Gen. Petraeus Comes to Washington: Will Congress Buy What He’s Selling?
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
This week the Afghanistan war’s top salesman is going door to door in Washington to hawk his counterinsurgency wares.
His newest product is a one-year old escalation of the conflict that increasingly looks like a bad paint job that was sprayed on to cover up the disastrous decade-long war underneath.
General Petraeus’ first house call was Monday at the Obama residence. There’s no way to know the exact details of the meeting, but it’s a fairly well-established rule of sales that if the homeowner invites you inside and offers you a seat on the couch you’ve probably got a deal. Of course, it also helps that President Obama is already a customer. Last year the Pentagon hooked the President on the 30,000 troop / $36 billion dollar Afghanistan “surge” with hard sell tactics that would make the guys at your local used car lot blush.
Last year, Petraeus’ successful pitch included dire warnings that without a troop surge the U.S. was on the brink of defeat in Afghanistan was key to selling military escalation. This year, the pitch is all about optimistic assertions of progress. This is where the performance element of salesmanship becomes critical–Gen. Petraeus will go before Congress this week to say with a straight face that the strategy is succeeding when in fact every indicator, from civilian casualties and the number of IED attacks on US troops to Afghans’ perception of government corruption and the number of provinces threatened by the insurgency say it is failing.
It increasingly looks like the American public hasn’t gotten what it paid for. A timeline including a “significant” drawdown of troops in July has been steadily walked back to an unspecified but insignificant number based on undefined “conditions on the ground.” Now military commanders are saying there will be a “significant” U.S. presence in Afghanistan for another eight to ten more years.
So Congress should ask Gen. Petraeus some hard questions about what he’s selling before they add another decade to the American public’s subscription to the longest war in U.S. history.
