Victory in military campaigns against the Islamic State group, the Taliban, the Haqqanis and others means nothing without concrete plans, retired top commanders say.
by Paul D. Shinkman
U.S. News & World Report
2015 January 27
An absence of clear policies from the White House makes it impossible for the U.S. to achieve any sort of victory in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region, according to three former top military officers who oversaw recent wars there.
“[We need to] come out from our reactive crouch and take a firm, strategic stance in defense of our values,” retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis said to Congress Tuesday morning.
“America needs a refreshed national security strategy,” he added, saying that it must look beyond the string of crisis “currently consuming the executive branch.”
The notoriously blunt combat commander and former head of U.S. Central Command was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee alongside retired Navy Adm. William Fallon, also a former CentCom chief, and former Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane.
They spoke to new members of the Senate, which for the first time includes veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who was on the dais at Tuesday’s hearing.
The three former commanders highlighted what they see as a common problem among top conflicts sucking in U.S. forces deployed abroad, and threats to the American people at home.
The U.S. has been in a “strategy-free” stance in Iraq for some time, and it didn’t begin with the Obama administration, Mattis said. He applauded President Barack Obama for visiting Saudi Arabia this week to reinforce ties with the longtime Middle Eastern ally, and for using U.S. influence to help oust Nouri al-Maliki, the polarizing former Iraqi prime minister.
But many countries in the region, including the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, remain confused about what America hopes to achieve there while stating its goal remains to pivot to the Pacific.
“We’ve disappointed a lot of friends out there, from Abu Dabi to Riyadh, from Tel Aviv to Cairo,” Mattis said.
Keane, a Vietnam veteran, helped oversee the initial invasion of Iraq and became one of the most vocal advocates following his 2003 retirement for increasing the number of troops deployed to the war there. Keane, along with Mattis and Fallon, criticized Obama’s preference for ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on a preconceived deadline, instead of weighing progress on the ground, he says.
The U.S. fight against Islamic extremism should resemble something closer to U.S. efforts to contain communist ideology wrought by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he said Tuesday.
A “policy of disengagement in the Middle East” has contributed to the rise of such extremism, he said, conceding that the appeal of groups like the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, or al-Qaida in Pakistan or Yemen, would still exist were it not for U.S. intervention in the region.
The U.S. must focus on gathering allies who share similar values and political beliefs to confront his threat, he said, or it remains doomed to face the same problems again. This is particularly important ahead of the reported massive offensive against the Islamic State group in the key Iraqi city of Mosul and in Anbar province this spring.
“Will there be something after ISIS to deal with?” he said, using a common alternative name for the Islamic State group. “You bet, if we don’t take a comprehensive approach to deal with it.”
Mattis offered a similar example in Syria, saying it remains unclear what the administration hopes to achieve politically in that country.
A civil war between the regime of President Bashar Assad and an opposition movement flared up in early 2011 amid the so-called “Arab Spring.” Extremists from al-Qaida in Iraq crossed the border into the active war zone, where they found safe haven, giving them time to arm, train and supply before launching a new offensive back into Iraq as the Islamic State group.
The Obama administration kept the civil war at arms length, refusing on multiple occasions to openly fund and arm the opposition movement, or to conduct unilateral airstrikes. That changed last summer when the U.S. began a continuing air campaign targeting only the Islamic State group fighters.
“We have to get a very detailed level of understanding. What is the political objective we’re out to accomplish? Frankly, I don’t know what that is right now,” Mattis said. “The clarity and commitment of the U.S. can draw in the full commitment of others.”
Tentative or halfhearted commitment only drives potential allies further away, he said.
In Afghanistan and elsewhere, Fallon stressed the importance of differentiating between Sunni militants who believe in the cause of extremist groups, and the disaffected local populations who are coerced into joining such networks because they have no other alternative.
Fallon stepped down from his position in 2008 following remarks published in an Esquire article criticizing what he perceived as President George W. Bush administration’s march to war with Iran.
The U.S. should remain in Afghanistan beyond the 2016 deadline imposed by the Obama administration when all U.S. troops will withdraw, he said. Troops could remain in largely a training role, with special operations forces helping the government with the tasks its own military cannot yet perform.
"The Haqqanis have safe havens in the east, embedded there," Keane said, referring to the notoriously brutal Islamic extremist network that was largely able to hide in Pakistan from U.S. strikes during the war. "The Afghan National Security Force does not have the capability to deal with that harsh reality."
But all of these threats represent a lower priority than one originating from within the U.S. government. Across-the-board spending caps known as sequestration remain law in Congress, which has yet to pass a budget deal that would repeal the automatic cuts.
Sequestration is greater than any foreign threat, and without budget predictability, no strategy can be implemented, Mattis said.
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