Why McCain Won't Know How to Win Wars

Yesterday, in Albuquerque, NM, McCain addressed a large crowd claiming that "I know how to win wars"[1].

Now, let's just take a step back and dissect this comment a bit. How can an individual actually know, without a doubt how to "win wars". We don't even need to delve into the number of operators that managed to make the first Gulf War or the Kosovo War successes to see the hubris in such a statement. The idea that wars themselves are so homogeneous that a single strategy can even be applied in all cases is laughable at best. History tells us differently, as not even the strategy used to fight the first Gulf War was sufficient to succeed in the second. Additionally, this comment really smells of Eau d'War-mongering. It brings up recollections of George W. Bush's Feb. 8 2004 proclamation:

I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign-policy matters with war on my mind. Again, I wish it wasn't true, but it is true. And the American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is. And I see dangers that exist, and it's important for us to deal with them.[2]

So, following the stump speech by McCain even further, he reveals that the strategy for winning in Afghanistan is the strategy we just used in Iraq. He is making the failed assumption that Bush made when leading us into Iraq: that these two wars are relatively homogeneous. Additionally, all credit does not deserve to go squarely to "The Surge". Rather, the Iraqis themselves deserve quite a bit of credit for making this happen. Faced with the prospect of a tri-sected Iraqi nation, they did eventually come together and work internally to end much of the sectarian infighting that exploded following the toppling of the Baath regime. Make no mistake about it: Iraq was in a state of civil war, with all three major groups warring over who gets what, leadership of each group saw that it was in their interests to cooperate against sectarian fringe militias for the common good.

Iraq, also, is quite an urbanized and westernized society. It has a considerable amount in common with Europe and the USA in regards to population distribution and developed infrastructure. Iraq is a country consisting of numerous compact cities, with population concentrated in cities and along roadways[3]. In Iraq, we were fighting to maintain control of the cities and the roadways. It was constantly a weighing of which places to focus the greatest number of troops in, and where to take new troops from. One of the reasons for the surge appearing to work is that, with more soldiers on the ground and more money we were able to secure more roadways and cities for the majority of Iraqis to safely run their daily lives. When fighting breaks out in Basra, the forces on the ground can know about it through electronic communications, and can reach it, typically, by driving there.

In Afghanistan, these population and development models are completely turned upside-down. There are two "big cities" in Afghanistan, and then huge swaths of land with medium-density population[4]. A majority of the Afghan population don't live lives that revolve around urban areas and urban economies. This is especially true in the north of the country, where there are a considerable amount of smaller cities and towns surrounded by large, distributed settlements of Afghans. The "secure the roads and cities" approach is not going to work here. It is less likely that forces will be able to be moved across the country freely as they are in Iraq. Any forces we deploy for the purpose of securing an area will likely have to remain long after major fighting is complete, and spend considerable time combing the countryside. Considerable other forces will need to be deployed to secure other large sections of the country. To achieve the same sort of "security" that we get in Iraq, we'll likely need to deploy many more forces per-capita in Afghanistan than we did in Iraq.

But the more chilling conclusion that I read into McCain's speech is the same I've got from Bush's "War President" policy. Both have taken the attitude that winning constitutes "killing all the Bad Guys". This oversimplification seriously undermines what we (and the UN) have really set out to accomplish with these war missions. In addition, it reinforces the approach that we'll win the war by fighting, and solely by fighting. True, if we can get enough soldiers on the ground and enough money and arms into the country we can probably militarily defeat just about any enemy. But the social and economic costs of this approach are so high that we rarely exercise it in practice, we just can't afford to do it. The concept missed by McCain, Bush, and other Surge-Mongers is that you need an exit plan and you really need a reconstruction plan. There needs to be much less talk about how we'll "defeat our enemies" and "hunt down bin Ladin", and more planning for what a rebuilt Afghanistan looks like, and how it fits into the world in general. One of the reasons that Afghanistan has not really progressed is that the population there hasn't been provided with very many new opportunities, aside from expanded personal liberties. The Afghan people need a new deal in social and economic revolution, not in military occupation. Winning the gun-battles is a meager portion of the work that needs to be done to fix this country.

Unfortunately, while McCain continues to argue that a draw-down of combat troops is a "losing strategy", he doesn't provide many answers to how combat troops serve a "winning strategy". He is much more focused on killing off al-Quaeda networks and Taliban insurgents, while being coldly silent on a solution for the non-military part of the war. This is the same policy blunder that evolved into the Iraqi civil war that has lasted for 5 years now. What McCain neglects to tell the people is that Obama solely advocates a withdrawl of "combat troops" and "combat operations", while leaving an international presence for policing and rebuilding (non-combat) purposes. This would still involve soldiers who still can fight insurgency when necessary, but also reallocates many combat soldiers to Afghanistan while replacing them with many more aid and engineering workers in Iraq, to rebuild the country. You can read this now, it is on his website. A visit to McCain's website focuses on our goal being primarily militaristic, and discusses nothing about allocation of our forces for rebuilding purposes. In fact, McCain even goes on to say that one of our key mission objectives is "to secure our interests there." Sadly, it doesn't appear that McCain or the Republican Party at large has learned much about what went wrong in Iraq, and they promote a stillborn plan for the war in Afghanistan.

The problem is that Bush and McCain don't see a war that has gone on much longer than proposed and at a much greater cost of money and life than was planned upon as being a failure. To both of them, as long as we're still there fighting, "it hasn't been lost yet". Unfortunately, for them, a success is defined by a successful execution of a plan. Since 2005, we've only had two potential outcomes to the war in Iraq:

• Fail, but remain to clean up our mess
  
• Fail, then leave it for the Iraqis to clean up
  

The moment that the original invasion plan failed miserably was when the war was lost. If we had never entered Iraq, we might be celebrating the anniversary of a liberated Afghanistan, and even the capture of Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein would still be ruling Iraq, and still be under sanctions. Just like Castro in Cuba, just like Ahmadinejad in Iran, just like the military junta in Myanmar, and on, and on, and on....

The simplifications and generalizations made by McCain on this matter are dis-informative, at best, and harmful, at worst. Either one of these candidates will inherit a war, it is how they plan to close it that is of utmost importance.

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1. McCain: 'I Know How to Win Wars'
   
2. Bush Interview Transcript: Feb 8, 2004
3. Population Density Map of Iraq
   
4. Population Density Map of Afghanistan