- FEBRUARY 9, 2010
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TIGHTROPE
Obama’s China-Taiwan Challenge
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DECODER
Parsing the State of the Union
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SUPREME COURT
Decision Widens U.S. Credibility Gap
Afghanistan is just not that important…
Posted By David Rothkopf
Friday, October 16, 2009 - 7:40 PM
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Like many people in the foreign policy community, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time grappling with the issues associated with Afghanistan. I have been reading newspaper reports, listening to interviews and testimony, weighing the assessments of experts. It is a tiny microcosm of the process that is taking place within the highest levels of the U.S. government right now with a couple differences. First, I don't have access to classified reports (although for the most part my experience has taught me to approach these with great caution.) Second, I don't have to worry about the politics of the decision I reach -- internal or external. And third, and most importantly, my opinion really doesn't matter. I'm up here in the cheap seats -- the blogosphere being the "noisebleed section" of the political arena -- and we all know that a stadium full of people shouting their opinions just sounds like cheering or booing and isn't much more nuanced than that.
Still, as with any discussions concerning whether or not and how to conduct a war, this is a debate that has a strong sense of urgency about it. It also involves a host of really interesting questions about what our real objectives are, about whether this is a counter-insurgency or a counter-terrorism operation, about how victory can be measured, about who our real allies and enemies are, about how much cost we are willing to bear, about what the role for NATO should be, about how to deal with a corrupt, dysfunctional partner in Kabul, even about more fundamental issues such as how do we ultimately keep ourselves safe from terror, whether we can ever be successful at nation-building, and whether there is even truly a nation to build in a country like Afghanistan that is really (much as Iraq is) a confection of the minds of British imperialists that overlooks ancient tribal realities.
To those who say that the Obama administration should not be reconsidering a strategy it announced only last spring, my reaction is that's nonsense. We should constantly be reviewing our strategy based on the changing situation on the ground and the ebb and flow of other external priorities and factors. To those who say that the process has gone on too long, I also say, that's ridiculous given the human stakes involved.
But I am among the group concerned that the final decision may be tainted by factors that should not come into play when forging a strategy. One factor is campaign rhetoric: The president should not be locked into a course of action because of what he said as a candidate. Another factor is momentum: It is hard to reverse any enterprise as massive as this operation in Afghanistan. Another factor is fear of perceptions of an internal rift: I am on the record as feeling that General McChrystal went too far in publicly arguing his case and I feel the President should not be cowed into nudging the needle one jot in the direction of escalation of our involvement because he is unsettled by the political consequences of subordinates who didn't get their way. I also fear the impulse some have to seek an answer that will make everyone happy. In this case, it's just not there.
But the more I grapple with this problem in my own head, the more I feel like we are collectively falling victim to a fatal heuristic trap. After 9/11 nothing was more important that getting the terrorists that committed the act or making America safe from future attacks. This turned Bush as it would have turned any president toward Afghanistan. When he made his weird wrong turn toward Iraq, it led some among his opponents to argue even more vigorously that Afghanistan should have remained our top priority. This had two advantages: It immunized them from critiques they were "soft on terror" or "weak" and it was supported by a certain logic. Barack Obama and most Democrats were among this group.
When Obama came into office therefore, his mandate was to switch from Iraq to Afghanistan and we began to ramp up our involvement there. It became "his" war. It was the "war of necessity." The more involved we got there, the more "important" the debate about our strategy there became. The issue grew to the point that it is common to see reference to Obama's decision on whether or not to increase our troop presence there as the most important foreign policy decision he will make this year.
It might be. But that is different from saying that Afghanistan is actually important itself and different from saying it is really important to the interests of the United States. In fact, the reality is that there are few measures indeed by which it can be honestly argued that Afghanistan warrants the attention it is getting or the resources we are devoting to it.
National Security Advisor Jim Jones was quoted as saying there may be only 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The terror threat has moved elsewhere. Almost every country in Afghanistan's immediate neighborhood can be argued to pose a bigger terrorist threat. It can be argued that we don't want the Taliban to come back into power in Afghanistan. First, of all, that our departure would produce their return is by no means a certainty and it is a view shared by many in Afghanistan. Next, again, they are actively sponsored by elements in Pakistan and their fate is really driven from there.
For sure the biggest security threat in the region is not Afghanistan but Pakistan, a country careening toward the possibility of being divided by civil conflict. The core of the threat is Pakistan's nuclear arsenals and anyone tells you the U.S. knows where the weapons are and is confident in their security is just outright lying to you. Pakistan is the home to terror. Pakistan is the 170 million person nation on the verge of chaos. Pakistan is the nuclear threat. Afghanistan is only relevant relative to Pakistan.
Does that make Afghanistan important? Only if we can use it as a base from which we can contain the threats posed from within Pakistan. But the reality is given the terrain in the mountains on the border, we have spent eight years proving that we can't really do that. And our friends in Kabul are running such a bogus government that it is unlikely they will prove to be a useful aid in such matters anytime in the foreseeable future. Thus, if Afghanistan is only relevant as far as it can help deal with threats in Pakistan and it can't really help very much with those, it is actually not that important.
What's the conclusion? View all our actions in Afghanistan relative to our real interests in the region, which are for the most part in Pakistan. To the extent we can position ourselves in Afghanistan in ways supporting cross-border activities into Pakistan and that gives a rapid deployment capability should the worst happen there, fine. Give them aid. Encourage them to stabilize. But recognize that we shouldn't have an extended military presence in a place that is not actually that important to us -- especially if most experts think our likelihood of success with regard to military objectives in the country is in the slim to none range.
As periodically happens in American life, we are engaged in a furious debate about the wrong issue ... and our failure to recognize this is certain to have negative implications for our ability to deal with what should be our real priorities.
MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP
Most problems in south Asia are problems between Pakistan and India. You want Pakistan to help you defeat Taliban. But Pakistan is afraid that you are actually helping India control Afghanistan. You can bet that Pakistan will always be on the fence.
I saw reports that American already recoganized this issue and tried to influence Pakistan to change its priority. Again, This is a non-starter at best. Too much blood had been wasted at that part of Asia. The problem now is almost as intractable as Mideast. In my opinion, there is really much you can do.
David,
I read with great interest your piece on Afghanistan. As always, it was well written, and generally well reasoned. Your comments on Pakistan were particularly timely, as it has become the elephant in the living room of our foreign policy.
I must disagree with you, however, on the importance of Afghanistan itself. As you note, this debate raises questions about what our real objectives are (or should be) in Afghanistan. Let’s go back and look at why we are there in the first place. In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan dissolved into various groups of feuding warlords, and chaos was rampant. Not a surprising result for a pseudo-nation whose central government and authority had been dismantled and discredited as a result of the Soviet invasion. Into this power vacuum swept the Taliban, a group of mullahs and students who felt that the only salvation for the country was a return to strict Islamic law. (Whether or not this version of Islamic law had, in fact, ever existed in the past is a question beyond my expertise to answer.) The Taliban proved to have the discipline and focus to prevail over the various warlords, and brought a kind of peace, albeit a fairly brutal one, to the country. At the time, most Afghans welcomed the Taliban, because they brought an end to the chaos. Maybe they made the trains run on time, as well.
Once in power, the Taliban proved willing to provide sanctuary to similarly strict Islamist groups, including Al Qaeda. From there, as we all know, Bin Laden planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, and as you pointed out, President Bush did what any president would do, going into Afghanistan to root out Al Qaeda and their Taliban allies. We have had initial success in doing so, but now our objective has to be to foster some sort of stable regime so that the terrorists cannot return. Of late, the Taliban have made increasingly bold inroads into Afghanistan, often taking and holding territory until driven out, and using terror tactics to undermine the functioning of society. It is this situation that has prompted General McChrystal’s call for a troop surge. (As an aside, I am not sure there is a meaningful difference between a counter-insurgency operation and a counter-terrorism operation anymore.)
So with that as our objective, let us take up your contention that this objective is not worth the resources required. As you noted, there are few Al Qaeda in Afghanistan today, and many Afghans do not want a return of the Taliban. However, that is not enough evidence to conclude that the Taliban would not retake Afghanistan. From what I can tell, most Iranians do not want the rule of the Mullahs and Ahmadinejad, but that isn’t translating into any effective movement toward regime change. What would happen if the U. S. were to withdraw from Afghanistan, or worse yet, be forced out because we failed to devote sufficient resources to the struggle?
• The Taliban and Al Qaeda would be perceived as having won a tremendous victory (one which they could not achieve by their own efforts), proving that they can beat the west if only they are patient enough. It would not matter that they had not retaken the country, it would be enough that we had left.
• The Taliban very likely could retake Afghanistan. A failure of the U. S. mission there would mean that Taliban forces are successfully attacking at will, and likely holding significant territory. As these attacks continued and escalated in the absence of U. S. forces, the validity of the Kharzai government would be increasingly called into question, and other factions would begin to take the defense of their local areas into their own hands. It would effectively be a repeat of the chaos which followed the Soviet withdrawal, and allowed the Taliban to rise to power in the first place.
• This victory would spur a tremendous surge in support for the radical Islamic cause, in terms of both money and fighters, and would provide the Taliban a safe haven from which it could foment further unrest in Pakistan. This could well be the spark that ignites an Islamic takeover of Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal. I am not advocating a new domino theory, but I don’t think you can realistically consider Pakistan without considering Afghanistan, and vice versa.
• The U. S. would be seen to be a fair-weather friend, likely to cut loose any ally when things got rough, as we did with South Vietnam, the Shah of Iran, and now Afghanistan. This would likely lead to a great reluctance on the part of potential allies to trust us, and likely provoke potential foes to initiate conflicts they might otherwise have shied away from.
I must also disagree that too much is being made of the time it is taking President Obama to decide on what strategy to follow. It is all well and good to be deliberate in your decision making. However, the impression that has been conveyed is that the President is simply dithering, that he isn’t really invested in the decision, and that he is balancing what is good strategy for the war against what is good strategy for his party. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant, it is the message being received by our allies and our enemies alike. President Obama is already perceived as being weak, as pointed out in some of your other posts. He cannot afford to appear indecisive. General McChrystal’s public spat with the President is very different from General MacArthur’s fight with Truman. McChrystal was not complaining because he did not get the answer he wanted, he was complaining because he was getting no answer at all.
I do not think that concern for the lives of the servicemen potentially involved is an adequate excuse for delay. While no one should make such a decision lightly, it is the responsibility of the Commander in Chief to make just those decisions. What I feel is a greater wrong than to put American troops in harm’s way is to put them in harm’s way when we are not willing as a nation to do what is required to win. The lesson that I had hoped we had learned from Vietnam is that you can’t do war half way. If you are going to fight, you have to give it everything you have got. If Afghanistan is not vital enough to our interests to justify committing the additional troops General McChrystal has asked for, then it is not vital enough to our interests to risk the lives of the troops already there. Personally, I believe it is vital, for the reasons outlined above, and that we should commit the additional troops. We cannot afford to let the terrorists have a victory, or even the appearance of a victory.
Outside of that, I enjoyed the blog.
Well, aren't we the special one.
For you, sending others off to die is not worth even thinking about.
I do not think that concern for the lives of the servicemen potentially involved is an adequate excuse for delay.
Hey, Champ, I got some job possibilities over there in Islam-land. Just go to Dyncorp recruiting, get all the specifics, line up something you're good at beside spouting off, and go for it. Have a nice trip!
Security Manager Afghanistan,
Security Manager Kabul, Afghanistan
QA/QC Supervisor (O&M) Afghanistan,
Project Facilites Manager Afghanistan,
Procurement Manager Afghanistan,
Power Generation Supervisor Afghanistan, Afghanistan
Passenger Support Supervisor Afghanistan,
Laundry Supervisor Afghanistan, Afghanistan
Be sure to write while you're "do[ing] what is required to win"!
Try to act as though you have a funtioning cortex.
Mr. Bacon,
I am responding to your crude reply to my comment, even though your knee jerk "four legs good two legs bad" drivel does not deserve it.
I wrote a very thoughtful response to Mr. Rothkopf's post, debating the question of the importance of Afghanistan in US Foreign policy and the war on terror. From that response, you lift one line out of context, and conclude that for me "sending others off to die is not worth even thinking about".
Did you even read what I wrote, or did you just skim it to find attack points? My argument, as it relates to the line you lifted, is that the President is taking too long to decide what to do here. He has advanced the argument that, in part, this delay is out of concern for the troop who might be sent to Afghanistan if he were to accept General McChrystal's recommendation. I do not find that reasoning compelling. It ignores, as does your snarky comment, the fact that there are US servicemen on the ground at present who are being attacked, and whose lives are put in greater danger than they would be if Mr. Obama decided either a) to withdraw them, as you seem to recommend, or b) to send the troops requested* and give those already there the backup they need to accomplish the mission. Leaving the troops already in Afghanistan in limbo is the most dangerous course for them. The President's inaction also embolden the Taliban, who might reasonably conclude that stepping up the pace of the attacks and inflicting more casualties on US forces might tip the decision in their favor, i.e. for withdrawal. Therefore, asking the President to make a decision in something less than two months time does not represent "sending others off to die", as you intentionally mischaracterize it, but rather advocating to protect, to the greatest extent possible, those at risk.
As far as your characterization of my attitude as indifferent to the fate of our troops, you obviously ignored the lines immediately following the one you lifted, which read "While no one should make such a decision lightly, it is the responsibility of the Commander in Chief to make just those decisions. What I feel is a greater wrong than to put American troops in harm’s way is to put them in harm’s way when we are not willing as a nation to do what is required to win." All you were able to parse out of that was "do what is required to win" (which you apparently view as a bad thing). So let me try to break it down for you, although I warn you in advance I will have to use some words of more than one syllable:
- "No one should make such a decision lightly" means that the decision to put troops into harm's way is an important one, deserving of thought and consideration. (This disproves your thesis that for me sending people to die is not worth thinking about.)
-The next part of that sentence indicates that although these are hard decisions, making these decisions is part of being President of the United States. Mr. Obama has taken several months to make a decision that should have taken two weeks at most, even giving the utmost thought and consideration to the issue. He has given at least the appearance of being unwilling to make the decision, and of ignoring it hoping it will go away. It won't.
-The next sentence indicates that I believe that what is worse then sending people to die is sending people to die for no reason. We fight wars to achieve objectives, like preventing people from destroying buildings filled with innocent civilians. If we fight a war, but are not willing to do what it takes to achieve that objective, we have wasted the lives of those who die in the war. I think that is criminal. It was in this context that I referred to doing "what is required to win". It was not intended, as you misrepresented, to justify sending ever increasing numbers of troops into battle, but rather to say that either we are willing to do what is needed to win in Afghanistan (and I defer to the generals as to what that is), or we should get out. We should not leave the troops there to die while Mr. Obama dithers. (This also disproves your thesis about my indifference to the lives of our troops. You see how you only embarass yourself when you don't read the whole thing?)
The rest of your post seeks to impugn my courage because I am not in Afghanistan at present. Unfortunately, I am 54 years old, and was 46 at the time of the 9/11 attacks. As a result of my age, the military will not have me. Otherwise, I would be there. How about you?
Having seen your other responses in this thread, your comment that I am only good at "spouting off" seems to be a case of projection. All in all, I recommend you seek professional help.
*Subsequent to both of our original posts, it has been reported that the 40,000 additional troops was only one of several options outlined by General McChrystal. Since both posts were written under the impression that this was the only recommendation, I have not adjusted the comments to reflect the later information.
Even if one assumes for the sake of argument that there are "only" 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the importance of their presence is misunderstood. These are not "foot soldiers" directly conducting attacks themselves, but planners and facilitators who teach other extremists such as the Taliban how to make better bombs, more effectively terrorize the population, and provide courier services and intelligence to leadership hiding elsewhere. They provide the physical networking between cells that makes them hard to detect while maintaining the latent ability to expand and regenerate Al Qaeda power if the US and its allies withdraw, or to consolidate efforts for specific attacks.
They are the AQ version of "Go Deep" in Afghanistan.
To pooh-pooh 100 Al Qaeda as being unimportant simply on grounds of quantity is a classic ethno-centric error of Western analysts and pundits. How many Al Qaeda were involved in the 9/11 attacks?
Hooray!
I feel like Sauron's Eye, looking over the fundamentalist Islamic world. Shouldn't I be concentrating on which little hobbit will sneak into my dark kingdom to the bring down my tower?
Why don't we pay attention to what is under our noses? War is under our noses and obliterating our pocketbooks. Why? Pakistan and Afghanistan are of no relevance to Islamist Freaks who see only two 'nations' in the world: Dar al Harb and Dar al Islam. Are we are looking at it incorrectly? Are we losing our ass because we are still thinking like, well.. infidels? War is upon us and we keep losing because our enemies have a superior way of looking at their enemies, namely those who would oppose Allah? (What century am I living in now?) The world of war - where folks collide particles and enjoy non-stop knowledge and society streamed through their Nokia laptops - and the world of peace - where the devout keep their women in tents and send their children to school with ordinance strapped to their waists and mobile phone detonators. "Hi, son. Having a nice day at school? Don't let anyone bully you about." Nokia wins again.
It is difficult for most folks to understand extremist ideologies and how fantastically insane their practitioners are. American citizens are now signing up for the virgins through 'home-grown' radicalism. Last February, some kid from the twin cities, of all liberal places, got wrapped up in some fundamentalist religious idiotry, took a plane to Somalia and blew himself up. Good riddance, except... He wasn't Pakistani. Not from the Swat Valley. Not from Waziristan. Not an Afghan. He was an American citizen in the jet set. He could have been president of the United States of America, Nobel Peace Prize and all! But he chose the life of a martyr instead. Wow. Eyebrows up.
“...But the hearts of men are easily corrupted. And the ring of power has a will of its own.”
Or wait. Was he an American citizen or was he simply a citizen of Dar al Islam? Should've asked him first. Hindsight is always 20/20, eh?
It's time our elected officials stop pussyfooting about with their self-destructive pc quasi-verbosity and get to work eliminating fundamentalism. Everywhere. And it would be nice if we could stop saying meaningless place-names like 'Somalia', 'Afghanistan', 'Sudan' and (God forgive me) even 'Pakistan'.
If I spent my life savings and all of my free time handing out free copies of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein or Tolkein's Lord of the Rings I would surely be committed to a loony bin. And justifiably, even though those great works of fiction have killed so many less than the Koran, Torah and the Bible combined. What madness
Hooray!
Mr. Rothkopf's unmitigated bigoted drivel is biased, it has serious errors in it and is typical of the anti-Pakistan tripe so pervasive in some racist quarters these days. It is very disappointing to see this esteemed publication chose to reproduce such a rambling crypto-racist screed.
The author’s Teutonic bloviations are an admixture of discredited Neocon assertions, unsubstantiated, or outright Indian distortion, and pure unadulterated balderdash. His nauseating fixation upon and paranoid conspiratorial delusions about Pakistanis are a transparent attempt to justify the murderous rampage, carnage and barbarism faced by West Asia.
The twaddle fails to illuminate the confusing deluge of eerily inept and counter-intuitive claptrap masquerading as fact in the clumsily stage-managed "global war on terror" environment. The author’s selective amnesia fails to consider the fact that more than 4000 Pakistanis have died fighting the so called “war on terror”, and Pakistan has been a US ally since 1947.
As a frequent harsh critic of Mr. Rothkopf,
let me say that you, sir, are out of line.
is a solidly reasoned, persuasively argued, and, above all, focused piece of writing. It's a testament to the difficulty of this problem, however, that for all of that, and for all the many other persuasive arguments I have read against escalation in Afghanistan that rely on the assertion that we have insufficient interests in Afghanistan to justify the sacrifice -- and I really do find this one and others persuasive -- I am still not entirely persuaded it's true. I actually suspect Mr. Rothkopf is in fact similarly unsure, and I want to say I respect his decision to make a judgement call and argue for it as vigorously as he can, rather than pen some mealymouthed, hedged, too-smart-by-half commentary that comes down nowhere and hence moves the debate to the same place. My own view is not that we have insufficient interests to merit significant involvement, but that the situation is simply one that is going to require maintenance indefinitely, so that an escalation on the order of 70% over our current deployment will raise expectations among Americans for something like "victory" that simply cannot be met. I wonder whether the job in Afghanistan is one that simply requires a long-term commitment of U.S. military personnel, and that we should therefore be scaling our deployment to a size that can be maintained over the long haul. I'm not sure what the right answer here is, but in a situation like this there is value in offering a view that take a clear position (easier when the lives at stake aren't actually on your shoulders, I realize), even though that means also being willing to possibly be wrong. I have no idea if this blog is read in high places; if it is, an argument that succinctly makes the best available case for a particular option is certainly of great value. Well done, sir.
I said that as persuasive as I find those making the case that David does here, I still am on the fence. This Frontline report from 2006 (far more informative and unsettling than the one much discussed of late) depicts what keeps me focused on the interests that we do have in the region at least, and makes me wonder whether we can really say with such clarity that our interests lie exclusively enough in Pakistan so that the disposition of Afghanistan is a matter we can afford to deprioritize. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/taliban/view/)
The report makes quite clear that Pakistan and its intransigent (from our perspective) leadership is the main concern in the region, so maybe it should be read to buttress the case of those urging caution in Afghanistan. I certainly am persuaded by it that however important for our security the outcome in Afghanistan may be, the results of our relations with Pakistan's government and military are probably far more so. This is why, as a non-expert, seeing the experts so deeply divided, I am actually inclined to go the 'patriotic' route and say that I support the president in whatever he thinks is best, and that I wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now. Then, though, I must say I share David's concerns that the thinking thus far seems to have been perhaps influenced as much by where we have been as by where we need to go.
The last thing to note (if reports out of England and now Washington are to be believed) is that this decision has been made -- and not in the direction David advocates. I personally think this is a very close call and that even as we agree they should be rigorously kept out of the decisionmaking, we should acknowledge the strength of the factors not related to the battlefield mitigating against a dramatic change in strategy. (A 180 degree reversal of a defining campaign position against the [inappropriately] publicly expressed advice of the commanding general is a tall order, though one we must insist be filled if it is in our interest.) But when the decision is made, I think at least initially we owe the president our support.
I'm not going to argue on the matter of Afghanistan itself, that's being debated by everyone. What I will look at, however, is Rothkopf's view of 'only 100 Al Quaeda'. Yes Mr. Jones said the same thing, but that simply lowers my respect for him. I feel that both men have fallen into the trap of judging a groups worth by its size. Terrorist groups do not work that way, they are not parties running for office*. The question is not "how many members of Al Quaeda are in Afghanistan" but rather "which members of Al Quaeda are in Afghanistan".
*Usually
I don't get some of the reasoning here: How does whether the government in Kabul is corrupt affect whether the Taliban is our enemy or not? If we can't get a non-corrupt government in Kabul does that make the Taliban less our enemy? Or less of a threat to us? I'm not seeing the logical connection you're making.
Second, a lot of this has that slipperiness of shifting the battlefield to the next war. like trying to hold water in your hands. Things looked bleak in Iraq, so that was the bad war, and Afghanistan the good war. Now things look bleak in Afghanistan, so now it's the bad war, and, what we're going to move on to Pakistan? And what, exactly, would that consist of? We certainly have no UN mandate to invade, so such an action would be entirely illegal even if it was under a pretext of securing their nukes (and, in fact, cross-border raids that you are suggesting are also illegal under international law). Are you getting a sense of deja vu yet?
When those who wanted to abandon Iraq said we should dedicate ourselves to Afghanistan they really had no plan for this (this is why they, in fact, simply took the Iraq plan and transferred it to Afghanistan). This current talk of Pakistan has the same echoes. So, what would focusing on Pakistan consist of? And how would abandoning Afghanistan aid this plan for Pakistan?
I actually agreed with your position in principle until I found out that Joe Biden was pushing it. I don't know all that much about foreign policy, and even less about war, but I do know the Biden Law of Foreign Affairs, whereby everything Joe Biden advocates has been shown to be wrong 100% of the time, so I just have to admit I don't know which way to think, except that I know Biden is very likely wrong, and the poor reasoning here seems to back that up.
By the way, this is in today's Washington Post:
U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits — including Americans — are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/18/AR2009101802549.html?hpid=topnews
Afghanistan is just not that important.
The warmongers here -- chickenhawks all who don't put their own ass on the line -- say that we should be concerned about who runs a small, poor country on the other side of the world from us. The other side of the world, which is a pretty big place. How come only Americans get fired up about this historic hole of misery? Is the rest of the world wrong?
Terrorism has been around forever. Terrorism is a crime, not a military enemy. Too many people were impressed by George W. Bush -- they keep repeating his claptrap.
The US military acting badly in countries halfway 'round the world don't accomplish anything except to create more enemies of the US. That's a fact. All this amateur hypothesizing about the tremendous importance of terrorism is simply war propaganda.
The average American, statistically, stands a better chance of being injured by a bath-tub slip or by lightning than by terrorism, to say nothing of auto accidents, heart attacks and influenza.
Afghanistan is just not that important.
To me is a helluva lot more important than Iraq ever was. George Bush dropped the ball with his little foray into Iraq, and Afghanistan, which should have been top priority was almost totally ignored.
You either do one of two things. Send 300,000 troops to Afghanistan to steady the situation, or you bring them ALL home. Anything other than those two options invites the quagmire Obama is hoping to avoid.
Field Manual 3-24, COUNTERINSURGENCY, supposedly written by the now-silent General Petraeus, McChrystal's boss, states that the accepted troop/citizen ratio in "COIN" is 1:50, which in a country of 32 million would require 640,000 troops. Whatever -- your general argument is correct and the US should bring them ALL home. Yesterday. Afghanistan is just not important.
David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.
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