NYT on Afghanistan and ObamaFollow

Cause one of those would indicate that the goals are the most important, and the other would indicate that leaving is more important.

Which do you suppose the Democrats would pick?

Canadian soldiers were dying in Afghanistan because the US never sent enough troops in so Bush could wage a second war in Iraq

Erm, yeah. And one of those goals is "Have the country ready to get out without it falling apart". Hence the whole "exit strategy" thing.


Huh. Well, thanks for answering for me but you're wrong.

Ok. So if the time expires and the goals aren't yet met, do we leave anyway, or find another way to achieve the goals?

Cause one of those would indicate that the goals are the most important, and the other would indicate that leaving is more important. Which do you suppose the Democrats would pick?

But what is the end state of this war on terrorism? What is the end state of the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan? Neither Bush nor any of his band of cronies ever bothered to define that condition. They took us into a war without end, like the perpetual state of conflict in Orwell’s 1984. There is no victory, worse, there can be no victory as we traditionally define it. There will be no Emperor of Terrorism or Pirate King to bow over his sword and command the surrender his forces on the deck of a US Battlewagon. There will be no dictator to commit suicide in his bunker or mountain cave as our tanks roll victorious through the shattered streets his capital and whose second in command will surrender the rag-tag teenaged remnants of his once mighty forces.

We can kill bin Laden, but terrorism will not end.

We could kill every last member of Al Qaeda, but terrorism will not end.

We could burn Afghanistan down to the bedrock and salt the ashes – and it will not end.

So, what then is victory?

Victory in this case must be a functioning government with power to control and police its territory – whether or not that is a democracy is irrelevant.

Victory in this case must be those things that we can realistically accomplish. To paraphrase the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer of serenity, Lord, give us the serenity accept the things we cannot change and the courage to change the things we can – and the wisdom to know the difference. We must do what we can to assure our own security, to help those whose countries we’ve torn asunder, and bring an end to this conflict – it is our moral duty to do so as Americans. But we must also understand that we cannot fix the world, we have neither the right nor the ability nor the resources to remake the world in our own image, we cannot impose freedom and democracy by fiat, and we cannot wipe out terrorism once and for all. We will never be completely safe, ever.

Terrorists are like cockroaches. You can’t kill them all. You can’t eradicate them completely. Wipe them out, and they will seemly spontaneously generate from thin air to scuttle about in the dark and feast on the crumbs of the world. The best you can do is to control their population, get it down to manageable levels. When you have an explosion of roaches you call in an exterminator, he fumigates the house and kills the pests where they live. Then he leaves. And you then keep your house clean, you bleach the floors, you take out the trash, you put out traps, and you stomp on the @#%^ers whenever you see them. You don’t demand that the exterminator to move in with you. The exterminator doesn’t hang around, day after day, for years on end until he’s killed every last bug and made certain that no bug will ever again set filthy appendage on your property.

But he also doesn’t just bail out on you either, not if he’s an ethical businessman and a man of his word. He doesn’t leave you holding the bag - blowing up your house in the process and leaving his poison and equipment laying about and the roach population undiminished and scurrying towards the surrounding neighborhood houses.

And so it is with Afghanistan.

There must be an end state. There must come a time when we, as the exterminator, turn the task of vermin management over to the homeowners. Now, later, an end state must be set – but we also have a responsibility to put the property back in some semblance of order, and to give the property owner an estimate of when we’ll be done with the job we were hired to do.

Setting this date has risks. It assumes that we will get the cockroach population down to manageable size by the time we leave and that the homeowner will be able to assume responsibility for keeping his own house in order without our constant help. There is always this risk. Always. Whether it happens now, or later. Delaying changes that not at all, it only changes the degree of risk – but that state will never be zero.

Establishing a date gives us, and the Afghans, a target to aim at. A goal. Without such a goal, you have no metric to measure against to determine progress. Without a goal, you go through the motions simply to go through the motions. We don’t fight just to fight, we didn’t invade just to invade, we didn’t send our sons and daughters to die just to watch them die – we have to have a goal, an objective. Setting a date gives us a metric to hang the rest of our exit strategy on.

Listen, when we invaded the beach at Normandy, General Eisenhower didn’t say, “Well, it’ll take however long it takes to secure that beachhead, could be years, could be decades. Hell if we establish a date, the ****’s will just wait us out!” No, the Allied commanders established very specific timeframes for each phase of the operation and for good reason – it gave their commanders specific goals and objectives to aim for, to build the rest of the plan around.

Establishing that date tells us what to plan for, it allows Congress to budget for the mission, it tells the military what to budget for and where to place assets and whether or not to commit assets held in reserve.

Establishing a date makes the public part of the process and tells them how much longer they’ll have to commit their children and tax dollars to this fight. It’s one thing to tell the public, stiff upper lip eighteen months and we can begin to bring our people home, it’s another thing entirely to keep saying, well we just don’t know could be a year could be ten years. You want the public’s support you better be a tad more specific. Don’t think specific goals and dates are important to public opinion? Don’t think that specific dates are important to world opinion? Don’t think those dates are important to the military and morale and public support? Then you don’t understand either people or politics. The day after the establishment of that goal by President Obama, our allies committed an additional 7,000 troops to fight alongside us – bringing the surge to nearly 40,000. Those conservatives who condemned Obama for touring Europe and Asia and apologizing for our previous behavior and for acting like an ally and friend instead of an arrogant jackass – this is the result, willing support, 7000 more troops, from our allies to help protect your sons and daughters. In some cases those commitments are nearly the sum total of that ally’s reserve. That’s right. You damn well ought to get down on your knees and give thanks that you have leader willing to mend fences and build bridges and do what it takes to get that support – because that support will directly and measurably increase the safety of your sons and daughters in uniform and help to ensure their success – and thereby significantly improve their odds of coming home outside of an aluminum box. Obama bowed low, he shook hands, he apologized, and he asked for help instead of demanding it and he just damn well may have saved your kid’s life in the process – ask yourself if Donald Rumsfeld would have done that when he wasn’t even willing to send your kids to war with a bulletproof vest or armored vehicles. Ask yourself if George W. Bush would have done that? Or Sarah Palin? What are you kids worth to them? Not a hell of a lot, not enough to swallow their pride anyway. For those of you who condemn the President for apologizing to the world, I’ll tell you what Rumsfeld told us, suck it up, Soldier.

Establishing that date tells the Muslim world that we are not the crusading imperialist power they’ve been led to believe we are. Establishing a date directly refutes the claims made by the insurgents, by bin Ladin, and by fear mongers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who recruit their cannon fodder and local support by pointing to our continuing presence and failure to set a date for withdrawal as evidence of our colonial designs on the Middle East.

Establishing a date does nothing to give away our intentions or hide our withdrawal. What? Did you think that when it comes time to pull out we were just going to sneak off suddenly in the middle of the night? Surprise! The insurgents rush in, ready for battle, Allah Ahkb… what the hell? They’re gone! Goddamnit! They tricked us! Pulling two hundred thousand troops and that many again contractors and their equipment out of Afghanistan is going to be a long drawn out process. There isn’t going to be anything secret about it. Hell, even if you wanted to keep it a secret you couldn’t – Congress couldn’t keep it a secret if their lives instead of our kids lives depended on it, and they’re the ones that are going to have to pay for it. Trust me here, there is no way whatsoever to hide when we’re pulling out, there will be hundreds of plane flights, hundreds of transport ships, we’ll be shutting down bases and moving millions of tons of equipment. The insurgents will know long before we go – and to pretend that the situation is anything other than this is just hyperbolic bullsh*t. That’s the kind of mental ************ that Rumsfeld and his bosses used to get us into this mess.

And yes, establishing a date now tells the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the rest of the insurgents that we will be leaving for certain. Conservatives say this will cause the insurgents to lie low, bid their time, and wait us out.

Could be they are right.

I sure hope so.

See, it is a measure of their lack of understanding of history and military strategy that makes these bloviating idiots think that this is somehow a bad thing.

By all means, let the insurgency go to ground for the next eighteen months.

By all means.

First, that will make those that don’t go to ground all the more obvious and easy to hunt down and kill. There are old terrorists, and bold terrorists, but there are damned few old, bold terrorists.

Second, it lets us concentrate our forces on those aforementioned bold terrorists. The ones that don’t have the sense to get in out of the sh*tstorm that’s coming when those 40,000 troops arrive in country are doomed. We should have little trouble mopping them up in short order – thanks to their more cautious brethren giving us the breathing space.

Third, those that go to ground give up the tactical advantage. Understand something here, the insurgents cannot stand against us in a conventional fight. They only persevere where our control is slight and they have refuge they can retreat to, places to train and breed and rest and plot and plan and rearm and reequip – just like cockroaches scattering under the furniture when the lights come on. Without a safe haven on the Pakistan/Afghanistan boarder, without safe haven in the cities – something the surge will deny them – they have only two options, hide or be destroyed. Some will attempt to fight, like cockroaches that stay out in the light too long, and as I said above they’ll be destroyed in short order. Most will choose to hide, to wait us out – exactly as the critics predict. But what those critics are missing is this: for eighteen months those that hide deed us the high ground.

That’s eighteen months to build schools and bridges and government and security and win over the population and establish peace. It gives us eighteen months without these cockroaches spreading their filth and disease and misery – and those that do, well they’ll get hunted down and killed like a game of whack-a-mole. In eighteen months, done right, the population will be settling into peace, into the normalcy they haven’t had in decades, into stability. In eighteen months, children will be going to school and many new ones will be born (nothing like a sudden cessation of hostilities to inspire a baby boom), crops will be planted, products will appear on shelves in the stores, broken windows fixed, bullet holes patched, electricity and water and sewage flowing. Mail delivered. Jobs in reconstruction. Again, if done right, if the insurgents go to ground for the next eighteen months, they will give the population a year and half of breathing room – imagine then, how hard it will be to convince Afghans that they should give that up and return to the desolation of war. The Americans are leaving, what then is their motivation? Why join the insurgents? Why give them haven?

In eighteen months, done right, the insurgents will emerge from their holes to discover that they quit the battle – and thereby lost the war.

In eighteen months we will have cut down the roach population, with the unwitting cooperation of the roaches themselves, to a level the homeowners can manage themselves. And then we can finally extricate ourselves from this conflict.

And that, my friends, is why establishing a public date for the end of this conflict is so damned important.

The critics have it right, they just don’t understand strategic opportunity when they see it.

Now, if only Rumsfeld will crawl back into his hole for the next year…
Posted by Jim Wright at 6:29 PM
Labels: things about politics, Things about Terrorism