PJ Media

This is a rather obscure and silly debate. I vote for the incompetence angle as to what’s going on. How else to explain the rather public debate between Panetta and Holder? Obama surely can’t be behind both men, and both are experienced political insiders who are part of the Washington Democratic power structure. Saying he’s endorsing one or the other of them is to my mind premature, without him saying so himself, and so far he’s not said anything like “We need to prosecute these people.”

As to which war belongs to which president, and which one was/is successful, both wars belonged to President Bush while he was in office, and both of them now belong to President Obama. That simple. What most critics of the war in Iraq don’t understand (largely because of ignorance) is the differences between the two wars, which are profound. We overran Iraq conventionally, with an army led by tanks and armored personnel carriers, and covered by extensive air power. That army, or a portion of it, occupied the country and fought a pretty conventional counterinsurgency against Al Qaeda and the various other groups opposing our presence. Our forces used tanks, artillery, and air power liberally, where it was appropriate and we could minimize or even better negate civilian casualties. The war has for the most part been fought by the regular army and the conventional wing of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Afghanistan is a completely different war. While we have access to Iraq via seaports, we’ve never had that with Afghanistan. This means that everything we use in Afghanistan has to be flown in, and that in turn means we have always deployed a much smaller, more lightly-armed force there. The idea that when we invaded Iraq we had to redeploy large forces from Afghanistan to do so is ludicrous on its face, at least as far as ground forces go. The invasion of Iraq involved more than a hundred thousand troops: our troop strength in Afghanistan was always kept low, typically below 15,000. Not only that, but the troops involved in Afghanistan have tended to be of the more irregular variety: Special Forces, Rangers, light infantry, that sort of thing. Artillery has only rarely been used, and we’ve never even tried to move a tank or any sort of armored personnel carrier into the country, as far as I am aware. This has always been the case: it was true when Bush was president, and it’ll remain the case under Obama. President Obama is trying to move resources from one country to the other, but I think he’ll be reduced to doing cosmetic things to show he’s fulfilling campaign promises: near as I can tell the military doesn’t want the heavy stuff in Afghanistan, anyway. They think it’ll be counterproductive. Air power is serving as our artillery, for the most part, and while that’s not always a perfect solution it’s the best one given the logistics situation. Artillery is always difficult to supply with enough ammo, because the shells weigh so much individually.

I always said that the war in Afghanistan would be a long one, and nothing I’ve seen since I said it originally (in the days after 9/11) has disabused me of the notion. The country’s terrain makes guerilla warfare much more easy than it otherwise would be, and the people, especially the Pashtuns in the south and east, are among the most hostile to outsiders, in some ways anyway, in the world. The idea that we were going to invade, remove the government and replace it with a democracy, and then convince an illiterate and ignorant goatherd from the hills near the Khyber Pass that not only should he be voting for a government in Kabul (where he’s never been) but his wife or wives should be voting alongside him, is one that boggles the mind. It’s going to take a generation or two for us to convince them of this, and in the meanwhile, there will be fighting. Anyone who says otherwise either isn’t paying attention, or doesn’t want to tell the truth because of some agenda they have.