SWJ Small Wars Survey 2012

[Dayuhan]

Occupation is a military and political function, where the armed forces of the occupying country assume control and authority of the governance of the occupied territory. Once the former governments were removed, the default goal became to install new governments. International law establishes the legal conditions for the occurrence of military occupation. This is not "mission-creep" but the logical progression of the original objective of removing the government of Iraq from power.

Just because the rules say you have to do it doesn't mean that you can do it.

The rules say you have to provide a new government. American politics require that the new government be recognizable to Americans as democratic. Nothing short of divine intervention could produce a government in Iraq or Afghanistan that would meet those criteria with anything approaching stability. These are inherently unstable societies not amenable to centralized control by anything but main force, and fledgling democracy is an unstable system even under ideal conditions.

This contradiction was implicit from the moment the goal of removing and replacing the governments in question was set. Trying to perform the same task in two places at once was just the icing on a thoroughly inedible cake. I agree with the points made by Ken and Steve, but I also don't think any level of training or quality of leadership would have made that set of goals achievable. They were just stupid goals, especially since they were thoroughly unnecessary: the US had no pressing need to remake Iraqi governance or to transform Afghanistan into a democracy.

That's the role of the senior military leadership, which should either detail its intent (since they understand the political mandate as "clear"), or in the event of confusion, request clarification. The fact that CENTCOM lists the military objectives underscores that the senior military leadership understands what their objectives to be. If they do not, then they failed as leaders by not requesting guidance.

Understanding a goal doesn't make it achievable. There's a certain institutional resistance to saying "that can't be done"... and didn't the military request more troops for Iraq, pointing out that while the force allotted was sufficient to defeat the Iraqi military, it was not sufficient to secure a post-invasion Iraq? That request was turned down, IIRC.

Then it's the fault of the senior military leadership for not properly training the force and providing the strategy to conduct military occupation with the intent of facilitating stable governments.

Facilitating stable governments?? Are you serious?? Are stable governments simply going to appear from thin air with a bit of facilitation? That's a completely unrealistic expectation that was never going to be met.

Civil war was a likely feature in any post-Saddam scenario that didn't involve an equally ruthless dictator. Afghans were going to fight for the spoils in any post-Taliban environment These were givens from the start, and our error was in the absurd hubris of believing that these conditions could be conjured away or suppressed. The goals were poorly selected and the challenges grotesquely underestimated at the time the mission was set. Certainly there were errors in execution, but the fundamental error lay in the selection of missions that were inconsistent with our capacities and interests.