Petraeus: The Man Behind War Without End

The man who could read everyone else’s email lost his job because suddenly people were reading his.

David Petraeus, as the world now knows, had an affair with a biographer two-thirds his age and claims that as the reason for his resignation from his role as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  The timing is fascinating, coming just three days after the election. Had he stepped down a week earlier, perhaps it would have made it harder for his boss, the President, to keep his own job.

Had things gone differently this summer, Petraeus might have been a Presidential nominee.  His paramour’s worshipful biography, All In, describes a man hungry not just for military but for political power as well.  He would not have run for President, but he certainly would have angled for a draft, had either convention deadlocked over the top of the ticket.  Now, because America isn’t France, and sleeping with a woman other than your wife is frowned upon, he’s been cashiered.

Petraeus is best known as the commander of American forces in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.  But the greatest, and most pernicious, influence he has had on America and the world is his 2007 rewriting of the military rulebook in favor of the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN).  The key to COIN is this:  war now, war later, war everlasting.

The basic idea of COIN is winning of the hearts and the minds of the people in whose country you are fighting.  If that sounds familiar, it’s because that was the battle cry of those wonderful generals who gave you the Vietnam War.  Counterinsurgency was the key to U.S. victory in Southeast Asia.

Wait a minute.

We lost.

You can quote Santayana’s maxim that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.  Or you can quote Einstein’s definition of insanity:  doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Either way, the Petraeus-inspired COIN doctrine means that we must stay and fight in Afghanistan forever.  Not until 2014 or some other distant date.  But forever.

It used to be that wars had finish lines.  Cause the other country to say Uncle and you’ve won.  Counterinsurgency is war without victory, because you never run out of hearts and minds to convince that we’re terrific.  It’s a full employment act for the military, because if you don’t have to win, you don’t have to stop.

The military under Petraeus wanted to fly under the radar of public opinion.  In other words, keep the American people distracted with other things—say, a collapsing economy, college football, anything—and let the wars keep going on forever.  The only problem is that COIN doesn’t work.  It didn’t work in Vietnam, it isn’t working in Trashcanistan, as the American soldiers there call it, and it won’t work anywhere else.  COIN just guarantees that American soldiers will keep fighting and dying…for no real reason.

Afghanistan has been called “the graveyard of civilizations” because so many have been tempted to conquer it.  Can you say quagmire?  The USSR might still be in business if it weren’t for its ill-fated incursion into Afghanistan.  At least the Soviets had the right idea—their strategy was kill and conquer, not an endless charm offensive.  And they still lost.

You simply can’t win the hearts and minds of a nation by inserting hundreds of thousands of foreign troops, some of whom kill the wrong people by accident and some of whom kill the wrong people on purpose.  America has a beef with Al Qaeda, not with poverty-stricken farmers in places like Faryaz and Balkh.  Why are we leaching money to win over those people when we have so many millions of people in this country whose hearts and minds are really suffering?

The purpose of armies, Rush Limbaugh said so simply and eloquently, is to “kill people and break things.”  You want to change opinions, send in the Peace Corps, not the Marine Corps.  But under the Petraeus doctrine of war without end, you’ve got our service people doing double duty:  fighting “enemies” who aren’t even our enemies, while trying to turn people who’ve never heard of us into our friends.

We could do this if we had unlimited money, which we don’t.  Is it worth borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from the Chinese just to keep on making new friends in Kandahar Province?  Should the next war(s) America fights go on for years and years, theoretically making new buddies while trying not to create new enemies?

If the poor of America were smart, they would declare war on Washington, and then have Petraeus’ successors in the military try to win their hearts and minds.

(New York Times best selling author Michael Levin and Shark Tank contestant runs www.BusinessGhost.com, America’s leading provider of ghostwritten books. Statements and opinions expressed on the CPR blog are solely those of their respective authors and may not represent the views of CPR or its employees thereof.)