The war in Afghanistan, called Operation Enduring Freedom, has
proved to be enduring indeed. Now in its 10th year, it could drag
on a lot longer. In November’s congressional elections it was
hardly an issue. But if we are still mired in this futile conflict
a year from now, it could become a big headache for President
Obama.
He must be kicking himself because if he had pulled out soon
after becoming president, claiming that this war was not benefiting
the United States, his argument would surely have prevailed (over
the furious objections of Max Boot and John Bolton). Obama could
reasonably have said that he was elected to end these costly and
unwinnable wars. But as early as 2007 he was persuaded that
Afghanistan was “the war we need to win.” In 2009 he sent in 30,000
additional troops. More recently, he postponed scheduled U.S. troop
withdrawals. As Al Regnery wrote here last fall, Afghanistan is now
Obama’s Achilles’ heel.
He has no good choices. If he withdraws, he will be seen as the
commander in chief who first aimed for victory then settled for
retreat. Withdrawal, said Charles Moore in the Daily
Telegraph, will be viewed as “the first defeat of the most
powerful military alliance in history at the hands of a small band
of fanatics armed with little more than rifles and IEDs.” More on
Moore in a minute.
But if he digs in — as in fact he has done — Obama’s liberal
supporters may turn on him. It is literally a “no win” situation,
because military victory in Afghanistan would require an enormous
army of occupation and that is not going to happen. Our NATO allies
are already heading for the exits.
Why are we there? “We’re there because of 9/11,” said the late
and much admired Richard Holbrooke. “And that’s a simple matter of
fact.” Holbrooke’s title was also his mission impossible: special
envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He died in December of a torn
aorta, but it might as well have been called a broken heart. A few
months earlier he said that a “pure military victory in Afghanistan
is not possible.”
Killing more tribesmen will avail us nothing, and may do more
harm than good. They become automatic martyrs, and Afghanistan
(population approaching 30 million) has lots more tribesmen in
reserve. Some no doubt are ready to become “terrorists.” An
increasing number of Afghans don’t know what we are doing there and
the same uncertainty could be attributed to more and more
Americans.
Initially, we invaded Afghanistan because, in about 1996, al
Qaeda set up a mountain encampment there and used it to plan the
9/11 attack. How many Afghan tribesmen ever knew about al Qaeda, or
ever heard of Osama bin Laden? As we have been told many times,
Afghanistan basically had no government, and it still doesn’t.
After 9/11 George Bush said we wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.”
My guess is that he is dead, but the intelligence agencies may not
want to go on the record. War planners, I suspect, would prefer bin
Laden alive. If he’s dead, we could claim “mission accomplished.”
Anyway, al Qaeda or what’s left of it is said to have decamped to
Pakistan, whose government is not really cooperating with us.
The Vietnam comparison still works in Obama’s favor. In 1968,
about 320 U.S. soldiers were killed there every week. In
Afghanistan, in 2010, we suffered about 10 deaths a week. That’s a
big disparity, and Obama will want it to stay that way. His best
option may be to keep U.S. forces in a defensive posture, the
(unstated) goal being to minimize casualties. That way the war just
might stay out of the headlines long enough for him to be
reelected. But if the casualties keep mounting, as they have in the
past two years, he could be in trouble.
One almost feels sorry for Obama because his instinct was to
extricate the U.S. from these unwinnable wars. It was the one area
where he at least wanted to resist the expansion of state
power. In other policy areas, as we know, he actively encouraged
the natural bureaucratic instinct to expand, resulting in a budget
deficit that is approaching $1.5 trillion for the current year.
Since World War II, the most effective pressure in Washington
has come from senior officials of government agencies, all pushing
to expand their own missions and budgets. The military very much
included. Take a look at Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars.
He reports in detail Obama’s conversations with Vice President
Biden (who favors U.S. withdrawal) and with senior military
officials in Washington. The Pentagon won almost every one of these
“battles” with Obama. A good case can be made, incidentally, that
Obama prevailed over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries
because he was more committed to pulling the U.S. out of these
no-win wars. But he has been unable to do so.
Here’s a further comment from Charles Moore, who was once the
editor of the (conservative) Daily Telegraph and since
then has been writing Margaret Thatcher’s biography. He asks if
opponents of this war “have any conception of what a defeat would
mean for the world order [and for] civil peace in every European
city.” Don’t they see that this fight “will be seen not as a battle
for control of some jagged mountains, but between values, and that
if our values do not win, they will lose?”
His article ended there, and he didn’t say what these values
are. But the Afghan values are fairly clear. They want to get
foreigners out of their country, even if they (we) are passing
money around in an attempt to buy friends. Anyway, it’s a good bet
that we would feel the same way if strange tribesmen with a lot of
hi-tech gadgets landed in the Rockies and tried to control our
government.
Afghans also believe in God. I’m not sure that we do
anymore.
BUT HERE IS ONE VALUE we are certainly fighting for: women’s
rights. Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Obama, and Mrs. Clinton have all signed on.
Take a look at the Time cover story last August 9, showing
a woman with part of her nose cut off. The headline read, “What
Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” No question mark. The victim’s
story “raises important questions for those working to establish
this young democracy,” Laura Bush wrote. “Will Afghanistan embrace
and protect the rights of all people?” The New York Times
agrees: “The basic civil rights of Afghans — particularly women
and girls — cannot be up for negotiation.”
Actually, they don’t really have rights in most of the Muslim
world. Theirs is a system based on power and force, and in such a
world men indeed can easily dominate women, and do. Maybe instead
we should try converting them to Christianity? (Just kidding. Even
to suggest such a thing shows how far we have traveled down the
road of relativism.)
It’s true that America’s position in the world has declined,
compared to other countries. But the great mistake has been to
think that this can be remedied by seeking out countries that can
be treated as military targets. Launching armed crusades against
selected foreign countries is a military response to a cultural
problem.
A lot of people in America would like to see a revival of the
West, myself very much included. But that will require a revival of
religion. What caused its decline? It is poorly understood, but I
believe that rising prosperity brings moral laxity in its wake.
That may be the key. American elites, with their persistent
negativism about the human race (trees good, people bad), have also
played a role in demoralizing the middle class. The rise of Islam
over the past generation is mainly a response to the decline of
faith-Christianity in particular. Islam is moving into the vacuum,
and dropping bombs on them won’t do any good.
