Obama Apparently Opts for Vision over Experience in Filling Key Defense Post for Central Asia
US President Barack Obama has reportedly settled on his choice for the top civilian defense official for Central Asia, tapping a bookish young Afghanistan veteran to fill the post. The selection seems to indicate that Obama is valuing fresh thinking over policy experience.
The White House is said to have nominated Craig Mullaney for the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Central Asia policy, according to Foreign Policy magazine's The Cable blog, which covers foreign policy appointments of the new administration.
Mullaney, 30, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. He was a Rhodes Scholar and later commanded a rifle platoon in Afghanistan in 2003 and then taught history at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is also the author of a recently released memoir, The Unforgiving Minute. The book has been glowingly reviewed; Vanity Fair called it "riveting" and "reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, and Ring Lardner, owing to Mullaney's talents as a storyteller and astute observer of detail."
A Pentagon spokeswoman said that there has been no official appointment, and Mullaney did not respond to a request for comment.
The Unforgiving Minute focuses primarily on Mullaney's personal experiences at West Point, Oxford and Afghanistan, and his reflections on leadership, courage and his own personal growth. There are few hints to how he thinks the Afghanistan war ought to be fought.
He does, at one point, tell his Naval Academy students that "the best thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai. We should have focused less on finding the enemy and more on finding our friends."
There are also suggestions that he was critical of the civilian oversight of the war, at least when he was in Afghanistan. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was at the ceremony where Mullaney was promoted to captain; all Mullaney writes about Rumsfeld is that "he was shorter than I expected."
Official visitors, he reflected after the Rumsfeld visit, "didn't see that the Afghan soldiers they inspected weren't reliable enough to take on patrol, or that they sold their uniforms and equipment on the black market because they weren't getting their paychecks from the government. They didn't drive through the streets and see the glaring eyes of current and future insurgents, or the total absence of police to lock them up," he wrote.
And he assigns partial blame to Pakistan for the death of one of his soldiers, the central episode of the book. The soldier was killed in a firefight near Shkin, on the border with Pakistan, and Mullaney saw mortar rounds being fired from a nearby Pakistani observation post. He called in artillery strikes against the Pakistanis -- "enough to level our ally's observation post" -- but was overruled by his commanding officer.
Mullaney also worked as an adviser to the Obama campaign on Afghanistan, and campaigned as a veteran. He wrote in a blog on the Obama campaign website: "I'd never voted or been involved in our political system, but in Barack Obama I saw a future Commander-in-Chief who could put our country and our military strategy on the right track. And so, I volunteered once more. Ten days after I left the Army, I joined this campaign."
If indeed Mullaney is the administration's choice to serve as deputy assistant secretary for Central Asia, he would become a key player in formulating Defense Department policy and strategy for seven countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and the five former-Soviet Central Asian states. The top priority would be the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation, said one military official involved in the region, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"That's what he's going to spend the vast majority of his time on -- how do we think through the problems in Afghanistan? Is a troop buildup the right answer? How do we go about finding the right set of recipes or tools to help Pakistan, so it doesn't implode on itself and become a failed state?" the official said. Given the importance that the new administration has placed on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the ex-Soviet Central Asian states are likely to be a far lower priority, the official said.
There are several complex items on that agenda, however, foremost among them dealing with the fallout from Kyrgyzstan's eviction of the United States from Manas air base, outside Bishkek. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Other challenges will include both establishing a "northern distribution network" of ground transportation, through Russia and the former-Soviet Central Asian states, into Afghanistan, as well as looking for locations for a new air base -- "locations in the region that may replicate some of the capabilities that Manas has -- you can't replicate all of them, but some of them," the official said.
In addition, the new Central Asia team at the Pentagon will have to deal with a litany of other difficult, emerging issues, the official said. "Tajikistan: there is a lot of reporting that it's close to collapse. So how do you deal with the problems there? How do you build up capacity in that country? [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Uzbekistan: [Uzbek President Islam] Karimov seems to be stiff-arming the Russians a little bit. Geography indicates that the country is important, but we have some issues on the morals and values side in terms of authoritarianism and the whole Andijan issue, so how do we deal with the country in the long term? [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Turkmenistan: It's coming out of the cold, so to speak, important energy supplier, how do you grow a security relationship with them while dealing with the issues of authoritarianism?"
Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
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