On the latest Afghanistan troop surge
Yesterday, President Obama requested that additional troops be sent to Afghanistan, the New York Times reports. The actual number of soldiers is unknown, but according to the Times piece, “senior advisers to the president have said Mr. Obama intends to commit roughly 30,000 more troops.”
News from this conflict gets worse and worse with each passing day. This is a war that our top military commander admitted in August that we are losing. This is a nation which the Russians and the Brits both failed to “defeat” in the past, while employing many of the strategies we have planned for the next phases of the war (as Daily Kos‘ Markos Moulitsas and former CIA agent Jack Rice pointed out on MSNBC last week). This is an imperial adventure that a majority of Americans no longer support.
But my sense of the practical idiocy of Obama’s decision is overwhelmed by my sense that our politicians’ current understanding of foreign policy precludes these idiotic decisions. Our leaders, right and left, fail to realize that President Bush’s “War on Terror” was exactly wrong because it involved, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, an illegal imposition of American force on another nation. (Not that the 9/11 attacks, also an illegal imposition of force, were any better… but as every child learns, two wrongs don’t make a right.) The responsibility of other nations to sort themselves out ought to be respected, and the United States would be much better off setting an example for the world in this way. Unfortunately, Obama has done very little to change our approach, as today’s news underscores.
It was our fundamental misunderstanding of this — through our disproportionate military and economic support of Israel (which is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a colonizing power in the Arab world) among other imperial actions in the Middle East — that radicalized Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists. Why can’t Obama recognize that these wars get harder to “win” the longer we fight them?
The only way to stop the bleeding, then, is to admit defeat and lay down our arms. The same principle ought to be applied in Iraq. Like someone watching a Dane Cook comedy special Clockwork Orange-style — and honestly, what worse a vision of hell is there than that? — we are stuck in a Vicious Circle. And our policy, to this point, has been no less awful than that man’s comedy.
In a way, the problem with our current strategy for “democratizing” the Middle East is very similar to the problem with our current strategy for “rescuing” the economy. As economist Peter Schiff has pointed out, the only thing worse than a devastating recession created by a credit bubble was our response: to extend and loosen credit. Similarly, I would argue, the only thing worse than the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 — whose conditions were created by a century of Western encroachment in the Middle East — was our response: to extend and increase Western encroachment in the Middle East.
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If you were around during Vietnam — and especially if you were in the Army — you heard most of the same arguments: just few more thousands of young men, just a few more billions of dollars, just a few more months, and we’ll have turned the corner. We’re sooooo close (after 8 years) that we can’t stop now. The pride and reputation of too many politicians and “analysts” are riding on it. (Actually, you didn’t hear the last statement — officially — but it’s the truest and saddest statement of all.)
Senator George Aiken, Republican of Vermont, made the wisest suggestion at the time: Declare victory in Vietnam and get out.
So the Taliban win in Afghanistan. Who cares? The place is a hellhole wrapped in chaos inside a madhouse. Just bring our service members and money home and use them to ratchet up by a power of 10 the security of the country so that the bad guys outside can’t get in and the bad guys within are hunted down and get what they bloody well deserve. Back in Afghanistan they can turn their murderous efforts on each other.
It’s a damn shame you weren’t in charge when 9/11 happened. I mean, shit- we’d all be in much better shape if only our leaders had been wise enough then to see the pearls you lay before our eyes now!
More, Calvin, more- I beg you! For the good of mankind!
Sarcasm is easy, Bob, but do you have any actual ideas?
I agree with Calvin that we are making more trouble for ourselves and absolutely not making the world a safer place and I’ve been saying that ever since we first went into Iraq. Before we engaged in military action there was a large secular moderate muslim population; where are they now? I will go even further and say that in a region that is full of warring tribes you need a strong man like Saddam to keep peace and it was bullshit to say we took him down because of “human rights violations”. The Shah of Iran, whom we were in bed with, was guilty of much worse human rights violations, including the most horrific torture, some of which was taught to him by the US. It’s always been about the oil in the Middle East and to pretend it’s about anything else is bullshit. That’s why we need energy independence.