The White House’s Seven Deadly Errors - Hoover Institution

Editor's note: This article is part of a Hoover series of essays on military history. 

A review of America’s military interventions since 2001 reveals that seven broad errors account for America’s inability to turn tactical successes into strategic victories. These errors are described below. In every instance, the error was the direct result of presidential decisions on policy or strategy. Some of those decisions ran in direct contradiction of the military’s advice. The military can be faulted for some significant tactical errors, such as ignorance of counterinsurgency in the early years of the Iraq war and excessive reliance on population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine in the middle years of the Afghan war. But the military eventually corrected its major tactical problems, and none of those problems thwarted strategic success.

Incompetence, in the form of bad judgment and disorganization, contributed heavily to the mistakes of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Reliance on flawed theories, which could be attributed to ideological fervor as well as incompetence, also hurt both administrations. Theories on democratization made Bush and Obama overly optimistic about the prospects for intervention in certain countries. President Obama’s adherence to McGovernite ideology fueled an undue aversion to the use of American military power. In addition, preoccupation with domestic politics and personal popularity guided many of Obama’s ill-fated strategic decisions.

1. Excessive Confidence in Democratization
President George W. Bush and key advisers believed that the hostile governments of Afghanistan and Iraq could be replaced with democratic regimes capable of maintaining domestic order and suppressing extremists on their own. For this reason, they did not assign American troops to the invasions in the numbers required for countering insurgents after regime change and did not plan to keep American troops for more than a short period beyond the formation of new governments. This thinking reflected both a lack of understanding of the factions in those countries and an underestimation of the difficulties of establishing liberal democracy in societies with authoritarian traditions. The short-term strategic successes of regime change that America’s tactical successes made possible in Afghanistan and Iraq evaporated as the new democratic governments failed to take the military and political actions required for stabilization.

Obama engineered the overthrow of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi based on the same misplaced confidence in democratization. Unlike Bush, he pursued regime change without deploying US ground forces, arguing that American forces would be an impediment to Libya’s stability and political development. Libya’s democratic experiment yielded even poorer results, as anti-democratic forces dismembered the democratic government in less than three years, ushering in chaos and violence.

2. Poor Selection of Local Allies
Bush and Obama erred repeatedly in their choices of allies within contested societies, to include many of the people who led the newly installed democracies mentioned above. Had the United States chosen different individuals in these cases, its experiments in democratization might have fared better. As history has shown in such places as Botswana, Chile, and Kosovo, leadership quality is often a critical factor in the viability of nascent democracies.

In Iraq, the Bush administration excluded Baathists and military officers from the postwar government, casting its lot instead with exiles, outcasts, and Shiite politicians, who turned out to be less virtuous than anticipated. The new Iraqi government lacked the governors, police chiefs, and military officers to cope with the insurgents, many of whom were former Baathists or military officers. Because of their ineffectiveness, the US military had to step into the breach.

Subsequent decisions to allow former Baathists and military officers back into the government contributed to the stabilization of the country in 2007 and 2008. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a highly sectarian Shiite whom Obama kept in power following the disputed 2010 elections, undid the progress by removing many of those same individuals when the US military withdrew from Iraq. He thereby weakened the government’s security forces and rekindled Sunni antagonism toward the central government, leading to the rise of the Islamic State.

In Afghanistan, the Bush administration chose to empower Hamid Karzai, based upon exaggerated estimates of his leadership skills. Bestowing key government posts on favored tribes and persons, Karzai gave free rein to malign actors whose predatory behavior drove Afghans into the arms of the insurgents. By the time he left office, he was almost universally derided for incompetence and corruption.

In Libya, the Obama administration backed rebels about whom it knew very little, and who were ultimately too weak to establish governmental control over the country. Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, whom Obama pushed into power in Yemen, proved incapable of holding off the Houthi insurgents. The Syrian rebels underwritten by the Obama administration have been utterly ineffectual, and some have defected to extremist groups.

3. Haste in Counterinsurgency
From late 2003 to late 2006, the Bush administration tried to hurry up the counterinsurgency in Iraq, in the belief that prolonged American involvement would alienate xenophobic Iraqis and dissipate American public support for the war. To extricate the United States quickly, Bush ordered the rapid expansion and fielding of Iraqi forces. But the Iraqi forces kept getting crushed by the insurgents, a problem ultimately traced to poor leadership, which was itself the result of abbreviated training and politicization of appointments. The US government ultimately rectified the situation by allowing officers from the former regime into the Iraqi national security forces and by compelling the Iraqi government to appoint leaders based on merit.

Afghanistan, by contrast, did not have a comparable body of experienced officers upon whom the government could call when security deteriorated. Ravaged by decades of civil war, Afghanistan had seen many of its talented and dedicated leaders perish, and disintegration of central governance in the 1990s had left a generation of Afghans devoid of professional soldiers and policemen. Creating a new, professional officer corps in Afghanistan would take at least ten years of training and education. Early on, the Bush administration undertook a serious effort to build an Afghan army officer corps, but it entrusted the building of the Afghan police leadership to the German government, which trained far too few police officers. Afghan police leadership development did not begin in a serious fashion until the United States took on a large role, starting in 2008. Building capable police forces, therefore, was likely to take until 2018 or later.

Obama decided early in his administration to intensify counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in the hope that short-term gains would allow the United States to turn the war over to the Afghans in a few years, which was politically appealing to Obama because of the high costs of American involvement and the unpopularity of the war among his political supporters. To permit rapid enlargement of the Afghan forces, the United States boosted funding and the number of American trainers. It also lowered recruiting standards for the Afghan army and police and shortened training, with the result that the enlarged Afghan forces suffered from the indiscipline and incompetence common to ill-led security units.

In 2011, Obama curtailed America’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan by cancelling large-scale clearing operations in eastern Afghanistan. The lack of a sustained counterinsurgency campaign allowed the insurgents to recruit replacements across the east. Those insurgents now provide safe haven for other terrorists and pose an existential threat to the Afghan government.- Read More at the Hoover

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