources of a state to achieve policy aims with the least amount of blood and treasure spent,” he said.
Counterinsurgency could ultimately work in Afghanistan, he said, if the United States were willing to stay there for generations. “I’m talking 70, 80, 90 years,” he said.
Colonel Gentile, who has photographs in his office of five young soldiers in his battalion killed in the 2006 bloodshed in Baghdad, acknowledged that it was difficult to question the wars in the face of the losses.
“But war ultimately is a political act, and I take comfort and pride that we as a military organization, myself as a commander of those soldiers who died, the others who were wounded and I think the American Army writ large, that we did our duty,” he said. “And there is honor in itself of doing your duty. I mean you could probably push back on me and say you’re still saying the war’s not worth it. But I’m a soldier, and I go where I’m told to go, and I do my duty as best I can.”
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At least the thinking end of the military recognizes some of the waste of blood and treasure that the political leadership of America called for in 2001 to this day. Sadly, the new political leadership wasn’t able to pull the U.S. out of the wars as fast as one might have liked. But it does show that the military’s thinking parts can see that some costly military action was entirely a waste.
Osama Bin Laden was always the enemy. What on earth Saddam Hussein had to do with anything is completely beyond me. Wasn’t one invasion enough?
I guess Bush needed to kill more brown people to get payback for 9/11 or maybe it was something about his daddy… I suppose history will decide.
Thankfully, the American people got their heads screwed on straight and threw out the idiots who got these wars going.
To this day, I thank the leaders of my country (Jean Chretien) for not getting us involved in our noble ally’s Iraq debacle. We were in Afghanistan too long in my view, but at least that war made some kind of sense, even though after Tora Bora, like as not, Osama was cooling his heels in Pakistan orchestrating the quagmire in Afghanistan into which we (being NATO) unthinkingly walked into, giving rise to nearly a decade of bloodshed and wasted treasure (including a nice slice of the current U.S. federal debt).
So it goes…
Stupid monkeys!
The Wet One