President Obama will announce Friday that retired Gen. James L. Jones is resigning as national security advisor, to be replaced by deputy national security advisor Tom Donilon, an administration official confirmed.
Jones’ departure comes amid a larger turnover of staffers in the Obama White House this fall. Just a week ago, Obama announced in the East Room that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was leaving.
Several other changes in personnel are forthcoming, the result of what White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called the “natural life expectancy” in the administration’s pressure-cooker jobs.
Pressure cooker jobs. That’s the spin. Michelle Malkin notes that Jones was critical of the administration lackeys who surrounded Obama. In Woodward’s recent book Jones is quoted as privately referring to Obama’s political aides as “the water bugs,” the “Politburo,” the “Mafia,” or the “campaign set.”
But let’s recall just a bit about Jones and his involvement in the troop deployment decision-making process. During a briefing with General Nicholson (then in Helmand, Afghanistan with his Marines), the following exchange took place.
… Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. “At a table much like this,” Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, “the president’s principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan.” The principals — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair — made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson’s Marines.
Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, “oops,” we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.
“They then said, ‘If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,’ ” Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.
Now suppose you’re the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?
Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.
Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF — which in the military and elsewhere means “What the [expletive]?”
Nicholson and his colonels — all or nearly all veterans of Iraq — seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.
Jones looked at his brothers in arms, currently under fire, and who had no input to the decision whatsoever, and told them that they would get no more resources than they were told that they would need by men who sat in the safety of their plush offices – and then ridiculed the idea that they would demur.
WTF? indeed. Jones was part of that Politburo which set into motion the current situation in Afghanistan. It may be a little too hard to rehabilitate that image now that the campaign is not faring so well and Obama is not the savior of the world any more. I called for him to resign more than one year ago. It’s a shame that it took him this long. As for his replacement, Michelle also notes his crony ties with Obama’s past (and looking at his credentials and previous involvement with Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan, it’s hard to envision that he is actually qualified for the job).
60 Minutes did a report on General Stanley McChrystal in which the main theme was that General McChrystal is trying to deprogram eight years of bad habits in Afghanistan. Killing civilians, running drivers off of the road, and generally being insensitive to the human terrain have kept us from winning the campaign. It’s the ham handedness that is killing the effort – or so the report goes. The exercise of air power has come to a virtual standstill in Afghanistan, and to contrast the current state of affairs with the previous, 60 minutes shows McChrystal visiting a town’s marketplace versus what I recognized to be a YouTube video of an A-10 run against a Taliban hideout.
The interviewer presses the issue of combat power.
“The hallmark of American military power was its overwhelming firepower. Now you’re describing a situation in which firepower is almost beside the point?” Martin asked.
“You know, the favorite saying of, ‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ We can’t operate that way. We can’t walk with only a hammer in our hands,” McChrystal replied.
Thus McChrystal has issued a tactical directive that has essentially redounded to revised rules of engagement. But this narrative is not compelling to those who have followed the campaign. True enough, there are too many troops at large megabases in Afghanistan who ought to be on FOBs. True enough, the campaign has had to rely very heavily on air power. The large megabases can be emptied, but the need for air power still exists due to the force size.
The Taliban now have a permanent presence in 80% of Afghanistan due to lack of forces to counter their efforts and provide security. While improvements can be made in the efficiency of the campaign, the narrative that bad habits have caused the diminution of the effort thus far is made-for-television theater, ending perfectly with a champion general who can repair the broken campaign and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
But it isn’t that simple, and McChrystal know it. His request for more troops is meeting electoral politics head on, with political advisers being lined up to bolster a potential coming decision not to send more troops. The never serious National Security Advisor Jim Jones has said of the deadline for deciding more troop levels “I don’t have a deadline in my mind. I think the most important thing is to do it right. But it is going to have a high priority in the administration to do this pretty relentlessly. We have a lot of other things on the table as well.”
Since no thinking American wants the National Security Advisor to worry about “other things on the table” as opposed to national security, the administration knows that it needs more firepower if it’s to deny McChrystal his troops. Enter Colin Powell, who went on record saying “The question the president has to answer is, ‘What will more troops do?’ ” You have to not just add troops. You need a clear definition of your mission and then you can determine whether you need more troops or other resources.”
As if on cue, Jones warns that “it remains possible that, after a decision on strategy by the president, McChrystal might change his mind about the need for more troops. “We will ask General McChrystal, and say, ‘Okay, now that you’ve heard what our strategy is, does this affect your thinking in terms of your resources and, if so, how?’ ”
What would that strategy be? As advocated by Senator Kerry, it’s likely to be a small footprint model, more oriented towards counterterrorism rather than counterinsurgency, thus returning us to the initial stages of Operation Enduring Freedom and the main reason we have watched the slow demise of the campaign.
McChrystal wants to conduct counterinsurgency, but not just any kind of counterinsurgency. He has made protecting the population the center of gravity, the be all and end all of our efforts. This has led to the tactical directive concerning kinetics when civilians could possibly be present. The McChrystal interview with 60 minutes focused on the issue of civilian deaths above every other aspect of the effort.
But in a report that got almost no attention in military blogs, the locals aren’t giving this message to McChrystal. Concerning the recent targeting of a stolen fuel tanker by an F-15, McChrystal found unexpected support from the Afghans.
At midday Saturday, after visiting the hospital and flying over the bombing site in a helicopter, the team met with two local officials. The NATO officers were expecting anger and calls for compensation. What they received was a totally unanticipated sort of criticism.
“I don’t agree with the rumor that there were a lot of civilian casualties,” said one key local official, who said he did not want to be named because he fears Taliban retribution. “Who goes out at 2 in the morning for fuel? These were bad people, and this was a good operation.”
A few hours later, McChrystal arrived at the reconstruction team’s base in Kunduz. A group of leaders from the area, including the chairman of the provincial council and the police chief, were there to meet him. So, too, were members of an investigative team dispatched by President Hamid Karzai.
McChrystal began expressing sympathy “for anyone who has been hurt or killed.”
The council chairman, Ahmadullah Wardak, cut him off. He wanted to talk about the deteriorating security situation in Kunduz, where Taliban activity has increased significantly in recent months. NATO forces in the area, he told the fact-finding team before McChrystal arrived, need to be acting “more strongly” in the area.
His concern is shared by some officials at the NATO mission headquarters, who contend that German troops in Kunduz have not been confronting the rise in Taliban activity with enough ground patrols and comprehensive counterinsurgency tactics.
“If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz,” Wardak told McChrystal. “If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that’s not our fault.”
McChrystal seemed to be caught off guard.
“We’ve been too nice to the thugs,” Wardak continued.
As McChrystal drove to the bombing site — defying German suggestions that the area was too dangerous — one senior NATO official noted that the lack of opposition from local officials, despite relatively clear evidence that some civilians were killed, could help to de-escalate tensions.
“We got real lucky here,” the official said.
But McChrystal still had a message to deliver. Even if the Afghan officials were not angry, he certainly did not seem pleased.
After fording the muddy river to see the bombing site — getting his pants wet up to his knees — he addressed a small group of journalists at the reconstruction team headquarters and said it was “clear there were some civilians harmed at that site.” He said NATO would fully investigate the incident.
“It’s a serious event that’s going to be a test of whether we are willing to be transparent and whether we are willing to show that we are going to protect the Afghan people,” he said.
McChrystal was caught off guard because what he heard from the Afghans doesn’t match the doctrine. McChrystal knows doctrine, and the Afghans know unintended consequences. They know that Taliban theft of fuel tankers meets with doom to the people around the tanker (unless McChrystal has his way). They know that if the rules say that no fires can be directed towards domiciles that could potentially have noncombatants, even in self defense, the Taliban will surround themselves with noncombatants, in the end making it more dangerous for everyone.
To run the campaign as McChrystal wants – with diminished air support, with no fires towards areas where noncombatants could be located, with extensive dismounted patrols, and with no artillery support – means that he probably needs even more troops than he has requested. It may not matter if the Obama administration has its way.
Responding to criticism from former Vice President Cheney that President Obama is making the nation more vulnerable to terrorism, the president’s National Security Adviser, Gen. Jim Jones (Ret.), told ABC News in an exclusive interview that actually the reverse is true: President Obama’s greater success with international relations has meant more terrorists put out of commission.
“This type of radical fundamentalism or terrorism is a threat not only to the United States but to the global community,” Jones said. “The world is coming together on this matter now that President Obama has taken the leadership on it and is approaching it in a slightly different way – actually a radically different way – to discuss things with other rulers to enhance the working relationships with law enforcement agencies – both national and international.”
Jones said that “we are seeing results that indicate more captures, more deaths of radical leaders and a kind of a global coming-together by the fact that this is a threat to not only the United States but to the world at-large and the world is moving toward doing something about it.”
So the message is that since Obama has taken office more terrorists have been put out of business. The metrics show success because of the person of Obama. Continuing:
The former Marine General didn’t provide any specific numbers to back up his claim, but he said “there is an increasing trend and I think we seen that in different parts of the world over the last few months for sure.” He added that he was not “making a tally sheet saying we are killing more people, capturing more people than they did — that is not the issue.”
So it’s not about a tally sheet, and that is clearly not the issue. Continuing:
But the numbers are going up, he said. “The numbers of high value targets that we are successfully reaching out to or identifying through good intelligence” from both the CIA and intelligence agencies from US allies has made the difference, he said. “We have better human intelligence; we know where the terrorists are moving. Because of the dialogue and the tone of the dialogue between us and our friends and allies…the trend line against terrorism is positive, and that’s what we want. If we have a positive trend line we have a safer country.”
So the trend line is positive, and the “numbers of HVTs … has made the difference” (whatever that is supposed to mean).
Summarizing, the metrics are showing success and Obama is doing better than the previous administration. But there is no tally sheet, and the whole issue of killing and capturing more people misses the point. But more to the point, we are killing and capturing more people.
Got it? Neither do I. Your NSA is not a serious man.
There is now not even a hint of an effort to make the narrative on Afghanistan consistent. From the AP:
President Barack Obama’s national security adviser did not rule adding more U.S. forces in Afghanistan to help turn around a war that he said on Sunday is not now in crisis.
James Jones, a retired Marine general with experience in Afghanistan, said the United States will know “by the end of next year” whether the revamped war plan Obama announced in March is taking hold.
The administration is redefining how it will measure progress, with new benchmarks that reflect a redrawn strategy. An outline is expected next month.
Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, Jones did little to dispel the growing expectation that Obama soon will be asked to supplement the 21,000 additional forces he already approved for Afghanistan this year.
“We won’t rule anything out,” but the new strategy is too fresh for a full evaluation, Jones said.
“If things come up where we need to adjust one way or the other, and it involves troops or it involves more incentives … for economic development or better assistance to help the Afghan government function, we’ll do that.”
The Obama plan is supposed to combine a more vigorous military campaign against the Taliban with a commitment to protect Afghan civilians and starve the insurgents of sanctuary and popular support. It envisions a large development effort led by civilians, which has not fully happened, and a rapid expansion of the Afghan armed forces to eventually take over responsibility for security.
“If we can get that done … we will know that fairly quickly,” Jones said.
The system to measure progress is several weeks from completion. It reflects creeping congressional skepticism about the war and its costs. The United States has spent more than $220 billion since the U.S.-led invasion of 2001, plus billions for more toward aid and development projects. By the United States’ own admission, much of the aid money was wasted.
Members of the House Appropriations Committee wrote recently that they are worried about “the prospects for an open-ended U.S. commitment to bring stability to a country that has a decades-long history of successfully rebuffing foreign military intervention and attempts to influence internal politics.”
The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunday he does not know how Congress would react to a new request for additional troops.
“It depends on what the facts and the arguments are,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. “It depends what our commanders in the field say. It depends also I think in part what our NATO allies are willing to do.”
So to summarize, the strategy involves a few more troops and a lot of civilian NGOs, these civilians not having been deployed yet because it’s too dangerous since there is little to no security, but we will know fairly quickly if this strategy works, er … um, that is, within 18 months. There may be more troops and if so we’ll provide them, but the White House is going to have a fit if the Generals ask for more troops.
Well, there you have it. But if Jim Jones is a stooge and a fool, Carl Levin is a liar. The commanders in the field have already said they are light on troops and need more. Brigadier General Nicholson has said that he doesn’t have enough forces to go everywhere, counterinsurgency-speak for “the insurgents will be left to run amok in various places.”
If lives and the existence of a transnational religiously-based insurgency weren’t at stake it would make for great theater.
You know all about National Security Advisor Jim Jones’ terse warning to the commanders in Afghanistan that they had gotten all of the troops they were going to get? As it turns out, Mullen decided that he would respond by giving Jones a pop to the back of the head.
WALLACE: You talked about troop levels. I want to talk about not just in southern Afghanistan but throughout the country…
MULLEN: Sure.
WALLACE: … because there seem to be mixed messages this week about our troop level policy for Afghanistan.
National Security Adviser James Jones was quoted this week as telling U.S. commanders they are not to expect any more troops beyond what the president has already promised.
You were quoted the next day as saying the top new commander, General McChrystal, is going to make a review, and he can ask for as many troops as he wants. Admiral, which is it?
MULLEN: I’ve had — I’ve had discussions with General Jones, also with the president, and I think we’re all committed to making sure we resource this correctly.
President Obama has committed the forces that we’ve asked this year. General McChrystal, who is the brand-new leader there, is in the middle of an assessment. He’ll come back in about 45 days with his assessment in terms of what he needs.
My guidance to him had been, “Tell us what you need, and then come back and we’ll work that.” And it’s guidance that both General Jones and the president understands and support.
I think one of the points is we have to make sure that every single American that is there is one that we absolutely need.
In addition, the commander on the ground has to assess with a new strategy, and he’s a — and new leadership — really zero base — not just what’s there, but what he needs for the future, and we expect that sometime the end of July or middle of August.
We’ll see if the administration deploys the necessary troops and does the necessary logistics to ensure that the campaign ends acceptably. In the mean time, it couldn’t be clearer. Jim Jones is not a serious man, and as a sign of his impotence and uselessness to us in his current position, Mullen has had to tell him to shut up because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Jim Jones should resign.
As we had previously discussed, a recent visit by National Security Advisor Jim Jones to the front lines in Afghanistan was an opportunity to say, one Marine to another, you get no more support from us. You’re on your own.
During the briefing, (Brig. Gen. Lawrence) Nicholson had told Jones that he was “a little light,” more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. “We don’t have enough force to go everywhere,” Nicholson said.
But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. “At a table much like this,” Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, “the president’s principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan.” The principals — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair — made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson’s Marines.
Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, “oops,” we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.
“They then said, ‘If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,’ ” Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.
Now suppose you’re the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?
Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.
Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF — which in the military and elsewhere means “What the [expletive]?”
Nicholson and his colonels — all or nearly all veterans of Iraq — seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.
To which The Captain’s Journal responded:
It’s his job – while all of the other principals are outlining a strategy and force projection that they believe will be endorsed by the President – to be whispering in the ear of the President: “Listen to them, but only so far. Iraq has taught us that this is harder than we think it will be on our first or even second or third take. If they’re telling you that the Afghan National Army can substitute for our own troops, they aren’t accounting for the drug addiction, incompetence and treachery of the Afghan Army. This will be long term, protracted, part of the long war. Iraq was long and hard, and Petraeus rightly said that Afghanistan would be the longest engagement in the long war. Fully expect for them to come back asking for more troops, because they will need them. You are a wartime President, sir.”
But his malfeasance in office gets even worse, and we recently learned about the apparently extent of the error in his Afghanistan narrative.
How this is Obama’s war as opposed to America’s war we aren’t told. Nor are we told how sending more troops to kill Taliban and secure Afghanistan is risky to the campaign in this horrible report. The report is mostly worthless, except for what we learn about Jones, who said:
The arrival of new troops, coupled with a strategy that is much broader, and that is more multifaceted, has the potential to turn this thing around in reasonably short order.
Really? Seriously? In reasonably short order? Remember those words. So what is this new strategy?
“This will not be won by the military alone,” Jones said in an interview during his trip. “We tried that for six years.” He also said: “The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development. If that is not done right, there are not enough troops in the world to succeed.”
This statement is remarkable not for what it advocates – the softer side of counterinsurgency and nation building – but for what it doesn’t. Michael Yon’s most recent report from Afghanistan shows the need for a vibrant economy in order to prevent low level insurgents from earning money by working for the hard core Taliban. But Jones misleads us when he states that we have tried military action alone for six years.
There has been significant effort put into construction, projects (consider for instance the Kajaki Dam and the effort placed into reclaiming the ring road), and nation building (see The U.S. Department of Agriculture Does COIN). More could be done, but it isn’t correct to assert that there has been no effort placed into economic development.
It is equally incorrect to say that the military option has been tried. No, the high value target campaign conducted by clandestine SF operators against mid-level Taliban commanders has been tried. Classical counterinsurgency with significant military force projection (like with the Marines in the Anbar Province of Iraq) hasn’t been tried until now. And hence, the reason the Marine Colonels went ashen when they heard Jones say that they had all of the troops they were going to get. They come from the Anbar Province, and they thought that they were going into the Helmand Province of Afghanistan to conduct classical counterinsurgency. Apparently not, and so there will remain vast amounts of territory in the hands of the Taliban.
As for economic revitalization while the Taliban still roam free, Philip Smucker gives us a look into what this means.
QALA-I-NAW, Badghis province – At dusk when the sun slips over the parched hills in northwestern Afghanistan, spreading a pink hue over the land, families and caravans stop to spend the night in the poorest province in the poorest country of Asia. The wells are dry, lights do not burn and hopes remain muted.
This is a story about people living in an arid, unforgiving moonscape; one that could be mistaken for the middle of nowhere, but could one day be a major stop on one of the most important highways in Asia.
For three years, the United States, China, the Asian Development Bank and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have promised the residents of Badghis province integration with the rest of Asia. They have vowed to complete the last link of Afghanistan’s national ring road, which will connect western China and Central Asian countries through Afghanistan with Iranian seaports and world markets.
Blocking the way, however, is an expanding Taliban insurgency, which feeds off the idea that the world does not care enough to complete the work. As attacks on road workers have increased and US-led NATO offensives have failed to pacify the region, the stakes have grown ever higher.
“Promises have been given and most of them have been broken,” said Monshi Ramazan, the embittered head of the Badghis’ provincial council. Meanwhile, Taliban attacks on government and NATO’s mostly-Spanish forces are up by 300% in the past three years.
Halima Ralipaima, the head of Badghis’ Women’s Affairs Department, said that she had been “unable to travel in the province for two years” and that her workers were now being kidnapped and held hostage by the Taliban. She said the Taliban were threatening to destroy even small educational gains for girls made since late 2001 when the Taliban were driven from power.
Delays in completing the road – effectively managed by insurgents determined to stop it – have led Western analysts and NATO officials to warn that the Taliban are gaining steady support across Badghis. Once far-removed from the fighting elsewhere in Afghanistan, Badghis, they say, has become a new insurgent base and the Taliban’s “gateway to the north” – the same route to conquest that the insurgents took in the mid-1990s when they rose to power.
There are signs, however, that with an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Taliban fighters now lying in wait for Chinese and Afghan road workers, NATO and the United States military are finally taking the threat – and their own promises – seriously.
… it wasn’t until five months on the job, last September, that 55-year-old Tucker of Charlotte, North Carolina, realized that “we had given the highways away to the enemy. I was shocked,” he said in an interview.
Tucker found out the hard way when he asked for air support in northwest Afghanistan from the massive NATO and US base in Kandahar and was told that the helicopters he needed were required for southern resupply operations. “I told them that they should resupply by vehicle and the answer back was that, ‘we don’t control the roads’,” said Tucker, who sniped that the Kandahar base had become little more than a NATO “R&R facility”.
“That is what happens when you are running around trying to kill the enemy in a zero-sum game and you don’t have enough troops,” he said.
Worse still, even though Jones knows that the Colonels need more troops and that economic revitalization won’t occur without security, his narrative is that some economic development can “turn this thing around in reasonably short order.”
If we have learned anything from the experience in Iraq, it is that there must be national and institutional patience. Counterinsurgency done right takes a long time, and Petraeus himself said that of the campaigns in the so-called long war, Afghanistan would be longest.
I did a week-long assessment in 2005 at (then Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld’s request. Following our return, I told him that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what we then termed “the long war.” Having just been to Afghanistan a month or so ago, I think that that remains a valid assessment. Moreover, the trends have clearly been in the wrong direction.
So not only has James Jones told the Colonels that they don’t really need the troops they say they need, and not only is he purveying the wrong narrative about what we have done in Afghanistan, he is asserting that the “new strategy” will turn the campaign around in reasonably short order with Petraeus asserting that it would be the longest of the campaigns in the long war.
Jim Jones is not a serious man. He is clearly way over his head in the office of National Security Advisor, and the narrative that he is peddling is not just wrong – it is dangerous because it is so misleading. It’s time for Jones to tender his resignation as National Security Advisor and allow someone to tackle the job who is up to the job. It’s time for the General to retire.
14 years, 1 month ago
