The Washington establishment is turning against last years darling General Petraeus.
A public warning shot against him was fired today by the Washington Post's David Ignatius. It starts off with a great but deadly line:
If briefings could win wars, Gen. David Petraeus would already be finished in Afghanistan.
Ooch.
Now Ignatius has certainly more friends in the CIA than in the Pentagon and this shot may well come from the three letter agencies with Ignatius just being their usual mouth piece. The intelligence community is certainly not convinced of Petraeus happy review of the Afghanistan campaign, marketed as progress by the Obama administration. The recent National Intelligence Estimates of Afghanistan and Pakistan were very negative.
Additionally a leaked UN map shows a deterioration of the security situation and various aid groups have serious doubts that the Taliban are on the run. The new year outlook by the experts at the Afghanistan Analysts Network is also full of gloom and doom.
So Ignatius is justified in his critic even if it is a CIA plant. He states:
History shows that three variables are crucial in countering an insurgency: a real process of reconciliation, no safe havens for the enemy and a competent host government. None are present in Afghanistan.
He asks Petraeus how these can be fixed. He is unlikely to get answers as there is no ready fix available.
One has to note that this was obvious from the beginning. The Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (pdf), copied by its "author" Petraeus from an older Vietnam version, refers to legitimacy as the core of COIN:
Legitimacy is the Main Objective
1-90. The primary objective of any counterinsurgent is to foster the development of effective governance by a legitimate government.
The U.S. imposed government in Afghanistan and its unelected president and parliament have no legitimacy at all. COIN and its pope Petraeus are thereby the wrong answer for Afghanistan.
A good answer would include a serious reconciliation effort which would give the Taliban a chair at a new government table. It would include a U.S. led regional truce and 'stay out' agreement with all neighbor countries of Afghanistan (but would exclude India).
But the Obama administration is too coward to go that way. It will rather follow the troop reduction the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, proscribed which -in the end- will be a simple withdrawal without any political solution. And here is the second hint that Petraeus will (rightly) be sacrificed. Hass closes his piece:
[I]t is the commander-in-chief's responsibility to take into account the nation's capacity to meet all of its challenges, national and international. It is for this reason that the perspectives of Gen. Petraeus and President Obama must necessarily diverge.
Not only the perspectives …