So Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said, “I
went on a safari to Afghanistan, and one night I shot an elephant
in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” Then
Bill Kristol said Steele should be fired for cruelty to elephants
and Ann Coulter said no, Kristol should be fired because Steele
had shot a liberal elephant in Obama’s pajamas.
Well, it didn’t go quite that way but it may as well
have. The level of debate on the war in Afghanistan —
even among Republicans — has risen to heights previously reached
only by the Marx Brothers.
Republicans can no longer afford a frivolous debate on the
war. They have allowed George Bush’s nation-building strategy to
morph into Obama’s without attempting to undertake the most
urgent task in war: if what you are doing isn’t working, you have
to start at the beginning and examine whether you’re fighting the
war the right way, or even fighting the right war.
Let us admit that what we are doing in Afghanistan — or
anywhere else — isn’t working. Defending Obama’s approach to the
war simply because it’s a continuation of Bush’s leaves
Republicans — and all Americans — in the attitude of Britain’s
pre-war government. As Churchill described it in 1936, it was
“decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant
for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be
impotent.”
War, as Sun Tzu wrote about 2300 years ago, is of the most
vital importance to the State, the province of life and death,
the road to survival or ruin. In short, a war is to be defined as
a matter of national survival to which the state must devote all
its intelligence, will, and resources to winning. This we have
not done. So let us begin by evaluating the war in Afghanistan in
those terms.
Is the war in Afghanistan a matter of national survival? If
so, how must it be fought?
If we withdraw from Afghanistan, what will the consequences
be for America?
As defined first by Bush and now by Obama, the answer to
the first question is no and makes the second moot. The goal of
that war was to rout al Qaeda in Afghanistan and to prevent that
nation from becoming the sanctuary from which terrorists could
and did mount attacks against the United States that it was
before 9-11.
But al Qaeda, as Gen. Petraeus testified in his recent
confirmation hearing, is now relocated to Northwestern Pakistan.
As its Somali branch al Shabab proved with last Sunday’s attack
in Uganda, al Qaeda has the ability to mount attacks outside the
nations in which its forces are based. And, as the resurgence of
al Qaeda in Iraq shows, when U.S. forces begin to withdraw, it
quickly returns. It will return to Afghanistan too, soon after we
leave.
For all our rhetoric about fighting an unconventional war,
we have — since 9-11 — been fighting an unconventional enemy
under a conventional strategy. Nothing is gained by the
counterinsurgency “clear, hold and build” strategy because
clearing the terrorists from one area just lets them slip into
another and reestablish themselves, and return whenever we
abandon the ground we gained.
The Bush-Obama nation-building strategy, as I’ve written
here many times, is a self-imposed quagmire that condemns us to
fighting the enemy’s proxies. You cannot defeat an enemy by only
fighting his proxies.
Right now, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is rejecting the
foundation for General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency, saying that
tribesmen and sheiks shouldn’t be recruited into the local
security forces on which the counterinsurgency depends. Petraeus
— in between visits to the Aspen Institute — dropped in on
Pakistan’s army chief Parvez Kayani to praise Pakistani efforts
against the “Pakistani Taliban” while diplomatically avoiding
mention of the Pakistani-Afghan Taliban who use Northwest
Pakistan as a sanctuary from which they mount attacks against our
forces in Afghanistan.
Terrorism is, and will forever remain, an existential
threat as long as nations such as Iran, Syria and others (notably
Saudi Arabia) are free to sponsor it. But having spent almost
nine years fighting an unconventional war on a conventional
strategy, we are compelled to debate the questions that Democrats
studiously avoid and Republicans haven’t had the courage to
ask.
What happens if we withdraw from Afghanistan?
The Karzai government is weak and unpopular. It won’t long
stand against the Taliban and al Qaeda will certainly return
quickly. We cannot long suppress al Qaeda with drone attacks,
which depend on the sort of highly accurate intelligence we don’t
have (and will be impossible to gather from abroad).
In a conversation with a former high-ranking Pakistani
government official last fall, I was told that if we don’t help
them defeat the “Pakistani” Taliban, Pakistan will fall. He
insisted that American forces were essential to the battle and
that Pakistan could not long resist them alone. Which means that
the Taliban directly — and their sponsors in Iran and other
Islamic nations indirectly — will gain control of Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal.
Does that mean we cannot withdraw in the foreseeable
future?
It does, especially if we stay on the current course. But
if the current strategy doesn’t lead to victory, why should we
maintain it? In short, we must not. The options we have are few,
and all are anathema to Obama.
We cannot win the kinetic war before we win the ideological
war which we have not begun to fight. Our strategy should be to
split Islam by condemning all — Iranians, Syrians, Saudis,
Yemenis, even Americans — who support or excuse the hegemonic
ideology that so many Islamists follow. We defeated communism not
only by containing the Soviets’ military adventurism but as
importantly by attacking their central beliefs. We have to do the
same to the Islamists.
Soviet Premier Brezhnev said that communism would
inevitably rule the world. The Islamists’ belief parallels his.
Obama’s administration demands that our enemies be labeled
without reference to Islam. As long as that continues, we cannot
win the ideological war.
Terrorists don’t respect borders and neither can we. Any
nation that harbors them should be on notice that we will strike
wherever we can find enough terrorists to justify the expenditure
of ammunition.
And the most important — and most difficult — task is to
stop nations from sponsoring terrorism. They must be attacked
openly when all else fails. We have failed, utterly, to prevent
Iran from achieving nuclear weapons. Because no peaceful option
exists, we should do whatever is necessary — with the Israelis
or alone — to destroy Iran’s ability to build and deploy nuclear
weapons.
By doing so, we would send an unmistakable message
throughout the Islamic world: America will defend itself and its
interests by whatever means necessary. The result will be an
enormous diminution of Iran’s and other nations’ support for
terrorism.
And, short of military action, we can disrupt nations’
sponsorship of terrorism by expanding dramatically and employing
consistently our cyberwar capabilities. The transfer of money
from Islamic nations to terrorist groups, including the Taliban,
through the international banking system can be disrupted.
Whatever funds are involved should be forfeited — i.e. seized by
our government. They will still get funds by the Islamic
halawa transfer system which uses couriers and written
notes. But that, too, can be targeted.
There is much more we can and should do. But these things
will have to await an American president who is willing to win
this war.
