A Delivery for Allah

Obama did the right thing in this case, which also happened to be the common sensical thing to do. Pakistan was exposed, for once, to the contemptuous treatment it highly merits, and bin Laden was granted a quick, sordid conclusion (capture would have been ideal). Should the President be accorded genuflections as a great Hero, as much of the Left insists? I think not. The SEALS who did the raid and provided backup, and their chopper pilots, were the heroes. Obama merely did his job--a new sensation for him.

 

I cannot say this changes my opinion on Afghanistan--the sacrifices being made without any sense of how to win are indefensible--Bush/Obama repeating just the same fundamental, disgustingly irresponsible and cowardly mistake of Johnson/Nixon. The presence of bin Laden in Pakistan, the ongoing base for our foe in the Afghan war, merely provides redundant emphasis on the futility of this fight. The endless government lies about Af/Pak: political correctness in action getting our soldiers killed overseas.

Checking in on Our Brilliant Anti-Terror Strategy

A new book is out on Afghanistan, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Alan West, reviewed by Dexter Filkins, the excellent war correspondent for the NY Times. West is a combat veteran and former officer who's observed the war from the ground. Here's the review's the key section:

His basic argument can be summed up like this: American soldiers and Marines are very good at counterinsurgency, and they are breaking their hearts, and losing their lives, doing it so hard. But the central premise of counterinsurgency doctrine holds that if the Americans sacrifice on behalf of the Afghan government, then the Afghan people will risk their lives for that same government in return. They will fight the Taliban, finger the informants hiding among them and transform themselves into authentic leaders who spurn death and temptation.
This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse. The Taliban, whatever else they do, fight hard and for very little reward...Most important, the Afghan people, though almost certainly opposed to a Taliban redux, are equally wary of both the Americans and their Afghan “leaders.”...The Afghans are waiting to see who prevails, but prevailing is impossible without their help.

Our soldiers should not be asked to sacrifice their lives in this war year after year.

And there are far more productive things we can do with $100 billion a year (at least, in theory) than dump it in Afghanistan. By the way, the charity-induced corruption reminds me forcefully of our welfare state and its ongoing destruction of the character of the lower orders most exposed to it. Afghanistan might just be the dumbest war we've ever fought--impressive considering the other contenders.

Afghanistan and American Responsibilities

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/opinion/31topping.html?_r=1

I consider this a rather dubious line of reasoning, culminating in the fantastical assumption in the last line. Depend upon it, none of our allies in any war we have ever fought volunteered to fight "in our interests." Were the French royals fighting in our interests in the Revolutionary War? Were Stalin's soldiers fighting in our interests? Absolutely not. They are motivated by their own distinct set of interests. The fact that there is sufficient overlap in their interests and ours to constitute them allies is a very different matter from having the same interests. This guy is arguing that whenever we go to war we have to accept the responsibility either to fight indefinitely until victory or to be prepared to relocate whole peoples and nations to the U.S. There are cases in which neither option is acceptable or reasonable, either from our perspective or from that of our allies. I might add that if this were adopted explicitly as U.S. policy it could lead to a major increase in isolationist tendencies. It effectively punishes us for trying to create decent regimes in other countries. This is like insisting that a man who saved several children from a fire, at risk to his own life, must now adopt those children since he failed to save their parents. It punishes good intentions and encourages a dangerous isolationism--which is far more pernicious, morally, than the occasional failure of well-intentioned international intervention. 

 

From a moral perspective there is no more reason to relocate Afghan allies to the U.S. than to relocate Congolans caught in the middle of that nation's civil war. Neither group was promised this privilege. Both groups face the prospect of being murdered by their countrymen and may, to that degree, be considered equally innocent and worthy of rescue. And there is no proof that our intervention in Afghanistan caused or will cause an excess of deaths above what would have occurred had we left that land to continue its endless civil wars and theocratic gambits. Perhaps we are more culpable for the millions of deaths in Congo since these might have been greatly reduced had we intervened. Another moralistic perspective might be this: it became clear within the first few years that the Afghan war was unwinnable (since the Taliban are based in Pakistan and Pakistan is neither our ally nor readily conquerable). This means the lives lost and monies squandered in the last 2-4 years were wasted in a futile exercise. And, remember, money at this scale, properly spent, could actually save lives instead of facilitating finishings.  

Another Bush Legacy of Incompetence

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?ref=world 20 different, incompatible police training programs operate in Afghanistan. Bush had the responsibility to rationalize this system and he did not. This incompetence costs lives (including American lives) and money. The former Moron in Chief is culpable. Obama has now required standardization to fix another of the Bush disasters.

How to One-Up Bush

Obama has apparently approved drone strikes in Baluchistan, which is part of Pakistan proper and which has not been hit previously. It looks like Obama wants to demonstrate that he has bigger balls than Bush. This move will widen the war and presents the clear risk of creating more enemies in Pakistan and destabilizing that nation. But, if you really intend to win in Afghanistan, this is a necessary gamble. Bush never took it. He was content to park a division over there and claim the situation was improving (which it wasn't). I give credit to Obama for decisive action and follow-through--if you are going to fight a war, do not fight it half-assed. It remains to be seen whether still more troops will be needed--if they are, Obama will have to send them to avoid falling into the half-assed trap. I said this with Bush's Iraq war for years, and he finally authorized a decisive surge that led to military (though not political) success. The same was true in Vietnam. We did not do and were not at any time willing to do what was necessary to win--therefore we should not have gone in or, at the very least, once we determined that the requirements of victory exceeded our appetite for risk, we should have pulled out expeditiously. Now, despite all this commendation, I retain serious misgivings about our likelihood of success in Afghanistan. The great obstacle to our goals is the prevalence of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan and the near impossibility of eradicating them from the border regions. Thus far, Obama is pressing forward with the strategy he has chosen without any weakening qualifications of consequence. Unfortunately, I think he chose the wrong gamble--we should get out of there and try to finance the best political groups that remain behind and press hard on Pakistan to use its influence to prevent a Taliban reconquering. Here's a discussion: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/al-qaeda-in-the-crosshairs/?hp

Packer's Take

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2009/09/reading-the-mcchrystal-report.html This is a good summary and analysis of the McChrystal report and its implications. As with Iran, and Iraq, and Pakistan, in Afghanistan too the President has no good options. He cannot be seen to retreat in face of terrorism. But, if he commits to victory he faces grave costs on many levels and the distinct possibility of failure to achieve victory by 2012. A contradiction in our first premise (ie, that our withdrawal means victory for the Taliban and a consequent increase in the terrorist threat): the Taliban already have a sanctuary in the North-West Provinces of Pakistan--what does it matter if their sanctuary is enlarged to include Afghanistan, or the Pashtun part of Afghanistan?

The Rock and the Hard Place

I count this a clear and ugly summary of our prospects in Afghanistan, and some implications for the region. I especially like the anecdote about the illiterate retards we're trying to train up to fight the insurgents. How long do you think we can continue to fight against an enemy which renders itself unbeatable by taking shelter behind the border of one of our supposed allies and for a narco-state that has neither the resources nor the moral conviction to defend itself? http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1865730,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar   The Muslims of the world have the most to lose from a failure in the struggle to contain terrorism. After all, the most cost effective way to do this, from the perspective of rest of the world is to contain all the Muslims of the world within a certain prescribed geographical range--and then ensure that they are deprived of the technological capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction. At that point all their terroristic impulses would merely be implosive, and the rest of us could shed the nihilistic drag we currently bear.

Bush and Obama

Apparently Bush recently adopted a new strategy that involves attacking targets in the Tribal Areas without Pakistani permission. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11policy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin Didn't Obama get hammered by the right a few months ago for saying that he would do just this? I believe he said that he would attack a known Al Qaeda meeting in Pakistan even if the Pakistanis declined to approve the attack. Am I missing something here? These Tribal Areas seem analogous to N. Vietnam, with Pakistani military and intel leaders acting as China did in the Vietnam war. Both would be difficult to conquer by invasion, due to guerrilla activity and a landscape that supports such activity. Of course, the fact that the Tribal Areas are a part of Pakistan makes them even more problematic than N. Vietnam was. An invasion would surely provoke further support for the guerrillas by their state backers or even a direct confrontation with that state. But, without an invasion the cross-border attacks continue indefinitely and threaten the stability of their target. Unfortunately, American operations in the Tribal Areas will probably turn the Pakistani people against us and could destabilize Pakistan.