On Exit Strategies: The Need for Public Debate

During the news on 9/11, at which time I had been coming up on a year working in the U.S. House of Representatives, I felt the deepest of sadness for the suffering of individual lives and anger at the unmitigated evil witnessed. I took comfort in the voices of friends and family. Being part of the political process, my mind turned to America's response. I listened to our leaders speak in Congress and on the news; I talked to my minister from back home despite my lapsed church attendance at that time; I thought about our troops leaving to take the fight against terrorism overseas. I was unsure of what to expect once those troops were deployed. I began hesitating when a new front in Iraq opened. What became between the two wars were too many patriots’ graves. Too many disabled veterans.

The foreign policy of the Trump administration is noteworthy both for its muscular nature and its opposition to “forever wars.” The need for debate over this approach is clear. Less clear may be the terms of the debate. With a series of military actions now reaching a new height with the attack on Iran, we should take some lessons from the past. Here, I concentrate on lessons related to the impact on U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen.

In hindsight, the debate heading into Afghanistan and Iraq would have been better served with a greater emphasis on the risks and costs of U.S. entanglement. One useful guide through all this includes at least one element of the so-called Powell Doctrine: Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid an endless entanglement? Whatever the answer, Congressional and administration leaders owe it to the public to discuss what military action potentially means in terms of the demands on blood and treasure; this obligation becomes heightened when an exit strategy is not clear.

A truly honest conversation is necessary with the American people from the very beginning when considering the entanglement of U.S. forces in a foreign war. Are we approaching the situation from the perspective of the Powell Doctrine? This, in part, means an exit strategy for U.S. servicemembers. Former national security advisor, joint chiefs of staff commander, and Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that such a strategy should preexist the deployment of troops. The first Gulf War – which Powell commanded – did have an exit strategy: Push Saddam Hussein’s army back into Iraq, freeing a Kuwait that would certainly welcome us. We were never going to indefinitely occupy any part of Iraq; we were only going to roll back one of the most brazen acts of occupation since Hitler and Czechoslovakia. Add that the Kuwaiti oil fields would have helped fund the Iraqi government and its sizeable military - potentially next invading Saudi Arabia to take its oil fields, only building up its military more and being a brutal hegemon.

By contrast, the exit strategy for U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq II was murky. We wanted to build democracies. We, of course, failed in Afghanistan to create a lasting democracy; Iraq is currently ranked by Freedom House as having a score of 16/40 in political rights and 15/60 in civil liberties. At a cost of over 22,000 and 36,000 US casualties, respectively. This is a cautionary moral for deploying combat ground troops, not for an existing democracy, but for becoming entangled with building a new one.

If the American people believe a prolonged occupation is necessary in some situation that I personally have been hoping to never see again, I offer some more clarity: This necessitates a “clear, hold, build” approach. Meaning U.S. troops clear an area of the enemy, hold the area, and try to win hearts and minds. The goal of clarity, beyond democratic assent, is to ensure we are truly ready to exit if that is best or begin holding territory immediately – reducing the chances of a slowly escalating situation and its greater casualties and a decreasing likelihood of success. This, arguably, was the problem in Vietnam and Afghanistan, as well as the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007.

A “clear, hold, build” approach is best represented by the counterinsurgency strategy of Gen. David Petraeus during the troop “surge” stage of the Iraq War. This is different than the “light footprint” of the U.S. military that went before it. Gen. Petraeus writes in his book “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza”:

"In Iraq, we learned – or rather relearned – that shock and awe based on high-tech forces is not a substitute for troop numbers in counter-insurgency operation or for the proper employment of those troops. Iraq did not stabilize until Multi-National Force-Iraq and its Iraqi counterparts and tribal allies reached 600,000 personnel (which, as noted earlier, meant roughly one security person for every fifty Iraqi civilians), and deployed those forces properly. In counter-insurgency operations, numbers matter – as do the overarching big ideas that guide employment of those forces."

Importantly, I am not looking to relitigate the casus belli of the Afghan and Iraq wars. They are a part of history now. Courageous Americans and their allies gave a good fight for a good cause. They are heroes who took the fight from our shores to overseas.

What we cannot do is overextend our all-volunteer military again. What we should not do is continue to ask the less than 1% of our population serving in the military to continue to sacrifice so very much.

We should not abandon the world to a place without values like solidarity and justice and some degree of selflessness, especially when defending our present commitment to other democracies. However, an honest public debate is required. The end result of such debate may seem ad hoc. There is nothing wrong with that. The best we can do is have that debate, with the rules of debate demanding a consideration of all these points made by history.

Scott Miller is a graduate of Widener School of Law, a former chief of staff in Congress, and the author of 'Christianity & Your Neighbor's Liberty.