US Marines in Helmand Province
As the war in Afghanistan enters into its eighth year with the situation on the ground rapidly deteriorating and Osama bin Laden nowhere to be found; with a naïve new president doubtless being pulled in several different directions by the various powerbrokers that be hesitant to make a decision regarding the direction and, indeed the ultimate aim of the war; with the global economy in shambles and the dollar on the verge of collapse, the current dire state of affairs begs the question: why? Why are we still in Afghanistan? Why have we not yet won? How could it be that we have not, after eight long years of war, captured bin Laden? These are among the many questions asked over the last several years, however the most important question – one that some of us have not been afraid to ask is this: are we even fighting to win?
To be sure, this question of whether we are fighting to win is directed at the politicians, the bureaucrats, the Pentagon, and the White House – all the political elite. It goes without saying that the men and women in harms way are fighting to win every single day, because for them winning means survival: the scope of the bigger mission becomes very narrow for a handful of soldiers coming under fire and their focus quickly becomes keeping each other alive. The problem is that these men and women are largely being used as pawns, having long ago been abandoned by the same politicians who continually demand and push for war amid flag-waving and pomp, tough talking speeches that result in the death and maiming of countless victims on both sides. These scoundrels are all too quick to pull the trigger and flex the military might of the United States to impose its will or right some perceived wrong somewhere in the world, but once engaged they quickly lose heart and deny the military the very things they need for victory, condemning the troops to multiple tours and suffering a deadly slug-fest that these politicians soon enough are afraid to win, because of the cost they never bothered to calculate at the outset.
But the cost that concerns these elitists the most is not the cost of human lives on either side, nor is it even the material cost in terms of money; rather, it is the cost to themselves that they fear the most – being viewed by the rest of the civilized world as a warmonger and a butcher. Sadly for all, by the time this lesson is even realized by the political elites, it is too late, for they have deservingly incurred this reputation regardless of the ultimate outcome of their splendid little wars. They cowardly shrink away from the notion of bringing to a conclusion that which they have previously begun, and leave lives hanging in the balance while they hold high-level meetings and discuss redefining their goals and aims. While they carry on with their gentlemanly debates in luxury provided by the fathers and mothers and sons and daughters of those doing the actual fighting, Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and Sailors die on the other side of the world because they are being denied even a chance at victory. Those men and women throughout the theater, in the FOBs and in the mountains and foxholes, know that they have been abandoned but yet they continue to fight for those around them even if all seems lost because, they possess innately something most of the political elites who sent them there will never know- honor.
Marines patrolling with Afghan nationals
To clarify, I do not at this stage begrudge Mr. Obama his hesitancy in making a decision. I hope it is because he understands the true gravity of the current situation and because he is most assuredly being ill-advised by all the self-interested parties looking to save face at the expense of untold lives of young Americans and Afghans. To be sure, Mr. Obama is a novice on the world stage, and like the vast majority of his predecessors, ill equipped and likely incapable of directing a war to victory. Politicians are not military tacticians and ought to place their trust in those personnel supposedly entrusted to accomplish the desired mission in the same way the people who elected them to high office trust them to accomplish their mission.
The grand irony of a republic that gives the civilian government control over the military is that the civilian politicians are in a position to dictate the terms of warfare to the professional military officers who are then charged with carrying it out; and, the overwhelming majority of these politicians, Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush included, have absolutely no business whatsoever second guessing the experience and tactical assessments of career military officers. One must realize that the single most important and divisive issue arising between the military and the president and his administration once the nation is embroiled in war is that the politicians suffer a severe disconnect from the glaring reality of what war is in that the politician just wants the war to come to a speedy victory with minimum casualties and for everything to turn out OK. Conversely, the military understands that by virtue of the fact that the nation is at war everything can never be OK, because a heavy price must be paid by all: to achieve victory painful decisions must be made that will cost money and, more importantly, lives. To think that general officers do not anguish over such decisions to the point of losing sleep is moronic. No one understands the reality of war better than those who have been there and suffered its irreversible consequences. It is a guarantee that the career military officer who has commanded men in combat two or three times over the course of his career and lived to tell about it has a far superior understanding of what is necessary to win a war than does the civilian politician – with the possible exception, of course, of those politicians who have served in combat.
War is costly in lives and money. It is also costly in political capital, and unfortunately this particular calculation tends to carry the most weight in the modern welfare-warfare state. Equally unfortunate is the easy money policies of modern central banks that create fiat money and credit out of thin air as demanded to fund various government programs, inclusive of war. With ample money to fund the wars seemingly at hand, the politicians of late have been less cautious about giving much forethought to the consequences of their saber-rattling and far are more prone to hastily enter into armed conflict than at any other time in history. Fiat money enables this mentality directly: because the currency is not tied to a commodity, such as gold, then the central banks are literally able to create money and credit out of thin air – producing something from nothing in their minds. If the money were commodity based and unable to be inflated by the central bank, its quantity being fixed, then the only recourse politicians would have to pay for their wars would be to tax the people and force the economy into a “war socialism” mode. The people would grow intolerant of this very quickly, and the politicians know it. If one considers how many armed conflicts the United States has been engaged in since the end of World War II, and especially since going off the gold standard in 1971, one can easily see this played out because there has been an almost constant military action somewhere, for one reason or another. War, instead of being the choice of last resort once all diplomacy has failed to resolve a conflict between nations, has now become a most useful tool of the political elite to distract the masses of people from their corrupt agendas and miserable policy failures.
Armed conflict is war, whether it lasts three days or thirty years. Calling war a mere “policing action,” “nation building,” “armed conflict” or anything else is a mere semantic game employed to circumvent the Constitutional process for an actual declaration of war coming from the Congress. Indeed, many of the war hawks in Congress are certainly pleased with this arrangement as they get their war with the added benefit of plausible deniability, and the blame for the war is placed almost universally on the particular administration in power at the time. It is important to note that while these politicians are playing semantic and political games, military personnel and others are dying on the other side of the world.
What is most curious, however, is the fact that while these politicians believe they have virtually unlimited funding to propagate their wars, a mass of military might and professionalism unmatched in the world, and a predisposition to hastily enter into armed conflict, that they do not employ the military power at their disposal to quickly overwhelm the adversary and force them to capitulate by force of violence. It is this strange fact that betrays their greatest crime – hypocrisy.
3rd BN 509 INF Airnorne at CO Zerok
I say hypocrisy because I cannot call it anything but. They enter into war boasting of the might of the American military, yet they do not employ it. Instead they merely allow a barely adequate number of personnel to be deployed so as not to offend the “hosting” nation, they compromise on various crucial elements necessary for a speedy victory so as to encourage the participation of a multinational force, they deny them the tools and the numbers they need to win quickly, and then question the capabilities of the commanders. It is a preposterous as it is criminal. If it is our war and it is worthy of fighting, why make concessions in order to win the support of other nations? If it is our war we ought to fight it. If it is someone else’s war, they ought to fight it and we ought to stay out of it. And, if we are going to fight we must be honest and fight to win and not get bogged down by looking for an international consensus approving of our actions and end up in a place where meetings are being held at the highest levels of military and government to re-examine what we mean by achieving a victory. Once anyone at the highest levels must question what “victory” means, then the cause is as good as lost, and the troops in the field abandoned, and anyone at any level who will not admit this is simply being dishonest. Victory only means one thing: completely defeating the enemy, by either forcing him to terms of an unconditional surrender and occupation, or by obliterating him. The problem for civilian governments is that real victory can only be achieved through overwhelming force of violence where casualties will be exceedingly high. Civilian governments in the western hemisphere rarely have the stomach to finish what they start these days.
It is a very sad irony. The political elites that push for war expect the impossible because the vast majority of them do not posses even the most elementary understanding of warfare, economics, or human action. They only understand politics – the politics of “me”. They assume that simply because ours is the most powerful military in the history of the world that if we were to send a mere fraction of the total complement into a theater then a swift victory is all but assured. This type of thinking is as moronic when applied to Afghanistan as it is to Iraq or to any place else. To win a war one must intend to win from the very beginning and must be prepared and dedicated well in advance to perform whatever actions are necessary to defeat the enemy. The present political elites are unwilling to follow through because they cannot stomach incurring the disdain of other nations for inflicting such brutality and destruction upon another nation. He who has overwhelming capabilities and does not use them to the fullest extent possible has already conceded defeat. This is where the political elites are detached from reality. If one is not ready to employ all at his disposal to achieve total victory as swiftly as possible, then it begs the question: why go to war in the first place?
War is no game. War is brutal. It is deadly. It inflicts suffering on peoples for generations after the conflict has ended. To win one must employ ruthless judgment and coldly accept the fact that many, many people must perish for the goal of victory to be achieved. Fighting wars incrementally is a modern practice that serves only to prolong the agony and benefit no one in the end, because by deliberately not dedicating the full force of the nation and its military might behind the cause neither side will win. The war quickly becomes a war of attrition, and the people soon grow war weary and demand the conflict to end. There comes a point where the decision has to be made: fight to win, or get out. The United States has reached that point in Afghanistan.
As I have said, I do not begrudge Mr. Obama’s hesitancy to make a decision in light of the fact that he, as nearly all of his predecessors, is wholly unqualified to make such decisions. This holds true for Mr. Obama in a unique way because he is a true globalist seeking to blur national borders, economies, and peoples under the guise of a new global “peace.” He believes in a transnational ideal where the nationalistic tendencies of all ought to be subjected to the consensus of international law. He, along with many others, claims that achieving this ideal will bring peace. But does he think that such a thing can be achieved without use of force? It would grossly naïve to make such an assumption. How many nations will cede their very sovereignty to a world body via a U.N. pseudo-government or a new global currency and monetary system without a fight? Such a question thus leads one to also question the reasoning behind so many of our wars: can a peace be truly achieved through the violence of war? Enforced, maybe. Achieved by repeated compromise in search of consensus, never.
No sensible person is a proponent of war except in the gravest of extremes. That said, there are times when war is unavoidable and must be fought. But what happens when the war effort is undermined by the very political elites who should be enabling the conditions for victory? What happens when the mission objective changes repeatedly? What happens when nation building and pandering to global bodies supercedes defeating the enemy? What happens when our troops are bound by rules of engagement that deny them the ability to win, simply to please those other nations who have committed no troops to the effort? What happens when we begin to debate tolerating the presence of our current enemy as a part of the “solution?” What happens when after eight long years of war we are debating that we can accept as “victory?”
Our political elites could and should learn a poignant lesson from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: the Soviet government overwhelmed the Afghans with men and materiel, technology, violence and brutality for a decade. Then they pulled out in defeat. Our politicians have kept our military on a tight leash so as not offend the other nations of the world. They have sought to win over the minds and hearts of the people of that country which is a noble ideal and has surely succeeded to some extent. But, a military conflict is not only about winning hearts and minds – it is first and foremost about defeating the enemy. Perhaps Mr. Obama might do well to speak with Mr. Gorbachev. Perhaps he might do well to make an appeal to his friends at the United Nations and NATO once again. There are many things he could do, but there is one thing he must do: he must trust his general officers and authorize his professional military to do what is necessary to win, or he must end the war now. There is no other course.
AP Photos: top and middle by Brennan Linsley; bottom by Dima Gavrysh
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