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Why we can't win in Afghanistan
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General McChrystal meeting with U-S and Afghan commanders (NYT)
Picture a nation controlled more by warlords with a vested interest in their own way of life.
Think of a nation supplying the West with a drug it craves and no way to stop its manufacture or its delivery because of an incompetent and equally corrupted security force.
And as it happens, this is also a nation with a critical role to play in the world's energy future.
Welcome to Mexico, a country that, while safe to travel provided you stay on the main drag, is a nation that, in its own way, undermines the safety, security and well-being of the United States.
So if we're so gung ho on nation building, why not fix Mexico by sending 40- or 60- or 80,000 troops across the border, wipe out those drug lords and gun runners. We could establish a proper and efficient government in Mexico City, turn their military and police into a competent security force, reform the school system and set up a WPA-like public works program to build things like roads, bridges, dams and parks so their unemployed citizens will have jobs and stop looking for work in our own country. I figure we can spend about a trillion dollars over 10 years, whaddya think?
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Of course, we're not doing that. Any politician making such a suggestion would be tossed out of Washington on a rail, and not even a lunatic pundit would posit such an idea. Well, Glenn Beck is loony enough; he might. Yet, we're prepared to spend what is likely to be a trillion over the next 10 years in a land that is more a patchwork quilt of tribal territories than a country, whose uncompromising geography has been the death knell for countless invaders and occupiers, not to mention the makings of the ultimate hiding place, and in case you aren't a wizard at cartography, it's nowhere near our borders.
But in a sharply written article, a retired Army officer Andrew Bacevich points out in the November issue of Harper's that "the contrast between Washington's preoccupation with Afghanistan and its relative indifference to Mexico testifies to the distortion of U-S national-security priorities adopted by George W. Bush in his post-9/11 prophetic mode --distortions now being endorsed by his successor."
Sure enough, President Obama is leaning toward sending about 34-thousand soldiers.
According to the story by McClatchy, the idea is to split the difference between war critics who don't want to send another soldier and General Stanley McChrystal, who has requested at least 40,000 more troops and said 80,000 would be ideal.
The president will make the announcement by month's end, and soldiers would deploy in waves, beginning next March, reaching the 34,000-troop level by the end of next year.
Here's the bad news: It won't matter. Even if we succeed, it won't matter, keeping in mind the inconvenient caveat that it still isn't exactly clear what we're attempting to succeed at.
General David Petraeus, now the head of U-S Central Command, recently said that "the mission is to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and other transnational extremists." That is, "to deny them safe havens in which they can plan and train for such attacks."
Sounds like a solid idea. The problem is in how you go about it.
On patrol, troops routinely encounter roadside bombs (NYT)
Outside the potential for renewed instability in Iraq, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, another long war aficionado, wants to keep 30,000 or more troops in Iraq until 2014 or 2015. And in Afghanistan:
"What McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge …McChrystal's plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men. And that's if it succeeds."
Mexico is starting to look good.
McChrystal's deputy, Gen. Michael Flynn, believes "it's probably going to take us three years to really turn the insurgency to the point where it's waning instead of waxing. To do that we have to fix the Afghan security forces, we have to build their capacity and capability, and we have to absolutely culturally change the way they operate. And then I think beyond those three years, we are looking at another two years when the government of Afghanistan and the security forces of Afghanistan begin to take a lot more personal responsibility." 
Marines on patrol in the perilous, desolate Afghan desert (NYT)
Marines on patrol in the perilous, desolate Afghan desert (NYT)
Yet a number of internal reports say such a timeline for training Afghan troops is overly optimistic. About "one out of every four or five" members of the Afghan forces quits every year, meaning that there has to be a constant recruitment effort and the number of battalions able to fight independently has been on the decline. Also, there aren't enough American trainers, and there have been repeated problems with facilities to train and house new recruits, who are, for the most part, poorly led and illiterate.
The McClatchy scoop notes that the 34,000 troops would be joined by 7,000 support troops to man the command center in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, presumably to conduct the training exercises but General Flynn is on record saying that "the challenge to us is: What can we do in 12 months? What should we expect? if people's expectations are that we are going to have the south turned around, for instance, it’s not going to happen."
Guess what's in "the south": Kandahar.
Suppose we give the long war generals the benefit of the doubt. General David Petraeus says the goal in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda and other transnational extremists a safe haven in which they can plan and train for attacks against, presumably, the United States.
What's to stop al-Qaeda from setting up shop elsewhere, anywhere instability exists? The Sudan, perhaps? You don't think al-Qaeda isn't well entrenched in Pakistan? And they're supposed to be an ally. We know that because we give them billions in U-S foreign aid; isn't that the definition of an ally?
We continue to fight this war as if there's "a central front in the war on terror." There isn't. Terrorism has no central front; it can be anywhere or go anywhere, and wherever they are, would it not make better sense to let the local authorities do the heavy lifting? In the case of Afghanistan, the tribal chiefs run the country and are best positioned to prevent a terrorist network from establishing a large-scale presence. Provide them with the appropriate incentives while we rely on intensive surveillance complemented with precision punitive strikes (assuming we can manage to kill off the right people). It's certainly a cheaper and more efficient alternative 
Marines take shelter after a firefight with Taliban fighters (NYT)to the long war ground presence which, as our campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, has the unintended effect of handing jihadists a recruiting tool that they are quick to exploit.
Marines take shelter after a firefight with Taliban fighters (NYT)
And then, if Washington suddenly finds itself with a trillion dollars it doesn't know what to do with now that we're not spending it on a 10- or 20-year adventure in Afghanistan, we might actually try spending some of our tax dollars on a little nation-building here at home. There is that nasty bugaboo, health care, but there's certainly the maintenance of robust security and defenses that help keep the nation safe, and so far, have done a darn good job of it thanks to the prime efforts of law enforcement agencies at every level, federal, state and local.
Or we could invade Mexico.
There's a real serious question we need to ask ourselves: What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies our intense attention? In Washington, this question not only goes unanswered, it doesn't even get asked. It needs to because the bottom line is simple: Afghanistan is not only a war we can't win, it's not a war we need to win, and it wouldn't matter if we did. As disappointing as it may 
sound to all those poor, disillusioned neoconservatives, the reality is that we can't eliminate every last armed militant lunatic harboring hatred against the West, nor do we need to. As long as we maintain adequate defenses, al-Qaeda operatives buried in their caves pose no more than a modest threat, and unless they establish enclaves in places like New Jersey or Miami (at which they've failed thanks to diligent local law enforcement), the danger they pose to the United States falls several notches below the threat posed by, well… Mexico.
sound to all those poor, disillusioned neoconservatives, the reality is that we can't eliminate every last armed militant lunatic harboring hatred against the West, nor do we need to. As long as we maintain adequate defenses, al-Qaeda operatives buried in their caves pose no more than a modest threat, and unless they establish enclaves in places like New Jersey or Miami (at which they've failed thanks to diligent local law enforcement), the danger they pose to the United States falls several notches below the threat posed by, well… Mexico.
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