The Futility of War

The Futility of War and the Path to Peace
Nicholas Johnson
Remarks on Armistice Day
November 11, 2018, 11:00 a.m.
Veterans for Peace, Chapter 161
Pentacrest
Iowa City, Iowa

It is a very special honor to be invited by you, Veterans for Peace, to speak at this commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. This is America’s day to recognize both those who have fought and died in our wars, and those who have fought to prevent future wars. [Photo credit: unknown; Wikimedia. "This photograph was taken in the forest of Compiègne after reaching an agreement for the armistice that ended World War I." November 11, 1918.]

You have told me to speak about war under the title “The Futility of War.” Fortunately, that title is consistent with my beliefs. Had you chosen, say, “The Case for Increasing Military Spending” this talk would have taken much longer to prepare.

You and I seem to agree – both about the value of peace, and why understanding the futility of war is the first step toward that peace.

In our brief time this morning I will suggest five reasons why.

First, Lessons From Viet Nam

Fifty-three years ago, President LyndonJohnson, who had appointed me Administrator of the Maritime Administration, or MARAD, asked that I look around Viet Nam and southeast Asia, and write an assessment of the war. Although based in Washington, MARAD kept a small staff in Saigon assisting with the agency’s responsibility for merchant shipping sealift.

The futility of that war was immediately obvious to me. As I concluded my report, “You can’t play basketball on a football field.” Not incidentally, that conclusion of mine for President Johnson led to a conclusion of his that I would make a terrific Federal Communications Commission commissioner.

Why no basketball?

It started with my arrival. Chatting with the officer driving me from the airfield into Saigon, I looked up and saw a banner over the street. “What does that say?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Do you have any officers who could read that?” I asked. “None who I know,” he said. [Photo Credit: Daniel Graham Clark; NJ delivering speech at Veterans for Peace gathering; first on Pentacrest and continuing inside Old Brick, Iowa City, November 11, 2018.]

My suspicion continued during a conversation with a Vietnamese gentleman. Our military was fighting a war of futility over a specific hill. I asked his advice. “Read some Vietnamese mythology,” he said. Befuddled, I asked him to explain. “If you Americans knew anything about us,” he began, “you would know that every Vietnamese schoolchild is told the story of the origins of our people: the union of a Chinese dragon and an elf.” “OK, so?” I asked. “The elf emerged from that hill,” he replied. “You will never take that hill. Move up the road two or three clicks and you’ll find the going much easier.”

Even if one wants to engage in war there is a futility of war in some places and times. It’s like trying to grow a garden on a concrete parking lot or play a trombone under water. Although, in my case, there’s a futility to my playing a trombone anywhere. The best and the brightest in our military know about the futility of war. Unfortunately, few of those who send them to war are as well educated.

The first example of the futility of war is when these eleven conditions are present:

• our troops are only the latest in a centuries-long string of invaders;
• in an ongoing civil war;
• we can’t read or speak the native language;
• know little of the people’s history, religion, culture, literature, or tribal relationships;
• our enemies don’t wear uniforms, while we, who are already easily identified, do wear uniforms (a British problem you’d think we’d recall from our own Revolutionary War);
• it is impossible to distinguish enemies from our local allies and employees;
• our troops’ choice is between killing innocent civilians, or being killed by those who look like innocent civilians;
• creating a conflict between “winning hearts and minds” and “burning down the village to save it;”
• the longer the fighting continues the more counterproductive it becomes;
• increasing rather than decreasing chaos and civil war;
• on a battlefield with no frontline, with territory repeatedly gained only to be lost again.

That’s what I meant by “you can’t play basketball on a football field.”

I provided the second President Bush similar advice in February 2003. The column was headlined, “Ten Questions for Bush Before War.”

Second, Due Dilligence

The second example of the futility of war involves due diligence – what I was urging Bush to do before sending troops to Iraq the next month. It’s not difficult. The process, the twelve questions, are analogous to those Iowa City business persons must answer for bank loan officers. Before war the questions are:

• What’s the problem, or challenge?
• How is our national interest involved?
• Is our goal precisely defined and widely understood?
• What are the metrics for measuring progress?
• Are there cheaper and more effective non-military alternatives?
• How will military force help, and how will it hinder, reaching our goal?
• What are the benefits and costs?
• What will it require in troops, materiel, lives, and treasure?
• Will the American people support it to conclusion?
• Will we be confronting Viet Nam-like impediments?
• What is our exit strategy?
• Once we leave will things be better, worse, or the same?

You may recognize my debt to Joint Chiefs Chair General Colin Powell for some of those questions. Or, as Joint Chiefs Chair General Martin Dempsey put it most succinctly in 2013, “As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that the use of force will move us toward the intended outcome.”

Our founders, fearful of unchecked presidential war powers, created what we today call “civilian control of the military.” But note that the analysis just laid out comes, not from civilians but from the military. That’s why I have only half-jokingly said, what we really need is military control of the civilians.

After the Twin Towers slaughter funded by Saudis and executed by Saudis, what was the civilians’ response? They let other Saudis in America immediately leave, skip the Congressional Declaration of War required by the Constitution, tell Americans to “go shopping,” and start fighting preemptive, perpetual wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Third, Constitutional Restraints

The futility of war is recognized in the Constitution.

The idea of a civilian, cabinet-level Secretary of Peace was first proposed in 1793 by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Many others have urged it since. The closest we have to a Department of Peace today is what was once called the Department of War, and now Department of Defense.

The irony comes, not alone from the Department’s name, but from conservatives’ approach to the Constitution, what they call a “textual” or “original intent” interpretation of its language. For the Constitution’s drafters made unambiguously clear their extreme opposition to a president having a king’s power to both declare and direct wars. As James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty.” His concerns were shared by Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason and others.

The presidents and members of Congress who came along later followed those men’s advice. For 156 years, through World War II, armed forces were increased for a war, following a Congressional Declaration of War, and then quickly demobilized once war ended.

Fourth, the futility of perpetual war and how it happened

How did we evolve from a country without standing armies, that demilitarized after every war, with a Congress that restrained executive war powers? How did we get a go-along Congress that supports the executive’s standing armies, never demilitarizes, engages in multiple perpetual wars of choice, maintains military presence in 150 countries, at an unaudited total cost over one trillion dollars a year, put on our grandchildren’s credit card?

Then, Americans fought in World War I for about 18 months. We wrapped up a multi-front global World War II in four years. Now we display the futility of war by continuing to struggle in Afghanistan for 17 years.

There’s more to this story than we have time to discuss.

Partly what happened is the same marriage of profits and politics that dictates other aspects of our lives and economy. Roughly half our fighting forces are employees of for-profit contractors. Privatize prisons and prison owners lobby for longer prison terms. Privatize the military and private contractors lobby for longer wars. Provide large enough campaign contributions for members of Congress and those who profit from war will reap the rewards of a military budget larger than those of the next five or ten nations combined. Some of this money will be spent on multi-million-dollar fighter planes and multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers – neither of which provided much protection from pressure cooker bombs for the 23,000 runners at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

The other half of the political equation is the virtual elimination of citizen sacrifice. (1) Those subject to the draft, and their parents, were a powerful force opposing the Viet Nam war. Without a draft we might still be fighting in Viet Nam, as we are in Afghanistan. Now only four-tenths of one percent fight our wars. (2) After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor everyone sacrificed. There was rationing. We did without. After the Twin Towers attack we were told to “go shopping.” (3) World War II was a largely pay-as-you-go war. No longer. Wars are free. We just borrow money from China, and add trillions to the national debt.

Fifth, the futility of wars when we doing nothing; and `what we can do.

What can we do to eliminate the futility of today’s wars? Essentially six things that are the exact opposite of what we’re now doing:

• Reestablish the impediments to war our founders intended.
• Reinstate the draft, for children of the rich as well as the poor.
• Demand every member of the House and Senate cast a recorded vote on Declarations of War.
• Enact a supplemental war tax and pay-as-you-go wars.
• Require all citizens to bear some sacrifice, as in World War II.
• Contribute our own voices to a public debate on the questions I’ve suggested must be answered before going to war.

In that effort, your voices are the most persuasive. When it comes to peace, Americans are more likely to listen to those who have known war than to those who have only preached for peace.

It really is up to us. You and me.

As Edward R. Murrow closed his documentary about the consequences of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on Americans, “We cannot escape responsibility for the result. … Cassius was right. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

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Why Unwinnable 'Wars' Are 'Stupid Stuff'

September 23, 2014, 11:50 a.m.

Note: Click here for an updated list of prior columns and blog essays about terrorism and war.

Add 'Impossible to Win' to Objections to War With ISIS

"A strange game.
The only winning move is not to play."

-- Computer's conclusion about the war game "global nuclear war," from movie "War Games" (1983)

"You can't win, you can't break even
And you can't get out of the game
People keep sayin' things are gonna change
But they look to us like, you're stayin' the same . . .
You can't win, you can't win no way
If your story stays the same, no, no"

-- Charles Emanuel Smalls/Michael Jackson, "You Can't Win"

"We're waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!"

-- Pete Seeger, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy"

"Don't do stupid stuff."

-- "The polite-company version of a phrase [President Obama's aides] use to describe the president's foreign policy." Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2014.

"After six weeks of American airstrikes, the Iraqi government’s forces have scarcely budged the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State [which] is still dealing humiliating blows to the Iraqi Army."

David D. Kirkpatrick and Omar Al-Jawoshy, "Weeks of U.S. Strikes Fail to Dislodge ISIS in Iraq," New York Times, September 23, 2014, p. A12

"The United States and five Arab allies launched a wide-ranging air campaign against the Islamic State and at least one other extremist group in Syria for the first time early Tuesday . . .."

-- Ben Hubbard and Alan Cowell, "U.S. and Allies Strike ISIS Targets in Syria," New York Times (online), September 23, 2014

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There is a rather long list of categories of reasons why our third military adventure in Iraq is a bad idea. They are very briefly reviewed, below.

But for those for whom none of those categories seem persuasive, we now have another: A "war" with ISIS, in which the U.S. is a leading force, can be neither fought nor "won" by the standards of any reasonable definition of those words.

This is not the same as saying America is no longer the preeminent military force in the world, more advanced in technology and larger in resources than the next 10 countries combined. It still is. It is not to say that our military is less able and macho than the ISIS fighters. It is not. It is only to say that there are some places and times in which we cannot fight and win anything resembling a war. Whatever it is we want from others, whatever our "national security" may require, they must sometimes be achieved with methods and strategies other than military -- not just in addition to military but instead of military.

As I once put it to President Lyndon Johnson, "You can't play basketball on a football field." In that instance, Viet Nam was a country in which we would, inevitably, be viewed as only the latest in a centuries-long history of foreign invaders, entering into a form of civil war, in a country with an unfamiliar language, history, mythology, religion, social structure, and geography, where our "enemies" refused to wear uniforms and thus were indistinguishable from our allies, there was no World War II-like "frontline," and land was won, lost and won again with ever-increasing American (and Vietnamese) deaths.

In that war effort, a high administration official and I came up with a couple of alternatives, only half in jest. We calculated a cost of $500,000 for each Viet Cong killed in our effort to "win hearts and minds." What if we were to simply give every Vietnamese $250,000? They would consider it a fortune; it would cut our costs in half; and would probably win more "hearts and minds" than killing them. The other possibility was to withdraw our soldiers and replace them with realtors, whose mission would be to simply buy up the entire country one hectare at a time.

Neither of our proposed options proved to be popular with the President, who decided about that time that rather than continuing my responsibility for sea lift to Viet Nam, I would make a really terrific FCC commissioner.

If you can't play basketball on a football field, you certainly can't play basketball in the desert sand. The ineffectiveness, indeed the negative contribution, of our military efforts in the Middle East have much in common with our failures in Viet Nam.

Others have cited a range of categories of concerns about our Middle East military adventures -- as have I in "Is U.S. Response Strengthening ISIS? Playing Into the Terrorists' Hands," September 19, 2014; " Why Iowans Should Care About Iraq War III; Why Do We Accept Words Like 'Islam,' 'State,' and 'Caliphate'?" September 16, 2014; and "Is War the Best Answer?" Iowa City Press-Citizen, September 12, 2014, p. A7; embedded in " Whatever the Question, Is War the Best Answer?" September 10, 2014. [The next day, September 24, the New York Times' editorial board outlined some of these categories as applied to Syria in Editorial, "Wrong Turn on Syria: No Convincing Plan," New York Times, September 24, 2014, p. A30.]

Some find our war effort unjustified by their standards, citing rules of war grounded in international law, religion, philosophy, morality and ethics. Others believe the military action is unauthorized under the letter and spirit of our Constitution and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. Frightening the American people into supporting the war on grounds we are under threat of imminent terrorist attack in the U.S. is challenged as, at minimum, unwarranted (e.g., Senator Lindsay Graham, "This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home.") Our military actions are self-defeating insofar as they increase, rather than decrease, (a) the ability of ISIS to recruit additional terrorists from now some 74 countries, and (b) the likelihood of terrorist attacks within the United States. The list goes on and on, including in the three prior blog essays linked just above.

Tom Tomorrow, in his usually incisive way, illustrates some of the folly in our Iraq adventure in this week's "cartoon":

[Source: Tom Tomorrow, "Building Blocks of War," September 22, 2014, Tom Tomorrow, "This Modern World".]

There is a kind of disquieting irony in the last three quotations at the head of this blog essay: President Obama's pledge not to do "stupid stuff," followed by the Times report that our numerous air strikes over Iraq, coupled with the Iraqi military's ineffectiveness, have failed to restrict ISIS' hold on Iraq land; and then the news 24 hours later that the bombing strategy that failed in Iraq has now been extended to Syria. (And of course fighting a "war" against ISIS in Syria -- ISIS being the Syrian government's most effective enemy -- is infinitely more complex and futile than fighting them in Iraq.)

As the other opening quotations illustrate in a variety of contexts, there are some wars, as well as some games, that cannot be "won" -- the computer's conclusion from its analysis of nuclear war that "the only winning move is not to play;" the metaphor of a card game in which the players "can't win, break even, or get out of the game;" and Pete Seeger's image of a war in which we "push on," notwithstanding the fact it is getting progressively worse.

We are not winning our military action against ISIS. There is little prospect that we ever will. Even if we did, as with our "defeat" of al-Qaeda, the likelihood is that another, successor organization will only pop up as ISIS did in this ongoing game of "whack-a-mole." If we ever were to, for the third time, "declare victory and go home" ("Mission Accomplished"), the probability is overwhelming that the results will be similar if not identical to what happened the two prior times.

The "solution"? There is none. There is only the "least worst alternative." We shouldn't have attempted a military action that was not fully supported by our Joint Chiefs of Staff and doomed to failure in the first place. Any option that has "the Great Satan" (the U.S.) as the leading aggressor is highly unlikely to be successful. Perhaps we should slowly abandon overt, conventional military action, limiting our involvement to diplomacy, intelligence gathering, economic and trade sanctions, and trying to restrict ISIS' access to financial resources. I don't pretend to have "the solution."

My only position for now is that "unwinnable wars are stupid stuff."

Now here is a 4:05-minute video excerpt from the 1983 movie "War Games," in which the computer's conclusion is portrayed about 3:50 into the excerpt:



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General McChrystal: Afghan Efforts 'Not Working'

August 31, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

For a better written, but otherwise almost identical analysis to my own, though I suffer no illusion that George Will reads this blog, see the next day's George Will, "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan," Washington Post, September 1, 2009.

BBC Has General Stanley McChrystal Report
(brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com*)
Although neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post seems to have anything online about The McChrystal Report as I write this, the BBC -- which remains in my judgment the world's single best news organization -- does. General Stanley McChrystal, our top military commander for Afghanistan, has been charged with reponsibility for preparing a report for his superiors -- up to and including the Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama -- regarding how things are going over there.

It reminds me of a similar (though much less public, significant and influential) assignment I was once given by another president, President Lyndon Johnson, regarding our efforts in Viet Nam and southeast Asia generally. My conclusion? "Mr. President, you can't play basketball on a football field."

What did I mean by that?

I recalled Iowa City during World War II, and the "Navy Pre-Flight Training School" in our neighborhood, under the command of Captain Hanrahan. I and my friends were only in grade school at the time, but he was always willing to give a little time to the operation's mascots. This included pointing out to us, on the map of Europe on the wall of his office (in the building we now call "South Quad"), how the "front line" was moving across Europe.

For in Viet Nam -- as in Iraq, and now Afghanistan -- there was no "front line." Territory secured one day and lost the next might or might not be repeatedly captured and lost.

Nor was that the only reason why it was very difficult to conduct a "war."

Whenever an economically advanced and militarily powerful nation tries to conduct a "war" in a less powerful country, regardless of how benevolent the military power's motives may be, a substantial portion of the local population will look upon the operation as only the latest in a centuries-long history of invaders and occupiers.

Just as many Americans would organize to fight off invaders and occupiers -- as we did, after all, in the Revolutionary War that marked our nation's beginning -- so do those in the countries we attempt to control with our military.

In science, the mere fact that a scientific experiment is being conducted may impact on what it is that is being observed. Similarly, however counter intuitive it may seem, it the more troops we put in a country, and the longer they are there, the greater is the local hostility to their presence and the more locals who are motivated to participate in the resistance. The resulting chaos may even ignite and exacerbate, rather than reduce, internal strife and fighting among local groups formerly existing under some form of truce.

More often than not, it's very difficult to know who "the enemy" is in such situations. We are identifiable by our uniforms. They are not. They are embedded in the civilian population. They may be part-time fighters with other jobs to which they devote more or less time on any given day. Some may actually be on our payroll.

One of the consequences is that in order to kill them we end up with enormous numbers of dead civilians -- sometimes school children, or those attending weddings or funerals -- whom we euphemistically refer to with the sanitized expression, "collateral damage." Needless to say, such deaths are extremely counterproductive in our effort to "win hearts and minds."

The whole operation is significantly handicapped, moreover, by the fact that those we send overseas, and those who send them there, often through no fault of their own, know very little about the local country and people. Often as not, we cannot speak their language. We don't know their history and religion, their literature and culture, their legitimate and criminal economic activities, their tribal and family ties, their social power structure (we certainly don't even know the names of, let alone have longstanding personal relationships with, local leaders), the internal territorial or religious groups' hostilities, what they do and do not consider appropriate behavior. Even the territory -- deserts and mountainous areas -- may be alien to our troops.

Finally, all of this takes place in an area that is significantly unlike anything we are used to as a "country" based on our American experience. Afghanistan, for example, with its poverty and lack of an educated population, nonexistent to inadequate systems of roads and communication networks, a poppy-based drug economy, with even the capital, Kabul, under attack, and the rest of the country essentially divided into areas under the dictatorial, all-powerful control of individual war lords, is not a "nation" in the sense we use that word.

See generally, Nicholas Johnson, "Ten Questions for Bush Before War," Daily Iowan, February 4, 2008, p. A6.

As President Obama is discovering, even the president of the United States is far from a powerful single leader of America insofar as the very independent members of the Senate and House are concerned, or the lobbyists and major campaign contributors who fund them. In Afghanistan it's much worse. "Our man in Kabul," Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has to make deals with the drug lords in Afghanistan just as Obama needs to make deals with the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. Karzai can't dictate to the regional war lords of his country any more than Obama can dictate to the senators and governors here.

Indeed, there's a growing disenchantment in Washington with Karzai. And it's not helped with the mounting evidence of outrageous and significant fraud in the recent election for which the ballots are still being counted, and his ties to the drug business. But without Karzai, whom do we turn to as a powerful Afghanistan "leader"?

This is the environment into which the U.S., and the coalition, have sent some 100,000 troops -- and may be sending more.

But with what "mission"? Why are we there? How are our national interests involved -- to such a degree that rational prioritization dictates continuing to spend in excess of a trillion dollars there (Afghanistan and Iraq) rather than here? How would we know if we'd ever been "successful"? What is our ultimate exit strategy? Why will Afghanistan be better off -- by any standard -- years after we've left than it was before we arrived? Why will we be any safer from "terrorism" -- since there are plenty of ungoverned "nations" where the Al Qaeda can hole up and train warriors even if we could run them and the Taliban out of Afghanistan, which it appears we cannot?

Moreover, even if we had a metric for measuring our "success," which we don't, why are we focused on Afghanistan? It's kind of like our response to 9/11 initially -- Saudi Arabia was the source of those who flew the planes into the Twin Towers, and the money that funded their operation. So what did we do? We bombed Afghanistan and then invaded Iraq, a country whose leaders and people apparently had virtually nothing to do with the operation and were actually hostile to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and the Taliban seem to be primarily located in and working out of Pakistan. So where are we engaging them? In Afghanistan.

So it is that we cannot be surprised with what early leaks indicate may be coming to us from General McChrystal, in these excerpts from the BBC's report:

A report by the top US general in Afghanistan is expected to admit the current strategy is not working, the BBC understands.

General Stanley McChrystal will liken the US military to a bull charging at a matador [the Taliban] - slightly weakened with each "cut" it receives.

His review is also expected to say that protecting the Afghan people against the Taliban must be the top priority. . . .

Crisis of confidence

BBC North America editor Mark Mardell says General McChrystal's bullfighting metaphor is striking because it is not the usual way that US commanders talk about the country's armed forces.

The general's blunt assessment will also say that the Afghan people are undergoing a crisis of confidence because the war against the Taliban has not made their lives better, our correspondent says.

General McChrystal says the aim should be for Afghan forces to take the lead but their army will not be ready to do that for three years and it will take much longer for the police.

And he will warn that villages have to be taken from the Taliban and held, not merely taken.

General McChrystal also wants more engagement with the Taliban fighters and he believes that 60% of the problem would go away if they could be found jobs.

"US Afghan Strategy 'Not Working,'" BBC News, 31 August 2009 09:13 UK.

It looks like the Report will end up being further support for my only half joking proposal that "what we need is more military control of the civilians" (a take off on the basic American constitutional principle of "civilian control of the military").

It is, after all, the elected officials and talk show hosts who suggest that we should "Nuke 'em!" or "Let's go kick some butt!" or whose contribution to military strategy such vacuous lines as "These colors don't run!"

The top thinkers in the military, many of whom do make their way to the top of their service, or the Joint Chiefs' staff, are well educated, bright, analytical and rational.

When left to their own independent judgment and opinions they are the ones likely to ask questions like those I outlined above. What, exactly, is it you are trying to do in this country? How are our national interests involved? In what ways do you think a military presence could be helpful in reaching that goal (as distinguished from, e.g., Peace Corps presence and building infrastructure; cultural exchanges; or bringing their best students to our universities)? How would you describe that military mission? With what metrics would you measure our military's progress? How many troops will it take to accomplish that mission? How long will it take? What is your basis for thinking the American people, and their elected representatives, will support the cost in human life and taxes over that time? (Support for the Afghan war has now dropped below 50%.) What support is there in the international community for this action? Does that support include financial support and troops? Once in, how do we get out; that is, what is our "exit strategy"? On the assumption the military mission produces the outcome desired, why is it reasonable to assume that progress will be sustained after we leave?

Note what General McChrystal is said to be talking about. Our military efforts "have not made their lives better;" security must be provided by locals "but their army will not be ready to do that for three years and it will take much longer for the police;" and a jobs program would be more effective than continuing to shoot Afghans ("60% of the problem would go away if they could be found jobs"). [See, e.g., Pamela Constable, "Many Women Stayed Away From the Polls In Afghanistan; Fear, Tradition, Apathy Reversed Hopeful Trend," Washington Post, August 31, 2009 ("Five years ago, with the country at peace, traditional taboos easing and Western donors pushing for women to participate in democracy, millions of Afghan women eagerly registered and then voted for a presidential candidate. . . . But on Aug. 20 [, 2009], when Afghans again went to the polls to choose a president, . . . a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise").]

To the extent he's talking about conventional military issues at all, he comments (as I do above) that "villages have to be taken from the Taliban and held, not merely taken." And that function would require, of course, multiples of the numbers of troops anyone has so far proposed. (It's reminiscent of Jerry Seinfeld's routine at the car rental counter: "You know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation." See video, embedded in Nicholas Johnson, "Gannett Shoots Straight -- Into Foot," May 3, 2009.)

It remains to be seen what's contained in the full report, if it is to be made public. But from what's been leaked so far it looks like it is going to provide the kind of candor that is needed and far more likely to come from the best and the brightest among the military in Afghanistan than from the civilians in Washington.
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* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source, even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson

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