Afghanistan is a difficult subject for me to find a position. I spent a year there from 2004 to 2005 (thanks to my fellow blogger, Russ Deane). I love the Afghan people, the culture and the country, so my heart tells me that we should stay until the country is stabilized and well on its way to becoming a developing country.
My head tells me something else, however, that this is another example of the current crop of foreign and national security advisors (and their cheerleaders at The New York Times and The Washington Post) failing their President and their country. In a War on Terror, you don’t fight to hold real estate. You fight the terrorists – and for the most part, they have decamped to other climes – and you fight their bankers, trainers and suppliers.
Iraq had the money and Saddam had the inclination to bankroll terrorism on a grand scale. The war in Iraq, therefore, (the war that our foreign policy elite called an unnecessary war, the war that everyone hates Bush for, the war that was the successful war) was a far more important battle in the War on Terror than Afghanistan can ever be. The Taliban were just Al Qaeda’s landlord, charging Osama rent to stay in the country, but Iraq was something different.
Terrorism has dropped off because Saddam, not the Taliban, is gone. A 600 page translation of Iraqi secret police correspondence, released by the Pentagon in 2008, shows just how heavily involved in world terrorism Saddam was. Without a magnifying glass, you would have missed this story in The New York Times, of course – it covered the story in all of two paragraphs back among the truss ads – but then the importance of a news story is often inversely related to the space The Times devotes to it. What is important is that Saddam was a key player in world terrorism, as important in his way as Osama bin Laden was in his.
If the Taliban were to take power in Afghanistan tomorrow, they would resume oppressing their people, but it is a pretty good bet that they would not invite Al Qaeda back. The rent Osama paid them was not worth the ten years they’ve spent in the wilderness. There may be reasons for the West to stay in Afghanistan – reducing the probability of its resuming its status as a narco-state and keeping a lid on Pakistan are two that come to mind – but we should no longer be there to fight terrorism.
The war in Afghanistan is not being fought the way you need to fight terrorism. One of the most successful battles against terrorism is being conducted in the southern Philippine Islands with zero publicity (except, of course, from Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic, the greatest war correspondent since Marguerite Higgins fifty years ago). There are only a handful of Green Berets assisting Philippine forces and together, they have trounced Al Qaeda. When the time comes for us to leave, we will do so with a decisive victory and no lingering commitments. We have kept the costs low and our options open.
The swelled heads who are advising the President have learned nothing from Vietnam. They are suffering from the Talleyrand Syndrome (i.e., they forget nothing and they learn nothing). They haven’t read (or, at least, haven’t understood) John Nagl, Hyman Rothstein, Mike Moyar or any of a number of thoughtful military intellectuals who have a better grasp of counterinsurgency than they do. The war is being treated just like Vietnam. Clear and hold, body counts, a corrupt local government aided and abetted by the international community’s own form of corruption; it’s not as if the thinking hasn’t progressed on counterinsurgency since 1960, it’s just that those in authority don’t seem to know that (or at least care).
What makes these advisors truly blinkered, though, is their willingness to telegraph their moves, and to slap a smiley face on stupid decisions. If you announce withdrawals a year in advance, subject, not to progress in the battlefield, but on the election cycle, you are not fighting to win, you are not even fighting to a draw; rather, you are fighting to lose and expending American lives while you are doing so. If the Taliban believes that we are leaving, why shouldn’t they lie low and wait to take over once we’re gone? There will be some fireworks before then, of course, to encourage us to leave and to create the illusion that there is still a war going on, but there is no reason for them to have an all-out Tet Offensive until we’re gone and they have a clear field.
But however inadequate the President’s civilian advisors have been, they don’t know any better. Admiral Mullen and Generals Petraeus and Allen, on the other hand, do know better and they, too, have behaved irresponsibly by letting it be known that they opposed the President’s plan. They have not resigned, which is the only honorable way for a member of the military to distance himself from a strategic decision made by the Commander-in-Chief. By their staying in office, the President’s decision has become their decision and they no longer have the right to dissent.
These are great American heroes and honorable public servants, which makes it all the more distressing that they behaved as they did. Obviously, these distinguished military men believe that the President’s decision will not lead to a disaster or they would be more outspoken than they are, so it is incumbent on them not to distance themselves from the final decision. It has become a team decision and they have made it their decision since they are staying as part of the team. Dissent only makes things worse. If Congress forced them to go on the record, shame on Congress.
As the James Bowman, the great historian of the concept of honor, has noted, we as a nation are fast losing all sense of what honor requires of us. Honor required that Admiral Mullen and Generals Petraeus and Allen refuse to let critics goad them into expressing of their opposition publicly and that they simply acknowledge that the plan was jointly conceived and that they stood behind the final version of the plan. It is ominous that three of the greatest military minds in the country don’t understand that it is wrong to stay in office to implement an order you don’t believe in, or, alternatively, to let the word go out that you disagreed with a plan that you’re implementing so that if things don’t work out, you can save face and point a finger somewhere else.
Ignorance of what honor demands is a far more serious matter to the United States than the outcome of the war in Afghanistan.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
