SITREP - October 20th, 2015

Statement

The House was out of session last week, so there wasn't a whole lot to report on the legislative front. There was, however, a fairly significant development on the military / national security front. After months, and some would say years, of dithering on the subject, President Obama reached a conclusion about leaving a residual force in Afghanistan. He's going to keep the current troop level of 9,800 into next year and will plan on maintaining a force of about 5,800 after he leaves office.

Why is that significant? Well, I would direct your attention to what happened in Iraq when the President's decision went the other way. Many of you may recall that the administration (against the recommendations of many) decided not to finish negotiating a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government, which would have enabled the U.S. to maintain a residual force. Instead, the President made his measure of success how quickly U.S. forces could be withdrawn.

Many have speculated that if the United States military had kept bases in Iraq, ISIS or the "JV" team, as President Obama described it, likely would not have been able to roll through the country and establish the stronghold that they did. This isn't the benefit of hindsight. There was a chorus of voices from across the foreign policy and security policy world (including your congressman) saying that if the U.S. withdrew completely, somebody else would fill the vacuum and we might not like the result.

Regardless of how one feels about the original decision to go into Iraq (I have publicly expressed my own opposition to it), the reality is that we did go into Iraq. We lost more than 3,500 U.S. service members in that endeavor. We spent hundreds of billions of your tax dollars to stabilize and pacify that country. And in the end, the Obama Administration failed to secure an enduring security presence as previous administrations had done in Cuba, Italy, Germany, Japan and Korea. And our absence was replaced by chaos, a terrorist safe haven encompassing thousands of square miles, and a humanitarian crisis which seems to grow by the day.

So it's noteworthy that the President decided to rethink his Afghanistan strategy after the Taliban seized a significant sized town located in a region that was thought to have been pacified. The President has been criticized by many -- and not just Republicans either -- for being so wedded to his political goals of ending the "Bush wars" that he disregarded military advice rooted in realities on the ground. Afghanistan and Iraq are important areas of the world for the direct confrontation of the terrorism threat, but they are also logistically valuable areas for projecting force and launching operations around the region.

After World War II, we kept bases and troops in Europe. Today, we still have roughly 29,000 troops on the Korean peninsula. Those places have remained peaceful through their rebuilding and up to the present day. So much so, that the United States is rightfully considering scaling back troop levels there.

While the President's decision this week is an important step in the right direction, it will be important in the weeks and months ahead for us to take a look at whether the specific troop levels he's envisioning are sufficient to carry out the objectives we've set for them.

In other words, if your commanders are telling you they need ten thousand troops to be able to conduct airstrikes and search and rescue etc, but you really don't want to have any troops at all, it's not necessarily a situation where you can just split the difference. The way these situations should be approached is you look at what you are asking your military to do -- in this case provide critical enablers to the Afghan National Army. That requires certain mission sets and capabilities. From those capabilities, you figure out how many people you need on the ground to carry out and support those capabilities. When politics trumps strategy, it tends to be the other way around. That's certainly been the case with this White House -- they start with a number of troops that they find to be politically tolerable and then ask the military to make it work.

Make no mistake about it, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan and ISIS is absolutely trying to get a foothold there. The Afghan military is clearly not ready to defend against those threats. The President's decision not to withdraw prematurely shows that he's learning from his mistakes. At this point, it's just going to be a question of whether he's learned sufficiently from those mistakes.

As always, agree or disagree, I'm interested to hear what you all think. If you have a minute, drop me a line and let me know where you stand.

Source