Jim Sleeper: Stanley McChrystal's War on Poverty
GENERAL STANLEY McChrystal’s recently announced counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan overturns many of the doctrines that the United States brought to Iraq in 2003 and expands others that were developed after 2006. But if it’s anything like the publicity its neoconservative cheerleaders are giving it, it has the possibility of resurrecting a set of policies that failed not only in Vietnam but also in LBJ’s “War on Poverty.”
The biggest obstacle to the strategy isn’t the supposed invincibility of the Taliban or an American liberal failure of nerve; it is achieving McChrystal’s ambition to do in Kabul what Americans couldn’t or wouldn’t do in New Orleans.
In his recent “interim assessment” for the White House and his “counterinsurgency guidance” for the troops in Afghanistan, McChrystal rejects what the conservative foreign-policy pundit Max Boot calls the “conceit that an army can defeat an insurgency simply by killing insurgents.” Never mind that until recently that was the conceit of law-and-order conservatives and “present danger” neocons; now, McChrystal sidelines it along with the more liberal “culture of poverty” that he says characterizes NATO’s disorganized efforts in Afghanistan.
McChrystal hopes to transcend the policies of both the militarist right and the social-welfare left by expanding the war to “embrace the people,” be “a positive force in the community,” and “use local economic initiatives” to displace the insurgency. With massive new resources, his new doctrine would integrate “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.”
But whose government? Hamid Karzai’s has proven to corrupt as well as feckless. And America’s is responsible for a decades-long disintegration of the “actions” McChrystal mentions—a disintegration that left New Orleans patrolled by Blackwater guards in a perfect storm of unchecked global warming, failed infrastructure, corrupt politics, laissez-faire economics, and social disarray. It’s not so easy to tell what model the NATO coalition would be fighting for now.
THE FAILURE of the Bush administration’s militarized free-market fundamentalism to win hearts and minds at home or abroad may explain the neoconservatives’ leap to social engineering and subsidies for dubious characters posing as popular leaders.
For half a century conservatives have derided and defunded such strategies except when they could be billed to “national defense,” like the U.S. Interstate Highway System and the first federal student loans. Small wonder, then, that people who so recently scorned “nation-building,” “community organizing,” community policing, and public jobs are now rhapsodizing them in the name of national defense.
Here’s Max Boot, just back from Afghanistan:
Next to the combat outpost is a brand-new district center built with foreign aid money. Inside we sit down to chat with the district governor, Mohammed Yasin Lodin, a natty man with frizzy black hair and a thin mustache, and the police chief, Colonel Amanullah, who is (unusually for an Afghan) clean shaven. Yasin is overflowing with praise for the improvements wrought by the Americans.
The Americans later tell me that the governor… is doing a good job, spending far more time than he used to in the district (his family lives in Kabul) because it is now safe to do so… The Afghan soldiers and police also receive praise.
And here’s David Brooks, touting the Afghan National Solidarity Project, that helps “villages elect Community Development Councils. Western aid agencies give the councils up to $60,000 to do local projects, but it’s not the projects that matter most. It’s the creation of formal community structures. These projects are up and running in 23,000 villages.”
The results are “astonishing” and “surprising,” Boot claims; and they are outpaced only by press releases and glowing reports that read like the publicity for the inner-city programs that Richard Nixon once chided for merely “throwing money at problems.” For McChrystal, reports like those of Boot and Brooks are fruits of the “strategic communications” that are essential to “policy development, planning processes, and the execution of operations.”
The general also requests massive new resources to “fight corruption and improve the delivery of basic services such as clean water, paved roads, electricity, education, and a functioning legal system.” He wants to raise Afghan government salaries because “the notoriously low wages...are a major inducement for corruption.”
War on Poverty strategists wanted all this, too. So do American local and state governments. Right now...