The New Republic has a special section on Afghanistan in which “Nine Eminent Intellectuals, Analysts, and War Reporters—From Steve Coll to Leon Wieseltier—Debate the Way Forward”. The good news is the nine POVs are well written; the bad news is that there are nine of them, all in disagreement to some respect. The articles are behind a firewall, but the main points can be summarized clearly.
Leon Weiselier reasons the chief difficulty is that while Kabul must save itself it neither has the capability nor interest of doing so. “As Petraeus says, what will determine the outcome is the host nation. But behold this host nation! I am losing faith in the war in Afghanistan because I am losing faith in Afghanistan.”
Peter Bergen says despite the hype, development aid to Afghanistan has amounted to about $58 per person per year. So what kind of results does Washington expect for chump change? Yet it has not all been in vain. Even this has whetted the Afghan appetite for a better economic life and that drives the increasing hostility of the population to the Taliban. “Where the Taliban once enjoyed something of a religious Robin Hood image … they are now increasingly seen as thugs.” His prescription is long-term therapy. Be patient. America doesn’t have to win big in Afghanistan, just keep the Islamic radicals from taking over the country and poison them with progress.
Jose Joffe argues that the key to victory is convincing the enemy that America is going to remain in Afghanistan, in one form or the other, essentially forever. It’s an argument from psychology: breaking the enemy will to resist. He argues that the conundrum is that if you want out, you must show no signs of leaving. Only thus can you win. And come to that, maybe some form of perpetual presence is possible in the form of “eyes in the sky” and Death From Above. If you want to fight Bin Laden’s deity, give him competition in the skies from an American god.
Amitai Etzioni says that America should put the “war” back in the “war in Afghanistan”. Unshackle the troops, he says. “The main responsibility for causing civilian casualties … is … the Taliban. Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, American generals apologize time and again.” His main point is that if America has no intention of fighting a war it should never have gone into battle against al-Qaeda in the first place. But if it wants to take Vienna, follow Napoleon’s counsel: take Vienna.
Anna Badkhen says ‘look to the north’. She believes America has been ignoring the Afghans who are really receptive to change and has focused on wooing the recalcitrant. “As a result, the people of northern Afghanistan — who … embraced the US led war … have seen little improvement in their lives. Now they are welcoming the Taliban back …” Don’t reinforce failure, it seems to suggest. Reinforce success.
Foad Ajami says forget Kabul and the Taliban for a moment. ‘Awaken the Pashtuns’. Counterinsurgency is just freedom with a gun. Just lead them against their oppressors — and those include the Taliban — and see where the whole place goes. It will go where all free men want to go. The problem as he appears to see it, isn’t restoring the country to some fixed state but turning it upside down so it will stay right side up. But will anyone have the faith? Maybe faith comes, as it did in the Surge, only at the point of despair. A resort to democracy is the act of contrition of politicians who’ve tried everything but the people.
Ahmed Rashid thinks salvage is the order of the day. The West has blown it. It’s now time to defend a few enclaves, talk to the Taliban, “save whatever we can” because we can’t save it all. “The strategy might not lead to ideal outcomes; but it may, at this point, be the West’s most realistic option.”
Steve Coll advances the idea that a stable political coalition against Islamic extremism in Afghanistan does exist, except Washington has been too blind to see it, “lashing” its political fortunes to a single point of failure — Karzai. In so doing Washington has fragmented Afghanistan rather than built a viable coalition. It has created in Southwest Asia the mirror image of Washington’s dysfunctional rivalries. In neglecting to build an Afghan political coalition it has, like some crazy model kit assembler, gathered all the parts of a viable nation state but unaccountably forgotten the glue.
Missing in all of these well-written essays is global context. Where do the Taliban get their money, ideology and support? Will it be as important were the infrastructure that supported it neutralized? What is the role of Pakistan? Of the Global Jihad? The nine essays are a little like monographs about taking Guadalcanal without describing why anyone should bother to expend blood and treasure in such a godforsaken place. It is possible that the context has been omitted not because the contributors to the New Republic special are stupid or ignorant; they certainly are not: but possibly because a consensus has silently emerged which regards the War on Terror in the same way as the Cold War. In some unspoken way that only professional pundits can unconsciously absorb it has by assent become regarded as a decades long campaign to outlast an enemy Who Shall Not Be Named. So strategy is assumed. Only tactics are important. If this interpretation is correct, maybe the stasis we observe is the result of being trapped within historical adolescence. In this metaphor Obama can aspire at best to be the Harry Truman and at worst the Jimmy Carter of the new Cold War. But he cannot even conceive of himself as being the new Ronald Reagan because the time for Ronald Reagans is not yet come.
Shorn of its place-names and dates the New Republic special might as well have been talking about Korea or Vietnam; about Syngman Rhee and the defensibility of the Hanoi Delta against the Viet Minh. That sense of cadence would fit in with that period. And perhaps events have to cross the uncertain time of analogous Cold War history between the fall of China and the rise of the Iron Curtain to crisis years of the early 1980s before anyone can speak of shattering of the Berlin Wall. Iraq and Afghanistan may be fated to remain part of the first act. The later acts have yet to open.
It has been argued that the Soviet empire was defeated by freezing it in place until the world outgrew it. Globalization and rising aspiration killed the Bear. Perhaps in time the 21st century will kill the 8th. But it will also destroy the 20th. If America is going to fight its new Cold War it too will have to fight its internal battles. There’s a costume change between the overture and the final curtain. And always, always, an encore.
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To put it succinctly and show my biases up front – why should we listen to a bunch of eggheads? Why does it matter if their POV’s are well-written? We’ve been down this EXACT same road many times before and it always ends the same way.
In a certain sense, it appears to me that all nine writers are “right,” that is, they’ve all grasped a legitimate piece of the elephant.
It’s a rather odd elephant, is the problem. It can’t lumber very effectively, it can only stagger like the man in the random walk problem; it can’t trumpet its protest through a magnificent trunk, it can only squeak unintelligibly in obscure languages known only to itself; its ivory is falling out; and it is deaf and cross-eyed.
Jamie Irons
Of course, neither Islam itself, nor its core teachings in the Sunnah and Hadith, can be held responsible for the Taliban’s essential depravity and inhumanity. Pointing out the intimate and undeniable connections between groups like the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda (etc.) and Islamic scripture is a Big Red Line One Shall Not Cross in the major as well as most of the minor media, reserved only for bigots, racists, islamophobes, fringe right wingers and the occasional tea party activist. The widespread support, not to mention outright lionization such Jihadists enjoy in the Islamic world is another Unmentionable in the Media.
Muslims generally approve of whatever the Jihadists are doing, so long as said thugs are killing the ‘right’ people (Jews, Christians, Hindus, etc.) and not making Muslims themselves too uncomfortable. It’s only when Muslim masses lose their TVs and barbershops and DVDs to Jihadist lifestyle police and get scythed down as ‘involuntary martyrs’ in various ‘martyrdom operations’ that the Muslims finally turn against their more devoutly violent brethren. And even then, in a generation or two, the Muslim attachment to Jihad returns. In short, Islam is a recipe for endless war. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the dhimmis, apologists and half-baked intelligentsia of the New Republic to mention that.
Wretchard hit’s the key thing to me. Nothing the 9 “experts” talk about addresses the problem of Iranian and Saudi support from those two nations both governmental and private for the Global Jihad. The Saudi influence is in Pakistan and other Islamic nations not just Afghanistan. While the Saudi influence is perhaps a tad less pernicious than the Iranian one, we have still suffered from it. Iran is spreading disease all over the place. The longer we do the diplomatic dance with those two disasters the closer we get to Armageddon. After and during the initial invasion of Iran a number of the more belligerent Islamic nations tucked their heads down. Now they are popping back up.
This is an example of why we’re losing. Too many experts; the West over-thinks things.
Jose Joffe argues that the key to victory is convincing the enemy that America is going to remain in Afghanistan, in one form or the other, essentially forever. It’s an argument from psychology: breaking the enemy will to resist. He argues that the conundrum is that if you want out, you must show no signs of leaving. Only thus can you win.
The existence of the pacifist/anti-war/defeatist crowd as a more or less permanent feature of Western politics makes Joffe’s argument a non-starter. As long as the defeatniks exist and have any influence at all, there will always be just enough doubt that America won’t cut and run after the next election cycle to keep hope alive in the Taliban camp.
In my view, it is amazing that these supposed expert appear to be ignoring this:
http://www.cjtf82.com/ (U.S. Regional Command-East)
and this:
http://www.isaf.nato.int/ (Coalition Of The Willing, and U.S. too!)
for starters. I have been following these since 2003, when I got tired of apparent (and later confirmed) omissions from regular broadcast news reports on Iraq, and needed something to replace them with.
You’d think we’d never defeated the Comanche.
ROS/1, T/5–I agree; the over-intellectualization of this is staggering. Elephant, indeed!!
As I’ve always understood, the strategic idea in Afgh is to kill and disrupt those who would set up training camps and plan attacks on Americans here and abroad. But the mission creep, as always, has just been incredible.
The thing is a giant tarbaby–’nation-building’ in a primitive area so they’ll see the light, get a taste of ‘modern’ ways, and peacefully turn away from AQ, Talibs, and the Persians.
But societies don’t change like that. I’ve read that the unit documented in “Restropo”, and the book, had something like 500 firefights in just months, yet they originally came to build roads. Then it turned out those attacking them weren’t Talibs, they were locals who saw them as invaders and wanted to get back to fighting each other.
This is another huge example of seeing others through our own lens: let them live like us, vote like us, etc and they’ll act like us and behave.
The whole thing smells of presuppositions and failure to think critically about what is the actual, minimally successful, goal and the most economical way to get it done–not “economical” as in money, but as in simple, straightforward thought.
And then there’s the Pak albatross, whose goals are not ours and over whose roads all our convoys travel.
We have done it again.
8. blert
You’d think we’d never defeated the Comanche.
But there wasn’t so much political correctness or lawfare back then.
8,10–If you haven’t yet, read “Empire of the Summer Moon” about the Comanche wars in Texas. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.
#3 Anti Jihadist- “Muslims generally approve of whatever the Jihadists are doing, so long as said thugs are killing the ‘right’ people (Jews, Christians, Hindus, etc.) and not making Muslims themselves too uncomfortable.
true, but they generally (also) side with whomever they think is winning- notice how the unmentionable rivals, sunni Saudi , and Shia Iran are essentially fighting a proxy war there for influence in that, or in fact, any other additional region they can, which includes the “foreign policy” desks of both the western media and western governments, which are riddled with blind spots far larger than even Afghanistan itself.
Sunni and shia tolerance of each other is not of the western so-called “tolerance and diversity” variety, but more in the in-between(s) of periods between going to the mattresses with each other. It’s smugly and glibly claimed in the western salon’s of, oh, say, a Chris Matthews, that “War is diplomacy by other means”. but the obverse is also true in the non-western world of spheres of influence, namely, that peace is war by different means. The rivalries between shia and sunni, not mention other rivalries such as exist between either/or both sunni and shia, and/and, say, hindu, buddhist ( and/or anything non-muslim in general, etc) are not considered in the “western” punditry’s salon discussions.
rickl #10: Oh yeah? Billy Sherman had to work a multi-layered scheme to get
all the needed assets into position, plus have McKenzie do a rather unauthorized raid into Mexico, plus put the Texas Rangers back together contrary to the wishes of carpetbaggers and scalawags, plus enlist a whole bunch of Johnny Rebs who would not take the damnnasty oath, plus get Phil Sheridan to calm down plus get Grierson into position to contain the Kiowa, plus restore the Tonkawa/Cavalry alliance previously established by Robert E. Lee.
Then after McKenzie had finally captured and killed the entire Commanche remuda, the entire Southwest had to do a culture-wide stonewall and coverup to prevent McKenzie
and his officers from suffering Dismissals and the enlisted men from being given
Dishonorable Discharges.
It was a close-run thing. See T. R. Fehrenbach.
PS: A young James Warner Bellah heard the stories, and rewrote them in fictionalized
form, changing names, locales, etc to suit. Along came John Ford and the Bellah narratives became Stagecoach, Rio Grande, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, and Hondo.
The Searchers is loosely connected and The Shootist was really Clay Allison who had
some kind of role from time to time.
The Commanche were an empire. We whupped them and their White-Eye friends as well.
#3. The Anti Jihadist – Of course, neither Islam itself, nor its core teachings in the Sunnah and Hadith, can be held responsible for the Taliban’s essential depravity and inhumanity.
———————————–
It is clear this is sarcasm – at least, having read your comment, I took it that way, and I generally agree with you.
Turkey’s PM Erdogan is quoted today as saying forcefully ‘there is no such thing as “moderate Islam”, there is only Islam’ (he’s said this since 2007, so this is really nothing new) (darned if I can’t put my hands on the source of the quote today [I think it was a turkish news service or newspaper], but just search for it to find many of the PM’s previous remarks);
While the MSM remains a powerful influence in the lives of Americans, it is being daily overwhelmed by new media. The MSM doesn’t make the story line anymore, and increasingly, I believe, but slowly, the scales are falling off American eyes with respect to Islam. ‘Who are you going to believe’, as the saying goes – ‘the media or your lying eyes’?
We don’t need the so-called “experts” in media to tell us what we can see for ourselves.
The flaw in all of this reasoning is that all seem to more or less accept the Obama Admin’s stated policy toward the war in Afghanistan, the “good war we are going to win after Bush all but lost it by focusing on the bad war” assertion.
But in reality the Obama Admin is giving no evidence that it thinks that a war even exists, even doing away with the name, except somewhat in Afghanistan, which is in reality its Potemkim Village. Rather than asserting “we are gonna git’em” they are extending the hand of friendship to all of our enemies and getting nothing for it. Indeed, things are going the other way rather sharply. The failure to close Gitmo or perform show trials as promised is an example of its dithering rather than deciding that old W was right about some things after all. They have not decided to reconsider climbing the steep hill in 5th gear rather than the 3rd gear used by the Bush Admin; it’s just that they don’t know how to work the clutch.
So the first and most important question is what is the Obama Admin really trying to do in
Afghanistan. We know, like everything else they want to look good, but that is all we really know.
So the first and most important question is what is the Obama Admin really trying to do in Afghanistan. We know, like everything else they want to look good, but that is all we really know.
The Occam’s Razor answer to that seems to be ‘nothing except answer the domestic political necessity of appearing to do something’. Which is what Potempkin Villages are, nothing but facades like those Hollywood Wild West towns. That is of course monstrous because it means people are getting killed essentially for show.
Let me suggest another answer. There are a number of competing policy actors some of whom want to fight the enemy in earnest while others want to put on a show, even take a dive, for all the monstrous reasons. And you’ve got all the guys in between or who are clueless and just try to do their jobs. Maybe the strange staggering around is a symptom of the conflict.
Fred Thompson and General Hayden on wikileaks: http://snipr.com/zwm7z [www_fredthompsonshow_com]
#16 Wretchard – “Let me suggest another answer… .Maybe the strange staggering around is a symptom of the conflict.”
You’ve got that right – the staggering around is symtomatic of the policy conflict. It’s not that the American public doesn’t have the patience to do what needs to be done – their sons and daughters are the ones doing the dying in all these wars, after all. Its the so-called “elites” whose kids largely aren’t at risk who can’t seem to figure out the fundamental challenge to the Enlightenment.
No war can be won until unacceptable damage has been suffered by the enemy. In Afghanistan, it seems that we don’t even know who the enemy is. And we certainly don’t know what the enemy would consider “unacceptable damage”. Until we know these facts, there is no road to victory.
Unconscionable. That is what it is. For cheap political points Obama declared Iraq the wrong war and Afghanistan the right war, truly intending not to fight either. He is trapped in a rhetoric of his own making and our sons and daughters are the cannon fodder for his grandeur.
Of course, it will not work. Either we didn’t have to remake Afghanistan, merely disrupt the Taliban, or we did have to transform it to such a degree that it would be decades or centuries before a Taliban would rise again in that territory. We are doing neither while pretending to do both.
And yes, Radical Militant Islam (is that a double or triple redundancy?) is the toxin that we are prohibited from naming. And has been observed above, our “god” must beat theirs. That is why we must occupy the moon (one of the demi-gods absorbed into Islam and represented on their flag) and shun trying to get their self-esteem raised. That is why we must win unconditional victories everywhere we fight, else not bother.
Is Afghanistan merely a boil on the electoral nose of our President or is it a theater in a larger war against a more pervasive threat? I shudder to think that our finest young men and women may be dying in vain for the vanity of our so-called leader.
I didn’t see any of the “experts” (yes, sneer quotes) addressing the fact that as far as nations go, in Afghanistan there is no there there.
I believe what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Afghanistan is a collection of tribes and Clans, all seeking to gain enough strength to exploit the closest tribe.
The society there hasn’t progressed beyond cattle lifting and wife stealing. Nothing the USA can do to change that. If every Islamic Jihadist of any stripe dropped dead at midnight, it would not make any difference in Afghanistan.
Turn the campaign in Afghanistan into “Allah vs JDAM” and we can’t lose. Kill the terrs, let the ‘ganis go back to killing each other.
As has been pointed out here and elsewhere before, Obama’s domestic energy policy seems aimed at crippling the US economy and aiding the enemies of the US. If we exploited all of our own “real” energy sources and drove the price of world wide oil, then a good number of countries would have to cut back on their adventurism.
Somehow the “experts” don’t want to talk about that.
Cut the Gordian knot. The plain and simple truth is that when resistance equals death the populace will comply. The US military is perfectly capable of exterminating 99.99% of the population of Afghanistan. No problem at all.
To what problems there are at all consist of what the political class puts upon the military. Oh gosh—don’t hurt them too badly, it might hurt their self-esteem. We certainly don’t want to hurt the feelings of the poor little Muslims. Better that a thousand white crackers die than one Muslim who is a “person of color” be offended.
But the tide is shifting. Where it will go I do not know, but it is shifting. Payback may be an ugly and heavy bitch for the race hustlers. We can pretend when times are good, but when pretending will end you and your family into starvation the pretending will end. And when the pretending ends things will get very, very, ugly.
THE PAST WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US
Alexander, the Moghuls, the British, the Russians, and now us. All tried to conquer Afghanistan, all tried to pit one tribe against the other and thus gain control, all without success. We must remember that the past is here to stay, we cannot change it, we cannot erase it, we can only try to remember it.
We cannot wish the gun unfired
Reverse the call that got us mired
The past is past and by the way
The past is here and here to stay
You cannot win without the will
You cannot bid the earth be still
You cannot call the tribesmen mate
Unless you wish to share their fate
Afghanistan is of the past
An ancient world, one of the last
Where tribe and family is the law
And life is brutal, short and raw
They do not wish to be like us
Nor like the Brits nor like the Russ
Leave them be to live their lives
The Alexanders and the Clives
All failed and left without a clue
It’s time we bid them all adieu
France declares war against al-Qaida
I wonder if the gathering French interest in North Africa has anything to do with the discoveries of massive amounts of water under the sahara. Probably not.
23. Tcobb
Better that a thousand white crackers die than one Muslim who is a “person of color” be offended.
I think that’s pretty much what Obama’s “policy” amounts to.
The problem is the Talibs are ignorant goat rapers who’ve been programmed into monsters by the the Wahaabi Imams in the Madrassas, deprived of any meaningful human contact (such as with women)indoctrinated in Arabic language Korans they can’t understand and sent off to kill for Uncle Mohammed. Either we’re willing to drop the hammer on a whole lot of them or we have no business killing middle class American kids in a stupid meaningless war run by dumb ass brainiacs who don’t know which end the round comes out of.
Charles, it’s not new, but what is new is that our government speaks loudlier about it, probably that that is a request from Mali, Mauritania and Niger, that have no means to fight AQ alone. It’s also a general tireness of the muslin populations there too, that also are the ransoming targets for these terrorists
Remember that former GIA (that made the bomb attacks in Paris in the nineties)are the first AQ members of today
“Nikto, ni kadga…nikto, ni kagda…”
Kapitan-Razvedchik, Soviet intel officer played by Russian general badass character actor Aleksey Serebryakov
“No one, ever in history has conquered Afghanistan. No one, ever.”
(watch minutes 4:05 through 8:14)
“What are we doing in Afghanistan?”
“Helping our brothers resist the forces of imperialism…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wktD5M0-G_0
9 Rota (The Ninth Company), directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, 2005
The war is working, namely keeping the bad guys watching their backs and disorganized; the problem is getting the Afghans to do it instead of us, taking over their sovereign responsibilities.
In the meantime, we stay there and do it ourselves. It’s not a crisis unless somebody wants to make it a crisis.
rhhardin @30 “the problem is getting the Afghans to do it instead of us”
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
The question is still unanswered even after the monstrously irresponsible mega-data dump by wiki traitor. Are the Taliban in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, still the dutiful child of the ISI or is it still acting the part of the rogue. If as the ISI insists it is a dutiful actor why then are we not at war with Pakistan as well as Afghanistan? If it is not, Why does Pakistan not give greater assistance?
Indian relations with Pakistan, and Iranian relations with Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as Chinese interests in Pakistan and Afghanistan are only held at bay by the notions of democracy held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Taliban is genuinely not liked, generally despised and openly feared by Paks and Afghans. Why do they still exist? Why put up with a such a vile, corrupt and demonstrably evil organization?
Oh, yeah the bomb.
Mr X: I believe there is an exception.
The Mongols did it. They even solved that whole “assassin” problem that plagued the region.
Alexander did it, too.
Founded Kandahar — aka Alexandria in the local tongue.
He did have to spread the gold around and rent local talent. But, he got it done.
That’s the solution I’d follow. Select, lead and rent your own talent and create your own militia using Green Berets.
Establish your own forts with deep water wells inside the perimeter.
STOP roaming the country side like an un-convoyed slow tramp steamer across the North Atlantic.
Straighten out our logistics with a treaty corridor to the Ocean — rent it.
Stop giving Pocket-stan pledge-week money. Every payout means a specific quid pro quo.
Start with an oceanic foot-hold in the manner of Gitmo even if you have to bring in/ mine rock for the base. Start shifting away from naval aircraft strike groups.
Start stretching our budget.
I had a bad dream that someone in a place of power suggested that we task NASA with reaching out to the bad guys in order to improve their self esteem.
26. rickl & 23. Tcobb,
“a thousand white crackers dead” is not part of the price, it is part of the prize. The other part of the prize is keeping the US military occupied as long and unproductively as possible, until it surrenders or withdraws in defeat. See “tarbaby, one each”.
Danger Room (journolist’s Spencer Ackerman)saying it will have major story in about an hour and a half: http://snipr.com/zxihg [www_wired_com]
I’m surprised and pleased that these “experts” appear to have enough human decency to know that simply abandoning Afghans to their fate would be criminal. It may be true that they are ignorant in other ways, or that their proposed policies may not work, but at least I’m spared from thinking the very worst of them. (I am coming to appreciate small favors more and more.) I wish I could feel at least this minimal confidence about the thinking of many other alleged “progressives” who can’t wait to cut and run.
I like the 9 eggheads just fine, and I think each of them has a powerful point. I do not see them in any great disagreement. I see nine paths to victory, which makes it all the much sadder if we can’t find any of those or another of our own.
The Iraq critics never understood that Iraq was a battlefield of our own choosing. AQ took the bait and was defeated. They will never really recover from that. They were defeated by their own brutality.
Afghanistan was meant to be bypassed, perhaps in the way that many historians and veterans thought Guadalcanal should have been. It was never the good war. We cannot achieve much more there. The terrain, in the broad sense, is not suitable for what the US military can do for all of it’s awesome power.
Spindok
Afghanistan was not really important until we committed to it, now it has negative value potential only. If we won over every Afghani tomorrow, what would change? Nothing really.
Pakistan was the prize. Secure the nuclear weapons before they go to the highest bidder on the black market. Isolate Afghanistan and nothing really changes for them but does not get any worse either. There is a littoral corridor for logistics. India would be more than happy to keep their border under control and possibly act as an anvil to our hammer when needed. They also benefit from having nukes secured. Strengthening our relationship with India is no cheap benefit either. Also we send a clear message to Iran, namely, we have you right between our cross-hairs.
The previous comment about Iraq being a well considered, tactical target is absolutely correct. Afghanistan was an emotional decision from someone with ZERO military/tactical experience and should have been the very campaign promise to die instead of the plethora of poor promises kept that continues to cripple our economy.