In the Arena

by Pete Hegseth

  Maliki had been willing to take a risk and choose the American tribe, until the rapid Obama military withdrawal and diplomatic disengagement drove him closer to Tehran. These military and diplomatic vacuums in Iraq both invited the rise of the Islamic State and solidified Iran’s belief that they could engage in—and win—high-stakes negotiations for a path to a nuclear bomb. The Obama administration wanted only one thing: to get out of Iraq. Instead, we’ve been sucked back into, and contributed to, an even worse mess—one that the next president will be left to confront.

  You still may be thinking as you read this, Is this guy really showcasing the highly flawed, highly disputed, and highly controversial Iraq War in a chapter about American leadership in the twenty-first century? To be clear (to quote President Obama): Yes, I am. The war in Iraq was no doubt flawed, disputed, and controversial, but given America’s ongoing and untenable choice between strongmen and Islamists, it also represented America’s best chance for a workable “third way” solution in the Middle East. Both the story of Little Omar and the story of Al Maliki are the story of Iraq. With the right leadership, the right strategy, and the will to see a tough fight through, American military forces can forge unlikely alliances and secure a beachhead of pluralism and stability for people who have never known an alternative—making America and the free world more secure in the process.

  Setting aside the rationale for the war and the difficult first few years there, Iraq—immediately before, during, and after the surge—serves as a model for what American leadership should look like in the twenty-first century: a consequential and clear mission, the military and diplomatic might needed to accomplish that mission, the courage to act decisively and unilaterally, and a gradual, conditions-based transfer to local political and military authorities—so the outcomes of the mission are preserved and America’s interests secured.

  AFGHANISTAN: “THE WRONG WAR”

  Understanding local conditions and allegiances—the on-the-ground reality—is one of the most important aspect of any mission analysis, lest America get sucked into missions and places that drain our finite human and financial resources in pursuit of far-fetched and ultimately counterproductive endeavors. Afghanistan, cynically dubbed “the good war” by Barack Obama and other Iraq War critics, is one of those places. Not only did Barack Obama get the consequential nature of the Iraq War ass-backward, but by halfheartedly doubling down on Afghanistan, he shifted finite American resources to a place where systemic progress is simply not possible. Given that it was the incubator of the 9/11 attacks, going to war in Afghanistan in the first place was the right idea. However, starting with George W. Bush and later with Barack Obama, the scope of what is possible in Afghanistan was never grounded in reality about the Afghan people, their culture, and their history. Save for the immediate response to 9/11, Afghanistan was the real “bad war.” More accurately, as military historian Bing West called it, it was simply “the wrong war.”

  Support for the war in Afghanistan was easy to maintain for the right reason: violent Islamists being harbored in Afghanistan attacked America on September 11, 2001. Eventually this support, thanks to criticism of the Iraq War glowing white hot, turned into reflexive support of a (creeping) Afghanistan mission that lacked critical evaluation. Regardless of realities on the ground, and after the successful Iraq surge and Barack Obama’s election, the American public and her lagging-indicator politicians stayed committed to the full fight in Afghanistan. Support slowly declined, but never plummeted. This allegiance was healthy and not wrong, but it was misplaced—as I eventually saw firsthand. Following my personal experiences in Iraq, the success of the surge there, and even after the election of Barack Obama, I was optimistic about America’s chances in Afghanistan; Obama had campaigned on winning the “good war” in Afghanistan, a victory I wholeheartedly believed in.

  My group, Vets for Freedom, fought like hell to try to prevent Obama from becoming commander in chief in 2008, but now that he was—I wanted him (as the American president and my commander in chief) to succeed in Afghanistan, and believed he could with more troops and the right approach. Even after Obama’s halfhearted Afghanistan surge announcement included a simultaneous withdrawal timeline and fewer troops than his commanders requested, I felt compelled to do what I could to help forge a positive outcome in Afghanistan. This included publicly supporting the Afghanistan surge in print, defending it on television, and even leading a group of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans (including then citizen and Afghanistan veteran, and now Arkansas senator Tom Cotton) to Washington, D.C., to meet with Obama aides at the White House—check the trusty visitor log!—and also compel Republicans on the Hill to support Barack Obama’s surge policy. As with Iraq, Afghanistan was never about partisan politics. I wanted to win in Afghanistan, and after seeing what America had accomplished in Iraq through the surge, I was willing to give our new commander in chief the benefit of the doubt.

  My passion to support the cause included volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan. I arrived in Afghanistan in early 2011, and it didn’t take long to realize that it is a fundamentally different place than Iraq—in all the wrong ways. If Iraq is decades behind the modern curve, Afghanistan is millennia behind. Afghanistan is biblical times with cell phones and AK-47s, completely lacking the human and historical seeds Iraq was able to leverage. The Afghan population is overwhelmingly illiterate and fiercely tribal, there is no history of effective or multiethnic governance, the country lacks an economic base necessary for revenue, the terrain is utterly unforgiving (with an impossible Pakistan border), there is almost no modern human or physical infrastructure, and the Afghan military and police are unreliable. Moreover, by the time I arrived in 2011, the Western approach to “nation building” in Afghanistan had made many things worse. The Karzai government was fundamentally corrupt and discredited throughout the country, the economy was almost entirely dependent on foreign aid, the shadow Taliban government was outgoverning the central government, and the Afghan security forces lacked the capacity to fight without overwhelming American support.

  In 2011 and into 2012, my regular email dispatches from Afghanistan to friends and family back home read like a slow, reluctant descent from naïve and uninformed optimism to realistic pessimism. My 2005–06 journal from Iraq, on the other hand, reads in the opposite direction—starting out naïvely pessimistic and ending with realistic and informed optimism. Anyone who has served in both places, or just followed those conflicts closely, understands this general comparison; Afghanistan and Iraq, both Muslim countries in a similar neighborhood, are very different. A multitude of local factors—known, unknown, and unknown-unknowns—contributed to American successes and failures in each place; this certainly includes the trade-offs of effort and investment between the simultaneous theaters. Many take this tension to a hyperbolic conclusion, saying that the Iraq War caused America to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. It’s a poll-tested talking point but has little basis in reality—for two key reasons. First, even if the early years of the war had been handled differently, the long-term mission would have crept into full-scale nation building either way, a result of both the Bush and Obama administration policies. Second, Afghanistan had no foundation for, or history of, centralized, democratic government. After a spectacular early success in 2001, U.S. troops on a mission of remaking Afghanistan were on a well-intentioned fool’s errand.

  (Afghanistan had earned the title “graveyard of empires” for a reason. Even a kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out scorched-earth policy has not worked in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union tried that tactic in the 1980s, only to be driven from the country in defeat and with their puppet government quickly deposed.)

  The sad reality is that Barack Obama and his campaign-team-turned-JV-national-security-team never demonstrated a realistic understanding of Afghanistan or the war. As early as 2007, candidate Obama cynically used the Afghanistan war as a foil for his opposition to the Iraq War. Because he was anti–Iraq War—e
ven during and after the surge—he had to look tough somewhere else, so he rhetorically doubled down on Afghanistan. It was his “good war.” But Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan was never grounded in knowledge, strategy, or reality; nor did any of his inner-circle advisers have in-depth knowledge of the country or the conflict. Obama’s support for the war in Afghanistan was, is, and always has been political. His administration didn’t feel the need to do something about Afghanistan. They felt the need to be seen as doing something about Afghanistan.

  Worse than not understanding, the Obama White House was never really committed to succeeding in Afghanistan—a moral affront to everyone who served under him, and especially those who lost comrades or kin on his watch. Fearing political blowback and always with an eye toward poll numbers, Obama never sent the number of troops his commanders requested, nor did he provide rules of engagement that could have made them successful. Moreover, as a senior counterinsurgency instructor charged with studying the past, present, and future application of our military strategy, I can personally attest to the fact that the faux-counterinsurgency surge strategy Obama employed was doomed from the beginning. Rather than projecting resolve and commitment, he immediately set a deadline for withdrawal—undercutting the mission of the troops and morale of our Afghan partners, while providing the Taliban with the hope and message they needed. Because our allies and enemies knew our commitment was finite, they hedged their bets and waited us out. This reality was evident the minute I hit Afghan soil and it will persist through and beyond Barack Obama’s time in office. Every Afghan I met with and served with had at least one foot out the door—prepared for an inevitable American exit. Moreover, in contrast to Bush and the Iraq surge—and Teddy Roosevelt’s barnstorming in support of World War I—Obama almost never took to the podium to defend the war. The war was a pesky political necessity for Barack Obama, not a mission to be completed. The memoir of former secretary of defense Robert Gates reveals in powerful detail that President Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan was never authentic. It was utterly and cynically political.

  It is a dishonorable, dishonest, and disastrous way to fight a war. As a result, Afghanistan continues to slide into the hands of the Taliban (and now the Islamic State) and the Obama administration will likely keep a small number of forces in Afghanistan to keep Kabul and the central government from falling into enemy hands. In this case, the Obama administration learned the right lessons from their failures in Iraq, just in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Keeping a small number of residual forces in Afghanistan is the right thing to do but will have minimal strategic impact, whereas keeping troops in Iraq in 2011 would have had a massive strategic impact and return on investment. Iraq certainly did not fail because of efforts in Afghanistan, but the Obama administration’s disingenuous political obsession with Afghanistan caused them to “take their eye off the ball” in Iraq, plunging that country into chaos and endangering the world for Americans.

  LIBYA: “LEADING FROM BEHIND”

  Speaking of plunging countries into Islamic chaos, the failed Libyan intervention in 2011 showcases Obama’s half-baked approach to foreign affairs and the use of U.S. military force. For decades the United States maintained a consistent strategy of undermining Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi that included limited U.S. military operations against Libya, isolating Libya internationally, and placing sanctions on the Libyan economy. In 2003 that strategy eventually paid off, when in response to the speedy toppling of Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program and renounced his support for Islamic terrorism. While certainly not friendly in every way, Libya also normalized relations with the United States and other Western nations. Yet, while he cut most of his ties with Islamic jihadists, Qaddafi continued to oppress the people of Libya in order to reinforce his grip on power.

  Then, in early 2011, the Arab Spring came to Libya, unleashing a brutal and fast-moving civil war. Eight months later, Qaddafi was captured and killed by rebel forces. With the stated goal of avoiding a massacre of Libyan civilians, NATO forces supported by U.S. airpower directly assisted Libyan rebels in overthrowing Qaddafi. The Libya conflict was emblematic of President Obama’s approach to intervention: war from the air, an extremely light footprint, and “leading from behind” through maximum international cooperation. With Qaddafi toppled, Obama ran to the United Nations to declare: “Today we’ve set a new direction. Forty-two years of tyranny was ended in six months. From Tripoli to Misrata to Benghazi, today Libya is free. This is how the international community is supposed to work.” With an election just one year away, the Obama administration was quick to hail the Libya intervention a “model” of twenty-first-century warfare.

  Then, the real world happened. After Qaddafi fell, the NATO effort—helpless to fill the power vacuum on the ground—fell apart. Relying almost exclusively on hope that the Arab Spring would empower “moderate” rebels, the United States and its allies never developed a comprehensive plan. Libya soon descended into chaos, falling into the hands of violent Islamists. The attack on America’s consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, was a tragic symptom of the mess that was left behind after so-called American “smart power” exited the scene. Today violent Islamist militias control massive swaths of Libya—including contesting all three of the cities the president cited in his self-congratulatory UN speech. The Islamic State has also exploited the chaos, controlling more and more territory in Libya in its push to expand the so-called caliphate.

  Suffice it to say, the Obama administration is no longer promoting Libya as a “model” of twenty-first-century intervention, nor—more disturbingly—are they doing anything meaningful about preventing Libya from becoming a haven for Islamic State sympathizers hell-bent on attacking America. As outlined in chapter 4, the outcome in Libya DOES. NOT. COMPUTE. for the Obama administration. In their mind, approval of the UN Security Council and “global consensus” about action in Libya was supposed to cement a good outcome, because global cooperation is the holy grail of the Left’s coexist foreign policy. Instead, while it made Obama’s neophyte national security team feel good about the intervention, it turns out UN resolutions have minimal bearing on how things actually develop on the ground. The guys with the guns on the ground can still get their way, regardless of what UN bureaucrats in midtown Manhattan think about them or their cause. The Obama administration professed to have learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan when they intervened in Libya, but in their haste to show a new model for U.S. leadership—or followership—they violated the very same basic tenets of foreign intervention: they did not understand the local dynamics, they underestimated violent and dedicated Islamists, and they ultimately had no plan to steer the post-Qaddafi outcome in an advantageous direction.

  • • •

  Setting aside lazy and useless rhetoric about which wars were “good” or “bad” or “smart,” contrasting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya should teach America a great deal about how and when we apply force, to what degree we apply that force, and what we should expect outcomes to look like. Every citizen is a product of their era, and every soldier inextricably linked to their wars. The entire post-9/11 wartime period is the lens of my generation—and it has undeniably shaped my worldview, just as San Juan Hill shaped Teddy Roosevelt’s. We are forced to learn the lessons of war firsthand, picking up the pieces of what went wrong, fortifying the best strategic principles and tactical practices of our conflicts, and anticipating where the next threats might come from. We also experientially learn humility about the things we thought we knew, in ways merely reading history cannot teach. One year after 9/11, I was a junior in college and argued for the Iraq War on the premise that it would bring about a wave of Western-style democracy in the Middle East. Clearly, I was wrong. We’ve all learned that Western-style democracy won’t work in Islamic countries—and where it does take hold, the results aren’t always what we might want (see Egypt). Before I deployed to Afghanistan I wrote multiple pieces about h
ow the counterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq could also be used in Afghanistan. Again, I was clearly wrong—as I outlined above. I even had high hopes for the Arab Spring when that short-lived movement first appeared, but with the Obama administration at the helm, I should have known better.

  As Teddy Roosevelt’s words in my black frame reinforce, our generation has learned firsthand that the arena is a messy place—full of mistakes, losses, and boatloads of critics. We have made mistakes, we have failed, and we have fallen short. But if we believe freedom, prosperity, and equality to be bedrock values of Western civilization, past failures mustn’t dissuade us from advocating unapologetic American leadership in the twenty-first century. Not Wilsonian, utopian leadership, but instead Rooseveltian, steely-eyed leadership. Despite setbacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere, America’s next generation cannot afford to be among “those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat,” lest we cede the future to looming threats or others still unforeseen. Gathering threats cannot be preempted or defeated with isolationism, restraint, or nonintervention. Instead, with humble hearts but heroic souls, America’s “good patriots” need to internalize the lessons of history while harnessing the attributes of victories past—forging a path for the twenty-first century to be an American century. As long as we learn the right lessons from recent experience, the arc of America’s history overwhelmingly demonstrates that our values, power, and action are the true linchpin of the free world.