Excellent Newsweek piece by Mark Benjamin and Barbara Slavin entitled, "How Rumsfeld Abandoned the Peacemakers." Gist in subtitle: "The former defense secretary launched a campaign to win hearts and minds, but he never believed in it. And citizen soldiers paid the ultimate price."
Very much worth reading.
My take on Rumsfeld in a nutshell:
- Without him, Gates is not possible. In the end, Gates makes more impact, but even Gates needs a follow-on worthy of what he's done, otherwise the big-war crowd resurges. But without Rumsfeld shaking things up and ultimately screwing things up, Gates couldn't have come in and fixed things as well as he did. That's how ossified the culture is. We can all complain, but having a military that is a bit slow to change is not all bad. In many ways, it's the price of being Leviathan, as in, you can't chase fads.
- In truth, Rummy came into office very big-war/transformational focused, and like everybody else in the admin, he disdained the small wars/COIN/nation-building "crap."
- Afghanistan and our early success there only strengthened that mindset--to everybody's detriment.
- Rummy's shaking up of the big-war force/institution did make possible the small-wars crowd rise by creating just enough room in the system, but he never really did anything to encourage it (and as one civil affairs soldier quoted in the piece notes, "They were aware the whole system was broke," and they did nothing to fix it). It was all a bottom-up push that took way too long and arguably killed a lot of our troops in its delay. Nothing was going to stop our early losses because those had to happen before the system would respond and the mid-level officers got frustrated enough to revolt from below. But a lot of the casualties we suffered in 05-06 should have been avoided, and Rumsfeld was a big reason why they weren't. He doesn't admit any of that in the book, and most people want to rake him over the usual coals (decision to start war, WMD rationale, "stuff happens" and such). They're all worth debating, but to me, if Bush-Cheney had adapted faster to the reality and skipped all the fantasy about recovery, this thing goes down as unmitigated success.
- But the ultimate remains: you can't mix good nation-building with primacy, because if you believe in the latter, you cannot go multinational or realistically welcome the logical private sector players (who will naturally be all regional neighbors). We did Iraq and Afghanistan as US-run and US-dominated packages, and we shut out countries on the reconstruction if they didn't participate in the war. Ultimately, as we faltered and began to pull out of Iraq, the logical regional and extra-regional players showed up, to clean up. Same already happening with Afghanistan and it will accelerate. We get fixated on "hearts and minds," which is a theory of gratitude, as Bing West like to say. But the demand to be met is the same one that Mubarak and Qaddafi and the rest of those autocrats in the Middle East have failed on-- and it's called jobs and opportunity and a reason to care about your country because it's got a future. We never really delivered either in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we didn't primarily because we're a go-it-alone force that will work with fellow Caucasian NATO forces and just about nobody else with any seriousness. Yes, we have our favored token players, but the biggies never came because we could never work with them, and I'm talking Russians, Indians, Chinese, Turks and--yes--the Iranians. Our "win" had to be ours alone, and thus we end up with sub-optimal outcomes that get summarized as, "We fought the war, and X won in the end!" And that's what primacy in an age of frontier integration gets you--nonstop frustration. Rumsfeld and the neocons never understood that. And that's why they belong to the 20th century.