Back on the campaign trail for real, U.S. Senate candidate Rob Simmons offered a prescription during a New Haven stop for turning around the war in Afghanistan: bringing 100,000 troops home, ramping up covert operations, buying opium from growers — and preparing for a partial return to power by the Taliban.
And deadlines for departing the country? “That is stupid. You just don’t do that,” Simmons said. “Franklin Roosevelt did not pledge that if we didn’t secure Germany 75 days after D‑Day we’re going to get out of there.”
Simmons made the remarks in an interview Thursday at the offices of the New Haven Independent and La Voz Hispana, one of a couple of planned New Haven stops.
He made the stops as an active candidate in the Aug. 10 Republican primary for U.S. Senate — something he was in May, then wasn’t in June and most of July, then was again as of last week.
Simmons, a former three-term U.S. representative, suspended his Senate campaign after he lost the Republican endorsement at his party’s state convention to World Wrestling Entertainment exec Linda McMahon. Simmons had less than $1 million left in his campaign. McMahon spent the summer continuing to pour millions of dollars into TV ads and other campaigning (she has promised to spend $40 to $50 million before she’s done), including attacking the Democratic candidate in the race, Richard Blumenthal.
After all that, while Simmons took the summer off, McMahon and Simmons have about the same amount of support in head-to-head match-ups against Blumenthal in the polls. So, with just one and a half paid staffers, chauffered to stops by his wife, Simmons has produced two commercials (the second of which hasn’t aired yet) and started criss-crossing the state, meeting voters, doing interviews, participating in debates, in the hope of pulling off a low-budget triumph at the polls. (The Hartford Courant endorsed him Thursday.)
Simmons is pushing his experience, his knowledge of how the Senate works, his command of policy. Especially foreign policy. He hopes to contrast his own experience — 17 months serving in Vietnam, two Bronze stars — with his opponents’ non-service (and Blumenthal’s misstating his own record).
So Simmons spoke at length Thursday about perhaps the biggest issue facing Connecticut’s next U.S. senator — how to turnaround the war in Afghanistan. (Click on the video at the top of the story for a sample.)
He said he’d start by bringing home the more than 100,000 American ground troops. He’d leave behind 6,000 to 8,000 “advisors” to work with local security forces. And he’d increase covert operations to keep warlords and tribal leaders allied with the U.S. instead of the Taliban.
“The purpose of going into Afghanistan was to capture and kill al Qaeda terrorists and get them out of a secure base. We did that eight years ago,” Simmons said. “Now we’re doing this kind of pseudo country-building stuff. … Let’s not have 100,000 of the best-trained Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force men and women over there. Let’s leave the nation-building to the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
A conventional military campaign on the ground doesn’t work in “a decentralized type of country where you have warlords, tribal leaders out in remote areas who for thousands of years have conducted their lives and their behaviors in their own special ways,” Simmons reasoned. “It’s not a nation-state in the tradition of France or England … even in the tradition of Iraq, which has had a civilized society, urban based, for a couple of thousand years.”
Similarly, bombing poppy fields in southern Afghanistan only draws those power brokers into the arms of the Taliban, which buys their product, Simmons argued. He suggested replicating a U.S. approach to Turkey and Pakistan: buying the poppies and using them to make painkillers in the U.S. Meanwhile, he’d give the farmers incentives to switch to other crops and insist they keep out the Taliban.
“That isolates the Taliban. It takes the drug money out of their pockets. And it allows … the local warlord, the local chieftain to secure his area, which is what he’s done for a thousand years. It’s much more consistent with the culture and the history of the country.”
The argument against drawing down American troops is that the Taliban would move right back into power, resuming a fundamentalist reign of terror aligned with al Qaeda, the situation that led the U.S. to launch the war in the first place.
Simmons said a Taliban return is not inevitable. But a partial return is possible, he acknowledged. That doesn’t mean they have to bring al Qaeda back with them. “They recall what happened the last time they refused to cooperate on dealing with al Qaeda,” he said.
“I think that power if frequently shared in countries like this among the different entities,” he said. “It can be shared. You can have some sort of stability. We certainly had that in Iraq where we had the Shia, the Sunnis, and the Kurds … put together a coalition of shared power. It has worked pretty well. Trying to develop coalitions with different groups … to achieve a situation where al Qaeda is not allowed to reestablish its base, that’s something that has to be looked at. … Just the way the sharing of power in Iraq involves some of Saddam Hussein’s former people.”
In an email statement, Ed Patru, Linda McMahon’s campaign spokesman, agreed about reducing the number of American troops in Afghanistan and increasing covert ops:
“Clearly the situation on the ground is different today than it was a year or two ago. Linda believes it’s critically important that Al Qaeda not be permitted to establish a safe haven in Afghanistan, and according to CIA Director Leon Panneta, 100 or so Al Qaeda operatives are in Afghanistan today.
“Given that, Linda is not convinced it makes sense to keep 100,000 troops in the country engaged in a counterinsurgency strategy. It is costing too many lives, costing too much money and distracting America from other more dangerous threats. She believes that rather than continuing to escalate the number of troops there, we should draw down and instead employ smaller and more focused counterterrorism operations.”
Democratic candidate Dick Blumenthal said in a statement released by his campaign that he supports President Obama’s decision to send more troops for now to Afghanistan, but that new revelations about the progress of the war have him concerned about the long term: “The recent release of thousands of sensitive documents describing U.S. efforts in Afghanistan has highlighted ongoing public concerns about the progress of the war. Last December, the President committed an additional 30,000 troops to help fight insurgent forces, which I support. This commitment must not be open ended. Our troops are scheduled to begin coming home in July 2011 and I would insist on adhering to this exit strategy.”
Positively Jolly
Beyond the grim talk of a war going south, Simmons had a bounce in his step Thursday. He seemed practically giddy to be back on the campaign trail — without the baggage of pollsters and advance teams and consultants.
Maybe “liberated” is the word. Simmons reemerged as a candidate last week with an outsider’s zeal. He has one full-time office staffer, another part-time scheduler. He’s bounding from newsroom to TV studio to streetcorner driven by a dedicated volunteer — his wife Heidi, who doesn’t hesitate to add her two cents. (Click on the play arrow for a snippet.)
Since he doesn’t have the money to compete in a conventional modern campaign, he’s trying to turn his near-penniless quest into a referendum on modern politics.
“You hire out-of-state media organizations to produce millions of dollars worth of literature that floods your mailbox, millions of dollars of TV ads that flood your television. Then you stay hidden so nobody can actually talk to you,” he said of the new modern campaign, especially those self-financed by “celebrity” candidates.
“Then you stay hidden so nobody can actually talk to you. You don’t go to debates. You try to avoid any public appearances not scripted. Now that’s kind of the way it’s going. I guess it works. It’s certainly not my” approach.
SImmons has marshaled most of his left-over money for the two TV ad buys. He plans to spend no money on a get-out-the-vote operation. None on robo-calls. He’ll let all the other Republican candidates running in Aug. 10 primaries do all that, he said. “They’re doing the heavy lifting for me.” He predicted that many of the Republicans reminded to come to the polls will fill in the bubble by his name on the ballot.
Sure, he remains behind McMahon by double digits in the most recent polls for the primary. But that was before he started campaigning again in earnest, and leaving even ideological opponents a bit dewy-eyed about his David-versus-Goliath campaign quest.
“It’s up to the Good Lord and the Good People,” Simmons declared. Miracles do happen at the polls, he added — especially in a wild year like this one.