I’m not advocating that we use nukes in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I am suggesting that we fight more to win the war and less to win the hearts and minds of the other side.
The “hearts and minds” strategy isn’t soft-hearted “liberal/multicultural BS,” it’s a pragmatic strategy. The enemy we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t a regime that can surrender in the name of its citizens. We need to contrast, in the hearts and minds of the people caught in the middle, the kind of world the enemy would build against the kind of world we’re helping them build. And we need to come out ahead in that comparison.
To avoid disaster in both countries, we have to stay until that comparison runs in our favour for an overwhelming majority of the citizens and until the institutions that protect those citizens are stable and self-sustaining.
