Time and the War
When I say “Time” in this headline, I am referring to the recent time magazine cover depicting a young girl who has had her nose cut off by a Taliban fighter who “owned” her as a result of a family debt to the fighter. The fighter was abusive, she fled him, and he cut off her nose and ears. The Time headline on the cover is “What Will Happen If We Leave Afghanistan.”
Okay. So there are obviously some problems here. The basic premise of the Afghanistan War is, in this writer’s opinion, indisputably “good.” It was to remove a brutal theocratic regime that was housing and protecting the terrorists who murdered 3,000 of our number on September 11. Removing that regime from power is a “good” thing on its face. Hell, removing Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party from power was a “good” thing at its face, but the truth about these wars is that we are very good at setting a philosophical basis for the wars, but we suck at the execution.
I say this because analysts are starting to suspect that victory may not be possible in Afghanistan. On NPR the other day, an interviewer asked an analyst what was at stake if we pulled out, and he simply said, “If we can’t win the war, why ask that question anyway?”
What’s upsetting here is to see Afghanistan turn into another Vietnam. The basis of the war in Vietnam was far more suspect, but they seem to be ending the same way. It’s like we didn’t learn our lesson. It’s like we didn’t look to the British or the Soviets history in Afghanistan and say, what are we going to do differently?
What’s worse, the less legitimate (and, by International law standards the illegal) war in Iraq seems to be… succeeding. To succeed where we’re wrong and fail where we’re right! America as a Shakespearean tragic hero.
We are already experiencing a discontent public with war in Afghanistan, and the Taliban have explicitly said they are playing a waiting game. The perennial ethical dilemma is, do we stay there if we’re not going to actually fix the problem? Is it abandoning a people we promised (perhaps wrongly) to save?
Probably, yes. There is no doubt that the war was handled negligently during the Bush years, and our overtures of “nation-building” were, if not disingenuous, ultimately doomed.
The ethical dilemmas here are unbelievably deep. A war justified from the start, a GOOD war (if there can be such thing), mishandled and mismanaged. A people we should have been rescuing left and abandoned. And now, with a new, significantly more responsible President trying to “end” the war, but cynically declaring a draw-down and pull-out immediately prior to his re-election. This isn’t a new story, the common people being screwed by the higher ups. But it never gets easier to watch.
So we’ll spend more time in Afghanistan, but because there is no credible central government, because Pakistan is supporting the insurgency while declaring themselves an ally of the United States, because we still haven’t figured out the Vietnamese problem of fighting a guerrilla enemy indistinguishable from the innocents, we’ll probably lose. And if Afghanistan falls, what happens will be infinitely more horrific but no less painful than our helplessness at being unable to stop it.
“because we still haven’t figured out the Vietnamese problem of fighting a guerrilla enemy indistinguishable from the innocents”
You obviously have not been to Afghanistan and have zero credibility when it comes to counter-insurgency. The news media today tells stories that want to be heard, not the whole truth. Look at the once violent districts of Now Zad and Nawa in Helmand province….or wait good luck finding any news about it. Those are the stories that prove our counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine is working, but you won’t hear them. COIN is separated into three phases Clear, Hold, Build. One cannot move on to the next phase until the previous phase is complete. The only stories that make the news are of districts in the “clear” phase. Once that phase is passed it will never make the news and if it does you won’t find the story unless you search for it. Even after searching for the story you would probably find that it was from a DoD news source not civilian media. So this seems once again to be a case of a civilian talking about a war he knows very little about, and probably cares very little to find out about. You proved it yourself, “What’s worse, the less legitimate (and, by International law standards the illegal) war in Iraq seems to be… succeeding.” I can remember a time when the war in Iraq was called a Quagmire, Vietnam, Unwinnable, etc. It seems like the civilian media is eating their words on that one now. If we leave Afghanistan without security forces that are able to stand on their own the Taliban will take it back over and the result will be a far more “terrorist-friendly” environment. I know i wouldn’t be willing to fight for this country again if the lives lost in these wars were squandered because a war was deemed unwinnable by the press.