There’s considerable concern too about the legitimacy of the regime after elections that were, to put it mildly, flawed.
The Washington Post has an interesting exchange of views on its op-ed page. The proponents of remaining in Afghanistan can define failure but they can’t define success — at least not concretely.
Some make a moral argument that we owe it to the Afghans, that allowing failure would be wrong. I think this runs up against the cost question. McChyrstal argues for troops getting out of vehicles more — this is necessary to reduce civilian casualties — but doing so will increase our casualties. Popular opinion is going to stiffen in opposition to this war if that should happen. To go that route is to plan for failure because we’ll turn back before we reach its distant, elusive goal.
Last time I checked, a bunch of colonists were able to kick out the most powerful empire on Earth (at the time) and establish a functioning democracy.
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p>With Anglo-American help (much like we had from the French) those people were able to beat back the big red machine. You’re telling me they can’t deal with the Taliban? It’s because they don’t WANT to. We can’t force these people to like democracy and rights and stuff.
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p>Might as well just let them have their junk of a “country”. Just keep one well-fortified base in the area with a lot of predator drones to let them know who the MFIC is.
The “bunch of colonists” emerged from a culture steeped in hundreds of years of literacy, due process, and analytic thinking. No similar culture undergirds the Afghan people.
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p>It is the height of imperialist arrogance to assume, based on nothing more than a mix of religious faith and self-serving mythology, that a form of government that emerged in the US, Canada, and Europe is appropriate or functional for the Afghan people.
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p>The proponents of continued US military involvement in Afghanistan have offered no vision of success, no plan for accomplishing this unarticulated vision, and no criteria for measuring progress towards this non-existent plan.
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p>The US should end its military involvement in Afghanistan now.
Your first paragraph gets a 6; I do think it’s important to remember that point.
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p>The rest gets a 4 as I think it is not only right, but in our interests to have a stable and at least somewhat democratic regime in Afghanistan. My biggest concern is that something unstable will create a vacuum filled by warlords (maybe Taliban) that will create a refugee crisis in the region and possibly a more global security issue if they start harboring terrorists again. Personally, I think the arrogance comes on the side of thinking that only westerners can handle democracy. I also believe in taking responsibility for cleaning up any messes we make.
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p>What would you propose? Replace the US with the UN? Replace military with a “Marshall Plan”? Either would be a reasonable answer, but complete abandonment doesn’t strike me as a realistic option for either our values or our interests.
You seem to be making the argument that a “democratic regime” in Afghanistan will be more stable, will somehow avoid involving warlords in said government, and will somehow ensure that they do not “harbor terrorists again.”
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p>Those three claims strike me as based on the sort of “religious faith/self-serving methology” that I referred to.
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p>I didn’t say that “only westerners” can handle democracy. The Japanese, to cite an example, have long cultural traditions of literacy, due process and analytic thinking — and they surely are not “western.” Democracy seems to be working very well in Japan.
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p>Without these foundations, “democracy” is little more than mob rule. How familiar are you with the how effectively “democracy” worked in the deep south during the reconstruction era?
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p>The argument that expanding our military presence in Afghanistan is somehow “cleaning up” a mess we made founders on the same rocks that sunk the seventies-era Vietnam argument that “we will not allow our boys to have died in vain.”
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p>We are not “cleaning up” anything. Instead, you propose to continue digging in a hole that is already difficult to climb out of. I suggest that it’s time to stop digging, drop the shovels, and climb out of the hole however we can. All involved are already covered in mud, and continued digging only worsens the situation.
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p>I suggest that “Marshall Plan” approach is far more likely to succeed than any military plan. Perhaps this is an area where we can invite a Republican “free market” approach to prove itself. Let those who feel that investing billions of dollars in Afghanistan is vital to America’s strategic interests put their own money at risk. I think our government’s increasingly limited resources are far more desperately needed closer to home.
Like AmberPaw, your heart is certainly in the right place here, but the level of corruption in Afghanistan is staggering. That makes it difficult to disperse aid.
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p>There’s some scholarship about patronage systems in the ancient Mediterranean world. I suspect such systems resemble the tribal structures in places like Afghanistan. Resources move very differently through a patronal system than they do through, say, a modern capitalist country. Values of the participants in a patronal system might strike us moderns as being corrupt and in violation of our meritocratic view as to who should lead and follow.
I’m aware of the
corruptionpatronage, and share your concerns. Hence my suggestion that those who take the risk be limited to those who (a) have the necessary cash and (b) have the willingness see that cash squandered on bribes.<
p>Personally, I don’t think the US Government should be there at all — either militarily or economically.
I think we can call it “corrupt” if we’re trying to make a modern nation-state out of it. If we are wearing our anthropologist disguises, it’d be fine to call it patronage.
Leaving the country in the condition it is not any realistic solution. Helping them to democracy is the main goal but they must not let the people who created the problems continue to stand in the way of progress
… the Taliban and Al Quada represent the monster that our organizing help morphed into. The wahabbi madrassas were a result of our importing central middle eastern ‘freedom fighters’ into the conflict. Problem is, after we brought them over they kind of took over. In other words, the forces at play in the area are at least half our fault because of the particular way we played the cold war in the area by proxy. The proxy players we brought in and armed became far more powerful than the natives we were trying to help (by necessity – we wanted them to rout the Russian army), and now they run the place in ways that are (to put it mildly) no longer helpful.
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p>I don’t know of an analogous situation anywhere else.
Destruction of the Taliban should not a war objective in itself.
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p>Their sin was that they sheltered our enemy. They have paid a terrible price for that misjudgment. They are not the ones, however, who attacked us on 9/11. To capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda colleagues is a specific, comprehensible, justified objective. The rest is mission creep and as unattainable as permanent occupation of Afghanistan.
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p>In fact, the transformation of the war against AQ into an unwinnable “War on Terror” (just like a “war on disease” or a “war on hate” is unwinnable), with a local manifestation as a war on the Taliban, is a big part of the reason we have gotten bogged down in that country.
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p>The #1 problem in Afghanistan is a lack of focus caused by having forgotten why we went there in the first place.
… your ‘promotion’ comment and thought:
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p>”‘Kick out the Soviets from Afghanistan. Everything else is incidental.’ – Isn’t that attitude what got us into trouble in the first place?”
I don’t think the U.S. should abandon Afghanistan in humanitarian terms — the way we did after the Soviets left — if we are able to accomplish the objective I stated, I just think we should withdraw all of our troops at that point and help the country develop economically.
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p>In fact, one reason for the success we had in getting the Soviets out of Afghanistan was that we kept our focus on the task at hand and avoided mission creep i.e. we didn’t take on the Taliban equivalents at the time, we focused on helping anyone who was opposed to the Soviets. First things first, or we’ll never get to the second things.
… ‘follow through’ is part of ‘everything else’ and thus isn’t ‘incidental’,… which was my original point.
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p>I’d offer that the lack of mission creep was more due to two different (but related) things: 1) our desire not to be drawn into an escalation. 2) maintaining plausible deniability for our activities in the area.
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p>I’m finding it hard to imagine a universe where we withdraw and are able to help the country develop economically at anything other than a snail’s pace that only really pays lip service to ‘help’. The standing institutions simply aren’t the kind that can ‘accept’ the kind of economic help we can effectively give ‘from afar’.
That said, the only way to avoid risking a WW III was to do it through proxies. Perhaps Proxies ‘R’ Us only had Islamist extremists in stock when we stopped by.
Leave a small footprint force of drones and special forces and hunt down AQ, capture or kill OBL, and let the Afghans fight their civil war themselves. This civil war has been on and off since they deposed their King in the 1970’s. The Russians made the mistake of choosing a side and backing it, and we are making the same mistake now.
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p>Incidentally to destroy AQ and capture/kill OBL would require extensive incursions into Pakistan that possibly destabilize that government begging the question if its better to leave that hay unturned. I could care less if Afghanistan is unstable, but Pakistan has nuclear weapons and I do not want them falling into the wrong hands. That is the real foreign policy problem.
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p>The irony is President Obama will be blamed for ‘losing’ Afghanistan when it was really George W. Bush who did so by not sending in ground troops to Tora Bora and diverting our resources to a war of choice in Iraq.
…that Joe have a long chat with Caroline Kennedy about the pitfalls of assuming a seat belongs to him.
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p>I think Joe starts with an advantage due to his family, but I don’t see it as an unbeatable advantage. If he gaffes a couple times, and polls start showing him tied or trailing a strong Republican, all bets are off for the primary.
Obviously meant to be a comment on the immediately preceding post. Ooops.
“make Afghans feel secure”, send in the Peace Corps. Somehow fully armed American soldiers pointing their weapons at anything that moves is not the best way to make civilians feel secure.
how that works, isn’t it? They apparently can’t tell that our tanks, machine guns, and rifles are expressions of love. They’re completely misinterpreting the airstrikes on their weddings and funerals, too.
Destruction and/or “minimizing” Al Qaeda should have been and should continue to be the mission of our presence there. I think we should concentrate our diplomacy on the neighboring country of Pakistan which has nuclear weapons and instability which is a very dangerous situation for the region an the world.
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p>It is time for us to seriously consider an exit plan which minimizes our loses and potentially begin a dialogue with the Taliban members who are less friendly with AQ.
Washington Post on Taliban fighting capacity:
New York Times on how the Afghan government is incompetent at cheating, too:
The whole story is worth reading. The Times also reports that there are more contractors than troops in Afghanistan. In a separate report, we learn that those contractors are not all well-behaved.
It is time for us to kill who we need to, mainly Al Qaeda terrorists (who are incidentally mostly foreign nationals-not native Afghani’s) and go home. I don’t care if Karzai is a dictator, I trust him not to harbor terrorists. President Obama is foolishly following his predecessor’s thinking that setting up elections in an area that has never had any in its three thousand year history will suddenly create an oasis of democracy in Afghanistan. It won’t. Tribal warlords have ruled over the country for centuries and nobody ever complained. Attempts to change that reality ended in horrible quagmires that buried many Greeks, Romans, British, Russians, Soviets, and now will bury many more Americans. For what?
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p>The Taliban didn’t plan and coordinate 9/11. They could barely hold their own country together and would have lost to the Northern Alliance with or without our help. Their military know how is limited to launching stinger missiles, firing AKs, and blowing up hostile statues. There is no way these guys have the resources or the capabilities to directly threaten the United States-therefore I see no reason for us to care about what they do. We scattered and separated them from AQ, as soon as we leave Karzai and his warlords will maintain control of the country leaving the Taliban to control little pockets to the South and West.
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p>Much like containment worked in Iraq it could work here. So long as we maintain airbases from which to launch precision strikes and a small contingent of forward operating bases for special forces-we can keep AQ at bay.
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p>The focus should now be on Pakistan and the President should focus all of our intelligence resources into pinpointing where their nukes are so we can take em out if Islamists get the bomb.
Gates thinks we should stay. I haven’t heard anything yet about more troops but he sure sounds like he wants more
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I’ve been pursuing this discussion because it was not clear to me what the correct policy is. The developing consensus on the left is that we should leave. George Will, on the right, now agrees with that. (Surprising, no?)
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p>Right now, the Gates and Chrystal seem to be making a proposal akin to building a bridge over the Charles made of gold and diamonds. However worthy that goal (or gold) may be, it’s too expensive, we’ll never finish it. A bridge made of gold and diamonds that goes only one-third the way over the Charles will not be useful to anyone. How many must diamond before they’d realize that?