General Allen will take responsibility for running the war in Afghanistan at the beginning of its end – after US combat forces have crested and the drawdown has begun.
It’s a thankless job, his supporters note, for a US military commander accustomed to tough odds. As deputy commander of the then-violent Anbar Province in western Iraq, Allen honed his reputation as a turnaround artist who helped to persuade Sunni tribes attacking US troops to lay down their arms and join the fight against Al Qaeda.
Obama stressed this feat when he named Allen as successor to General Petraeus, calling him “the right commander for this vital mission” and “a battle-tested combat leader.”
What will this mean for the Afghanistan war? Allen will no doubt play an active role in reconciliation talks, recently brought to light, between US officials and the Taliban. This, too, will be no small challenge. Efforts to bring low-level Taliban fighters to NATO’s side have stalled as Taliban interest in changing sides (which occasionally comes with cash incentives) has outpaced the Afghan government’s ability to process them – a problem that US officials are frantically working to remedy. There are grave concerns among Afghan women, too, about what an open-armed welcome home to any Taliban leaders could mean for their rights, schooling, and health.
Though he has not served a combat tour in Afghanistan, Allen has high-profile military experience as former deputy commander at US Central Command in Tampa, Fla., which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Allen takes his new post in September (assuming he is confirmed by the Senate), he will be the first Marine to be the top US commander in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
He gave some hint of where his personal and professional priorities intersect in a 2008 letter to cadets at the US Naval Academy (Allen’s alma mater). He extolled them to read extensively, a pursuit that would help them develop “a 5,000-year-old mind.”
Across the “sweep of time,” he wrote, “the literature of war lays at our feet nearly the sum total of man’s warfare experience.” It will help hone their ability to understand “human factors in combat,” he added – and make decisions in battle. “A leader is a reader. A reader is a scholar. A scholar is a communicator,” Allen wrote. “The one flows into the other with all these qualities being inter-related. In the end they find their most urgent expression in battle.”
