Hagel’s replacement an open question
It just sounds like the Obama administration thought the defence secretary was not sufficiently excited about conducting mulitple wars
Chuck Hagel resigned as US Defence Secretary on Monday, and the Obama administration must be ecstatic that the Washington press is agrip with the perennial Beltway question: “Was he fired or did he quit?!” After yet another week of news that the US administration is expanding its war footing in the Middle East in secret, the White House yet again is exercising its power to avoid talking about what should be on the tip of the tongue of everyone: How are more troops going to solve a problem that 13 years of war have only made worse?
With Hagel’s resignation, hardly anyone is talking about the alarming story published on Friday by the New York Times, reporting that President Barack Obama has ordered — in secret — that troops continue the Afghanistan War at least through 2015 ... after announcing to the public months ago that combat operations would stop at the end of this year. Obama made his “This year we will bring America’s longest war to a responsible end” statement in the White House Rose Garden, on television, six months ago. The extension of the Afghan war was reportedly executed by a classified order.
On Sunday, the New York Times also reported that the new Afghan president quietly lifted the ban on so- called “night raids”, clearing the way for them to once again be conducted in conjunction with American special forces. While Hagel’s departure has already been framed around the Obama administration needing a “change” after the mid- term elections, or as a scapegoat for the administration’s response to Daesh ( Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), but that just raises more questions than answers: Why does the Obama administration think removing the only Republican from its cabinet will satisfy an electorate that just voted in more Republicans? And how is firing Hagel supposed to be a magic wand for a faltering campaign to destroy Daesh?
Taken with the Afghanistan news, as Marcy Wheeler points out, it is clear that Obama’s White House wants to slot in someone who is a lot more gung- ho about war. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who was long sceptical of the Iraq conflict , entered office “to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration,” as the New York Times’s Helene Cooper described. But “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus,” an unnamed official told the New York Times, apparently unwilling to articulate the obvious: Obama wants the primary focus of his ( and perhaps Hillary Clinton’s) next defence secretary to be ramping up troops.
Troop surge
It just sounds like the administration thought he was not sufficiently excited about conducting mulitple wars that would last for the next decade. Hagel’s replacement remains an open question, but one thing is for sure: It will be someone pushing for more war, not less. Former Pentagon official Michele Flournoy’s name was floated by most people on Monday morning. Flournoy, a favourite of defence contractors, has seemingly never met a military intervention she did not like — and that did not require more troops. As the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman wrote: Flournoy had been one of the defence intellectuals most closely allied with counter- insurgency. As one of the founders of the Centre for a New American Security thinktank, she promoted the 2007- era Iraq troop surge and was once installed as undersecretary of defence for policy; parlayed that advocacy into urging another troop surge in Afghanistan, intended to cleave Afghans from support for the Taliban.
Which is depressing for anyone who wants answers and honest policy: The US is almost five months into the war against Daesh, still with no legal authority to do so, and now we can look forward to Congress questioning the next Pentagon chief on whether he or she is sufficiently willing to continue bombing, while the real question is left unanswered: America still has no idea how the next 13 years of ‘ Forever War’ will be different from the first.
Trevor Timm is a Guardian US columnist and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non- profit that supports and defends journalism dedicated to transparency and accountability.