The failure of leadership

I've spent a good part of the last couple of days pondering the question, "What did Bing West really mean in denouncing Nir Rosen's Rolling Stone piece?" Yesterday, I jumped into the question that West (pictured to the right) raised of whether a journalist should be traveling with the enemy. (Short answer: Press coverage of the other side is essential. Being in a situation where you might be complicit in the killing of Americans is not defensible.)

Today, let's look into West's accusations of failed leadership:

Most disturbing was the lack of outrage to Rosen’s sojourn by the administration, the military, the civilian appointees and the politicians. Secretary of Defense Gates is a cool, detached official who reacts to events. He does not plot a course into the future. He does not project a determination or a vision about how to succeed in Afghanistan. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral William Mullen, calls for a strategic review – after six years of fighting! - laments that “we cannot kill our way to victory”, a vacuous absolution that transfers responsibility for failure to others. Why increase from 32,000 to 50,000 US troops, whose basic training is as riflemen, if the application of force – killing - is not the objective? A policeman protects the population by arresting criminals; a soldier protects the population by shooting the enemy soldier. Our military succeeds in confusing us all by reverting to Rodney King's plaint that we should all just get along.

When our leaders lack moral clarity and courage, then agnosticism about our mission in Afghanistan is understandable. Rosen’s conduct is not the problem; he was taking advantage of American moral lassitude. Our leaders don’t stand up for the righteousness of our cause. Why not hang out with the Taliban, if America’s leaders see nothing wrong with it?

This passage inspired some equally strong responses from other bloggers. Here's our first rebuttal, from Spencer Ackerman:

Recognizing the basic strategic fact that not all problems have a military solution indicates that Bob Gates and Mike Mullen and David Petraeus means "transfer[ing] responsibility for failure to others." Could this myopia be any more self-refuting? I take back what I said about not reading West's new book, because I can't wait to see how The Strongest Tribe explains away the obvious failures of the killing-our-way-to-victory strategy in Iraq from 2003 to 2006.

Abu Muqawama had even more to say in defense of the senior leadership at the Pentagon:

Aside from accusing the Department of Defense -- en masse -- of lacking "commitment and passion in the cause," West also accuses Sec. Gates and Adm. Mullen of lacking "moral clarity and courage." If you're Sec. Gates -- getting your teeth kicked in on a daily basis while trying to fight two wars and keep a military from falling apart -- how much patience would you have for Bing West's opinion right about now?

While the paragraphs I've quoted above are not West's best written work, I think it's pretty clear what he's arguing:

• At the level of the Secretary of Defense and the JCS Chairman, there has not been a clear strategy for Afghanistan. Gates is reactive. The strategic review should have happened a long time ago.
• If we can't "kill our way to victory," what's the point of sending more American troops? I'm reading that section of West's blog post a lot differently than ackerman and Muqawama. West is hardly a babe in the woods about counterinsurgency. He knows that sending soldiers "whose basic training is as riflemen" is not necessarily going to help. They're not trained to be policemen, or civilian reconstruction professionals, or intelligence analysts. The NATO mission in Afghanistan needs to increase all these skills, not just blindly send more soldiers whose training is limited to shooting the enemy. West is arguing against a simple-minded "surge for Afghanistan," when something else is needed--which undoubtedly includes more people who also know how to kill.
• People who don't have a clear strategic vision leave the moral playing field wide open. If there's no clear picture of what people should do to create particular outcomes--political, military, and moral--there are no grounds for saying that someone, like a journalist traveling with the Taliban, is doing something wrong.

I don't agree with everything West says. For example, the phrase "American moral lassitude" is a bit too broad for what otherwise sounds like a criticism of the top military and civilian leadership (much like Dereliction of Duty accuses the top brass of failures in the Vietnam War). I also don't think that the US government needed to respond officially to Rosen's article at all.

On the other points, however, I think the critics both misread what West was saying, and in some ways, were definitely wrong themselves. It's specious for Ackerman to accuse West of being against a free press--a little weird, since West is a journalist himself. (And someone who has had some pretty acid things to say about the senior leadership already, in his book on Iraq, No True Glory.) And who cares if Muqawama is right that Gates gets his "teeth kicked in on a daily basis while trying to fight two wars" if he can't clarify what the strategy for the Afghanistan war really is?

West's post does have its faults. On the "how do journalists cover the other side" question, his answer leaves almost no room for a Rosen to do his job. (Robert Farley's rebuttal is still the best I've read on this question.) But on the leadership issue he has a much stronger argument.

Comments

[ian]

Short answer: Press coverage of the other side is essential. Being in a situation where you might be complicit in the killing of Americans is not defensible.

Just on this point, what would you think if the journalist had not been a US citizen, but from a country that was not taking part in the war in Afghanistan. Would you think it unethical for a US media organ to carry the reporting of such a journalist?

[J.]

"At the level of the Secretary of Defense and the JCS Chairman, there has not been a clear strategy for Afghanistan. Gates is reactive. The strategic review should have happened a long time ago."

I think that this is a big blind spot of West and probably others. The point is not that OSD or the JCS should have done a strategic review of how things are going in Afghanistan. They KNOW that it's going nowhere, but they have no options if the White House refuses to allow them any options. I would suggest that it is the failure at the higher levels - the White House and NSC - that has limited the OSD/JCS staff from supporting any position other than "stay the course, Iraq is the focus."

Of course, it's easier for Bing and others to criticize the military than the Bush/Cheney team. It allows them to retain their conservative credentials if they don't criticize the political leadership that ought to be developing strategic policy that is executable and moves us forward in a positive direction.

[Charrua]

Nice post, but expressions like "moral clarity", "moral lassitude", "agnosticism", "the righteousness of our cause", etc. definitely make it look like West has a moral/religious view of the Irak/Afghanistan wars and views what he perceives as the lack of enthusiasm of Gates for said wars as a kind of moral failure. I can't see his writings as an even-handed take on the strategic failures of the Pentagon, but more like the lament of a zealot that argues that the Pentagon doesn't like killing foreigners ENOUGH.

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