Afghanistan: The Question Is Strategy, Not Troops
For the last few years of the Bush administration, Afghanistan suffered from both the neglect and ineptitude of a President more interested in Saddam Hussein then Osama Bin Laden. While distracted in Iraq, we lost territory to a resurgent Taliban and watched our handpicked government devolve into corruption. Most importantly, we failed to eliminate Al Qaeda as a threat. While the Bush administration was able to achieve very dramatic early success, they ultimately failed to find the correct combination of finishing moves. As a result, Afghanistan has remained a country half conquered and a mission half accomplished.
Afghanistan featured prominently in Obama’s campaign speeches and he has frequently stated that it is the central front in the war on terror. Now that he is President, he must make the crucial decisions on how we are to proceed. Any choice he makes should be based on a practical set of achievable goals. Unlike Bush, He knows that decisions about our future strategy in Afghanistan can be based on a realistic assessment of the situation on the ground and not failed neoconservative ideology. The Neocons believe that it is America’s duty to defeat totalitarianism around the world and replace it with American style democracy. They are perfectly willing to expend vast amounts of blood and treasure to accomplish their goals. Basing military strategy on political ideology, however, is often a foolish and dangerous endeavor that does not adequately take into account the safety of American lives. The Neocons make the same two mistakes over and over again. First, they overestimate the target country’s receptiveness to American intervention. Then, when the indigenous population begins to fight back against the foreign invaders, they try to fix the first mistake by sending more American troops into harm’s way.
The decision to send in more troops should not come until three basic but important factors have been addressed. Define the mission, perfect the strategy and assess the risk to our troops. Only then can Obama make a decision about Afghanistan. More importantly, he cannot be afraid to say no. He has to be willing to make a strategic retreat if the facts warrant that decision. He must draw on the lessons of our own military history to give shape to that difficult decision. The civil war battles of Fredericksburg and Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg are two examples of bad strategies wasting the lives of thousands of good men. However, the most important example of bad judgment costing American lives is Vietnam.
The parallels to Afghanistan are quite obvious. The Vietnam War was begun as an ideological struggle against the spread of Communism. Our involvement grew as we became more and more frustrated with the outcomes. The war was conducted without a definable mission or achievable strategies and more troops were always seen as the answer to nearly every problem. Finally, like our current conflict, it was often stated about the Vietnam War that “failure was not an option”. Before we finally learned to accept failure, over 50,000 American soldiers were forever lost and over a million Vietnamese. The worst part of Vietnam was that three different American Presidents had a multitude of opportunities to change the course of history and bring the troops home. All of them were afraid to fail in Vietnam so they escalated the conflict instead. The great Civil War historian Shelby Foote said about Pickett’s Charge that it would have taken more courage not to go up that hill. If Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had just a little bit of that singular courage during Vietnam then many men would not have needlessly died.
I don’t know what the proper course of action should be in Afghanistan. The status quo is an impossible situation that is getting us nowhere, but I don’t have enough information or expertise to assess the efficacy of sending in more troops. For the time being, I am willing to trust that this President is going to redefine our objectives in Afghanistan based on reality and not wishful thinking or politics. However, if he chooses to send more troops, the American public must understand those three important factors that I mentioned before; Mission, strategy and risk. Without those three factors well defined and easily understood, then Obama will have a very rough time convincing the American public that he is doing the right thing.
