Clinton Had It Right
That’s not exactly how he puts it, but that’s what I’m getting off this George Will column, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan,” which can be summed up quickly: War’s hard. Vietnam was hard, and also impossible, Afghanistan’s harder and more impossible. Abandon now. Cruise missile counterterrorism policy, please.
What is fascinating is how Will writes as if Sept. 11 never happened, and the Afghan war is happening in a vacuum in which the only strategic goal is providing security and economic development for the Afghan people … though in fairness Will does, towards the end, mention the goal of denying al Qaeda bases of operation, but only in despair, to suggest it’s impossible, so why try?* It’s also as if the 1970s and ’80s, the post-Vietnam abandonment, never happened. And, on the other hand, as if the turnaround in Iraq never happened.
It’s another version of the double reverse wack-a-mole policy advocated by Sen. Russ Feingold the other day. Like Feingold, Will doesn’t much concern himself with what happens when you concentrate on wacking the mole in Pakistan and stop wacking the mole in Afghanistan. But there’s a lot Will doesn’t much concern himself with. ”Clinton had it right” doesn’t really cover what Will is advocating, on reflection. “Back to Carter’s Future” maybe works better.
Because it sounds like the drumbeat to disengage from the world is gathering steam again. Let it go its own way, hope for the best, because our involvement is not only expensive, pointless and upsetting, but just makes things worse, and also makes people not like us. OK. Better start thinking about what the world is going to look like when we are not engaged in it again. History can sometimes be a guide in these matters. ” Let’s review. Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Islamic revolution, hostage crisis in Iran. Saddam and Gadhafi gone wild. Then there’s that bin Laden thing. OK, let’s stop thinking about it. It’s a little early in the morning to start thinking about all that again.
Re winning Afghanistan, here’s another view from Anthony Cordesman who basically says, we haven’t really been trying. Even since the guy who said Afghanistan was the real war took office.
* Will, who is smart enough to know better, uses a modified version of the old peacenik argument that held: If we’re going to invade Iraq, why aren’t we invading North Korea? The short answer then and now is, one size doesn’t fit all. Yemen, while a tribal backwater and al Qaeda haven, has been cooperting with us and has engaged in serious efforts to contain and curtail al Qaeda, though who knows, additional assistance and/or intervention at some point might be called for. Somalia, while a chaotic warlord-torn, al Qaeda-plagued backwater, has been and continues to be addressed in a variety of ways over the years, through direct action, proxies and assorted nation-building efforts. That may yet also required more direct attention. Then there’s Sudan, which George Will doesn’t mention, or Saudi Arabia for that matter. Iran and Syria, other sources of related kinds of trouble. The list goes on. No, George, we don’t invade them all. Afghanistan, a formerly failed state that has been a major al Qaeda base of international operations, from which top al Qaeda leadership has lately shifted to a neighboring anarchic tribal region, remains a critical and immediate concern within the broader range of areas of concern. Seconary but not inconsiderable is the degree to which United States credibility is invested in Afghanistan, and its dual role with Iraq in the containment of Iranian ambitions. Rethinking how we deal with Afghanistan is a good idea. Shrugging and walking away from it, to a past policy of remotely launched attacks on failed states, is a bad idea.
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Topics: Afghanistan, America, al qaeda, terrorists
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:24 am on Tuesday, September 1, 2009
4 Responses to “Clinton Had It Right”
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September 1st, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Willisaurus Rex needs to shut up and retire, like all his kind. It’s the 21st century, for God’s sake, not frickin’ 1968 anymore.
September 1st, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Geo Politics. Study a Map. Afghanistan is right of Pakistan and left of Iran. The one on the right has A-bombs the one on the left will soon. We leave the one in the middle and all 4377 breaks loose.
September 1st, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Robert is absolutely right: location is everything.
We win in Afghanistan by not losing. “Victory” in the conventional WW-I, WW-II sense ain’t gonna happen, and it’s not what we should be hankering after anyway.
Afghanistan is important for its location. We need a presence within the country’s borders to whack any mole worth the effort that rears its head (be it in Afghanistan or Pakistan), and to deny any terrorist organization a base for training or launching operations against civilized people.
Much more importantly, we use our bases there for gathering intel about as many entities in that part of the world as we can (and it’s downright dumb to think that we can gather better intel from afar than we can from afar AND from having boots on the ground).
While we’re in country, we help improve the conditions of the locals (when feasible), we train an Afghan army (insofar as that’s possible), and we support the least corrupt politicians around (if we can find them).
We don’t need 500,000 troops to do this, and the victory should be our limited presence there for decades, not Mullah Omar offering up a white flag of surrender, troop withdrawals and parades.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:04 am
Maybe Will is reading the handwriting on the wall. If someone who had the guts to persevere had control of the decision making process I would feel a hell of a lot better.