L’Affaire Davis

Over the past couple of days, I’ve found myself yapping with several mid-career Army officers about L’affaire Davis.

We’re mulling whether the maverick officer violated any law or regulation. We doubt it.

But we’re still flummoxed over whether he’s pushed too far the envelope of traditional civil-military affairs.

The Skinny:  After his second year-long tour in Afghanistan, LTC Daniel L. Davis has grown to gravely doubt the rosy forecasts about the war ginned up by our generals for Congress and the American people.  As a member of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, he hoped to see some signs indicating that Kabul was creeping toward self-sufficiency, both in its ability to govern and protect itself from insurgents.  Instead, Davis “witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level,” a startling awareness that pushed him to pen a highly critical essay on the war effort in Armed Forces Journal. 

This, of course, builds into a moral argument of great force, one that echoes similar statements made by disillusioned veterans during the Vietnam War:

 How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders inAfghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.

But Davis didn’t stop with an AFJ op-ed.  He sought out lawmakers to warn them that the overly optimistic prognostications by both our generals and those of our ISAF partners are little more than bunk, and he also chatted with a reporter from the New York Times before the AFJ piece printed.

According to one of my peeps who knows him personally, Davis is a conscientious man, an officer with nearly two decades of service to our nation, and someone who has written cogently about our strategic options in Afghanistan before.

Davis moreover had every right to visit lawmakers; talk to reporters about non-classified things he was putting to paper for a respected journal on military affairs; and consult with his pastor about the consequences of going public with his claims. He also apparently alerted his chain of command about his intended actions and submitted two versions of his work, one more detailed, to Public Affairs Officers for approval, a request they seem not to have okayed.

So why do I still feel that he’s pushing civ-mil relations too far over the line?  Is it because he’s a serving officer and finds himself essentially calling those in the upper echelons of his chain of command liars?  Is it OK to believe that but corrosive to military discipline when one shouts it out to the public?

Or is it because he can’t name names and must, for the sake of his argument, rely on his own and a collection of anecdotes in lieu of more sophisticated analysis?   Maybe it’s the zeal with which he’s taken to making public his disagreement with policy?  That it seems orchestrated, maybe even self-serving from someone who’s so prolific in his opinions?

I don’t know.  So I want you to tell me.

*****

But first let’s consider a few test cases.

In 2007, then-LTC Paul Yingling was channeling H.R. McMaster’s PhD thesis on the officers who failed our republic during the Vietnam War when he churned out “A Failure of Generalship.”  A j’accuse essay in AFJ that named no names, Yingling’s piece nevertheless indicted an entire generation of generals for failing “to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy.”

Before the invasion of Iraq, our generals had a duty to provide Congress “with a correct estimate of strategic responsibilities” and failed to do so, a problem so critical that Yingling called on lawmakers to fix it.

Full disclosure:  While still on stoploss orders as a junior Army infantryman, I publicly stood with Yingling on this issue, even if I quibbled that his inability to name names leeched some of the sting from his polemic.

Like Yingling, in his essay Davis outs no generals specifically.  Also like Yingling, Davis seeks remedy from Congress.  Unlike Yingling, however, Davis blabbed unclassified details to the press – also his right — and personally visited lawmakers to share classified information with them, apparently showing where his data diverged from official statements.

That’s a bit farther than Yingling was willing to carry it.

In September, then-Maj. Fernando M. Lujan, a visiting U.S. Army fellow to the CNAS think tank in DC,  wrote a controversial op-ed.  Combining equal parts naivety and bluster – despite his hollow claims of doing the exact opposite – “This War Can Still Be Won” lamentably also found a serving officer telling policymakers in their newspaper of record the policy choices he thought they should make on behalf of our nation.

I think that this actually went beyond what Davis has done.  Like Lujan, Davis has taken his own experiences, wadded them into a ball and hurled them at the reader and Congress.  But Davis merely seems to want lawmakers to audit the generals’ Afghan books a little better, not shift operations there.

Lujan stepped over the line by making policy suggestions, to the point of shaming in his prose increasingly concerned lawmakers – and by extension the American people – for accepting “failure” when they could have something close to a messy victory.

In some ways, Lujan’s piece resembled the op-ed penned by David Petraeus in the midst of a presidential election.  “Battling for Iraq”  was full of half-truths about the status of his mission training the nascent Iraqi military.  But because it was scratched from the quill of the most political general since Douglas MacArthur, it gave George W. Bush cover from the charge by his rival, John Kerry, that the war wasn’t going so well and White House and Pentagon policies were to blame.

Unlike Davis, however, Petraeus was in a privileged position of insight and accountability because he led that mission.

Sure, later reports by the Government Accountability Office (alas, not an agency charged with making the government’s generals accountable) found numerous problems with the job at the time, including widespread extortion and larceny by corrupt Iraqi officials and that the Americans lost track of thousands of small arms intended to be used by Baghdad’s security forces.  But that doesn’t mean that Petraeus couldn’t speak to the recruiting, arming, training and retention of jundhi.

In fact, if he couldn’t do so, who could?  In the balance, I’d have to say that I could’ve found no problem with Petraeus, except for his timing.

Why did he publish it only weeks before a presidential election?  Why couldn’t he have waited until mid-November?  Didn’t he insert himself and the Army into an increasingly  partisan political debate over Iraq and the choice of his next boss?

And even if I think Davis hasn’t committed the same sins against mil-civ affairs that Petraeus and Lujan did, why am I still unsettled by his jihad?

*****

During a November interview, U.S. Army MG Peter Fuller told Politico that the Afghan leaders he met are corrupt and incompetent.  He noted that it appears unlikely that Kabul shall sustain their armed forces when we leave.  He said that they also fail to fathom the economic problems dogging the U.S. and our European allies.

In other words, he said what pretty much everyone with half of a brain cell inside Afghanistan believes, which is why U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John Allen fired him.  But not before the four-star’s beadles issued a pair of filthy lies, falsehoods spat in the face of our democracy.

I think we should read again this perfidious cant so that we might inhale fully the reek of dishonor that wafted from its emission:

These unfortunate comments are neither indicative of our current solid relationship with the government of Afghanistan, its leadership, or our joint commitment to prevail here in Afghanistan.  The Afghan people are an honorable people, and comments such as these will not keep us from accomplishing our most critical and shared mission – bringing about a stable, peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan.

And then his ISAF chums flatulated loudly in the same room the same sort of nonsense:

 These unfortunate comments are clearly MG Fuller’s personal opinions.  However, they in no way represent the policies or positions of the International Security and Assistance Force.

Too bad that cables poached and released by Wikileaks and a steady stream of leaks by Kabul hands to the media in several nations hadn’t exposed these remarks for the  obfuscated idiocy that they are.

Fuller, you see, was caught repeating what everyone knew to be the official western stance toward Hamid Karzai’s kleptocracy.  He merely forgot that it’s also apparently official policy to lie to the American people about our less-than-solid relationship with Karzai’s flunkies.

I defended Fuller on this, but narrowly.  I contend that any decent officer who followed our Army’s core values would have a problem with lying — unless he had been ordered to deceive the enemy.

I also noted that Fuller, like Petraeus, had a unique job as a liaison between Karzai’s kleptorcracy and western forces, one that made him not only the pointman for materiel bound for the Afghan National Security Forces but also the guard tasked with protecting American taxpayers from the rapacious thievery of these very same Afghan leaders.

Fuller told a Politico reporter without obfuscation what his job had been like for seven months.  And because he told a truth that couldn’t benefit the president – unlike Petraeus and his article near an election — he had to go.

Fuller did far less than Davis but probably paid a higher price for it.   Is that why I’m  bothered by Davis?

*****

In June, a gaggle of junior officers cautioned me from Afghanistan that the metrics of progress released by the military – then under the command of U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus – were belied by what they and others were experiencing on the ground.

Others in uniform who knew exactly what our generals were saying in private – through classified reports – told me that these data often conflicted with what the GOs told the public and lawmakers.  And, because of the groupthink infecting HQ, their optimistic prognostications diverged from what many of those fighting the Taliban believed.

While there was some progress in key areas, in other initiatives there wasn’t, they said.  Or the numbers themselves were too murky to obtain the certitude our leaders found there, they added.

So on the behalf of these men in the field, I called for our GOs to release the measurements that would indicate progress or failure in the counterinsurgency war we’re fighting in South Asia.

I pitched this as a moral argument.  I said that we as veterans had kept up our end of the tacit contract:  We rendered unto them our courage in battle and they owe us personal accountability when their plans fail.

The stars, of course, never opened their databases to those who made their reputations for them through dint of battlefield sacrifice.

Instead, the generals have ordered to be published increasingly hilarious sitreps about impending victory while hiding from the public classified documents that suggest strongly that they’re fibbing or, at least, failing to caveat their talking points with contrary evidence.  Even Congress has begun to call them on this.

Was it OK for these mid-career officers to go to a blogger and fellow veteran and ask him to challenge the generals to come clean, especially after the junior soldiers had posed these very same questions to their own chain of command, without obtaining an honest answer?

I think so.  But they also weren’t lone wolves.  They were something of a pack and had compiled a great deal of information about how official pronouncements were clearly being sculpted to tamp down reality.  And they didn’t want to be seen by junior soldiers criticizing the generals directly, lest it sow disunity in the ranks or hurt their lawful mission.

While I’ve never communicated with him in any way, I should highlight another AFJ article by U.S. Army Maj. William Taylor.  An historian as well as a battalion S-3, Taylor in August explored why he thought the generals might be fudging the numbers.

He suggested that a military tasked with trying to “win” the war against Taliban militias is inherently incapable of grading its own performance and often optimistically “spins” events on the ground to reflect a “can-do” attitude in conflict with reality.

Davis has taken a different approach from both Taylor and other junior officers.  By inserting his own version of reality through anecdote and biography, he’s made the issues that these other officers raised as much about himself.  And by making it partly about himself and his potential martyrdom, has he harmed the greater – but quieter – cause of those officers who are working through Congress and their chain of command to salvage with integrity and honor the accounting being performed by generals?

I really have no idea.  What I think I know is this:  If the GOs are so convinced that their metrics show we’re winning the war in Afghanistan then why don’t they release the numbers and have us scrutinize them?

Maybe then we could figure out why the measurements grading security that are released by the United Nations are diametrically opposed to the secret sauce of ISAF.

So, generals, if you want to shut Davis and other detractors up all you’ve got to do is release the info.  Open your books.  You know.  The real ones.  The ones the HASC and SASC have seen but we, the people, have not — even if we’re the ones who volunteer to fight and die on your orders, the ones who foot your bills, the ones who now call on you to perform the most decent and honorable gesture one should expect from a commissioned officer.

Tell the truth.  Like Fuller, follow the Army’s core values that you claim are so valuable for everyone below you and yet become so inconvenient for officers when they morph into generals.

*****

Two of these officers also asked that I tackle something I’d prefer to leave alone.

I’ve long followed the noble example set by one of my favorite stops, the Ink Spots blog:  I go out of my way to avoid writing about the bearded mediocrity Tom Ricks.

Sure, I note in passing the defense dilettante every so often because I’m human and he’s a bloated blimp of a target, but I never read his worthless writing unless someone calls or emails –  “Hey, you won’t believe what Tom Ricks put up today?”

Today, however, they’re right.  Something must be said to correct his latest dissembling.

The CNAS scholar has tackled, sort of, the Davis matter.  He seems to want to smear the LTC for having put to writing ideas far more cogent than Ricks’ own hagiographic journalism.  That’s cool.  It’s Tom’s blog.

But he also wants to suggest that wee lil ol’ Tommy doesn’t “feel equipped to judge his piece” and he doesn’t even “write much about the Afghan war” because he doesn’t “understand the war there.”  In the comments section, Ricks continues this defamation against truth and reason by asking that his readers give him “150 years’ and then he’ll “have a MUCH better idea of the Afghan war.”

Well, it shouldn’t take 150 years for someone to hand Ricks a keyboard and show him how to Google his own name.  I say this because it took me all of five seconds to catch Ricks fluffering the Afghan COIN mavens Petraeus and Stan McChrystal on Charlie Rose’s show, not to mention the bracingly callow declaration in late 2010 to NPR listeners that he was “actually more optimistic about Afghanistan than I am Iraq.”

Or the fact that Ricks can’t sit down with a reporter without belching uncontrollably the factoid that he grew up in Afghanistan.  That, you see, is the sort of lived experience that prods him to say, on the record to many thousands of people, that  “I think I know the country better than I know Iraq.”

Hey, didn’t he need 150 more years for that wisdom to take hold?  Not in 2009, he didn’t.  To be fair to Ricks, he added that he wasn’t sure if the Petraeus/McChrystal COIN scam would work on Kabul, but, golly gee, he just couldn’t really “see any viable alternative” to their strategic genius so we were stuck with it.

And he should know, right?  He lived in Afghanistan once and knows it far, far better than Iraq.

Over the past three years, Ricks happily has served as a traveling salesman for CNAS and we’ve suffered many loudly stupid opinions about Afghanistan and Iraq policy along the way.  Only now does he ask us to forget all of that untidy but quite public history, lest someone call him to account for pitching policies and personalities that failed to get the job done.

Ricks wants to have it both ways.  He wants to continue his odd form of think tank journalism that pivots on his infatuation with maverick warrior-scholars who “get it” while he punishes the unthinking troglodytes far below them fighting guerrillas, the dullards who “don’t get it” or, as his colleague Andrew Exum once put it, the “losers” in Ricks’ books.   But Ricks sure doesn’t want you to talk much about his own failures as a reporter or scholar, at least for another 150 years.

His sniffy little dismissal of Davis is no different.  Ricks ends up giving cover to those like Petraeus, the man he once pimped on TV and in magazines, while prissily protecting his increasingly dubious brand of mash note journalism. Perhaps if Davis were a dashing CNAS fellow like Lujan or a similar sort of “got it” warrior-scholar like King David, Ricks would defend him on TV in all his bumptious, bearded bloviating bluster.  Maybe he’d even throw him a bone on his blog by giving him a guest post with a funny title, perhaps his “Correspondent of Army Honesty” or some sort of hockum like that.

But that would require Ricks to understand irony and I don’t think that he can.

I say this because Ricks actually is a lot like Davis.  Both men seem to be peddling their own biographies to sell a perspective about the war instead of putting real data and competent analysis before the American people.

So we’ll solve this conundrum once and for all, at least with Ricks.  For the purposes of this blog, I’m going to say that we have it on the best of authority that “Tommy Gun” Ricks grew up in Afghanistan and that he understands that curious country better than he did Iraq, the nation that produced two best-selling books from his pen, a phenomenon that would lead a reader to assume that he had a cursory understanding of the topic and didn’t need to bone up for another 150 years.

I have that on the best authority possible — Tom Ricks.  Which is why on this blog, this one time, let’s make Ricks at least own his past words and deeds and not let him abet his favorite generals while they try to escape the legacy of theirs.

Tags: Afghanistan, Daniel L. Davis, David Petraeus, Fernando M. Lujan, Paul Yingling, Peter Fuller, William Taylor