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A Surge in Afghanistan?
A SURGE IN AFGHANISTAN?....Iraq is hardly a finished success story yet, but there's no question that violence is down, security is up, and political reconciliation is at least a distant possibility. Credit for this goes to the Five S's:
Surge
Sectarian cleansing
Separation barriers throughout Baghdad
Sadr's ceasefire
Sunni awakening movements
So do we need a surge in Afghanistan? A better question is: can a surge succeed without the other four S's? After all, Afghanistan may be full of tribal animosities, but none of those tribes are going anywhere. Furthermore, Afghanistan doesn't have a single key city like Baghdad where separating those tribes with miles of concrete barriers is both feasible and productive; the Taliban hasn't and won't declare a ceasefire; and since the Taliban is fundamentally an ideological movement, not a sectarian one, there's not much hope for any kind of "Awakening" movement that will sap their strength. Bottom line: One S is the most we'll get.
Unfortunately, Fred Kaplan suggests that we can't even count on that. The effectiveness of the Iraqi surge depended on flooding a single city — Baghdad — with troops. But in Afghanistan there's no single city that we can focus all our attention on:
The ultimate military goal — one lesson from Petraeus' strategy in Iraq that is worth learning and might be applicable — is to protect the Afghan population, and that requires putting a lot of troops in the neighborhoods of towns and villages, to provide security and build trust. It might be possible to do this in Afghanistan, just as it was done in many Iraqi neighborhoods with one important difference — it has to be done by the Afghan National Army, not by us.
There are a few reasons for this. First, we simply can't do it. Stephen Biddle — a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, who was an adviser on some aspects of Iraq strategy — estimates that securing the Afghan population would require about 500,000 troops. That's 10 times the combined number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan now. We don't have anywhere near this level of manpower to spare (the three extra U.S. brigades under consideration would amount to about 12,000 troops), and even if we did, and even if we wanted to send them, we'd have no way to maintain them.
So what should we do instead? Kaplan suggests building up the Afghan army, airdropping mountains of money on the region, and paying way more serious attention to Afghanistan's most troubling neighbor: "Pakistan is not a sideshow to Afghanistan. It is the main show, dwarfing every other problem in the region." Read the rest for more.
Kaplan suggests... airdropping mountains of money on the region...
This is a joke, right? Maybe we could offer them boatloads of AIG shares instead.
Surely this Friday McCain will press Obama on why he won't admit the surge is a "big success".
Obama would be wise to turn it around by asking McCain why he thinks a surge will work in Afghanistan. I don't know if "I have confidence in our troops and General David Petraeus" is going to cut it, no matter how many times he repeats it.
This does not conflict with your conclusions, but actually the "surge" didn't work in Iraq.
What did work was mainly two things: Ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, and the deals struck by the US military with the Sunni resistance (remember "we don't negotiate with terrorists"? Well, they did negotiate with the sunni resistance, and a good thing too). As long as a significant proportion of the Iraqi population support violent attacks on American troops, military escalation is unlikely to achieve anything good, unless they want to pull a "Fallujah" in Baghdad and Basra.
As for Afghanistan, the positive effects of an escalation would be even more ephemeral. What they really need is to get in someone qualified to make negotiations across ethnic boundaries, and across the borders of the Pakistani provinces not controlled by the Pakistani government. (This could by done without starting a war - note, it says *negotiations*).
Afghanistan's proximity to the Asian and Middle Eastern oil fields and to Russia make it appealing to imperial war planners, which is why Mr. Kaplan considers Afghanistan the main show. There is no other national security reason to occupy Afghanistan. There is no 'show' in Afghanistan. The value of Afghanistan is as a geographically strategic location to launch new attacks from.
Can someone please explain to me how a level of day-to-day violence greater on average than the Sri Lankan or Lebanese civil war is trumpeted about as a great "success"? Talk about low expectations! If someone had told me in 2002 that 30 U.S. troops would still be getting killed every month in Iraq, even I (a hardcore opponent of the war) would be surprised. Just as I would be surprised to hear that bombs would still be killing scores of Iraqis on a daily basis five years on.
Soft bigotry of low expectations, Kevin. Iraq is still a complete shitstorm by any measure other than itself a year ago. Most nations work very hard to NEVER be in the kind of position Iraq is in now. Improvement? Yes. But I noticed the reduction in violence has itself kind of leveled off, and not by any means at a good place. At a level that would be a nightmare for any other nation in the world.
Remember the horrible "Georgian War" a few weeks ago? How many people died in that? How many people die every week in Baghdad?
Let's be honest. The Sunni Awakening had more to do with paying insurgents to behave than any philosophical shift. The four other S's probably played some role, but collectively couldn't deliver the results achieved by good old fashioned bribery.
The problem in both Iraq and Afghanistan is that the U.S. is on the wrong side of justice and morality, and people who do not realize this grossly underestimate the effort needed to force injustice on other nations.
Bin Laden attacked us, making him fair game. With hindsight, we can say for certain that Bush has no diplomatic skills, and the neocons are bullies who fancied that "the world's only superpower" could use force to get their way, so it is difficult to reconstruct what might have come out of a sincere diplomatic approach to the Taliban aimed at getting them to turn over bin Laden. If we then truly had to invade Afghanistan, the campaign should have been limited to getting bin Laden. Fighting the Taliban and forcing American culture on the country is far in excess of what is justified by 9/11.
Iraq didn't want a war with the US and was no threat. The administration had Walter Mitty fantasies of WWII apparently--it would be like liberating France from the Hun and getting garlands of flowers and kisses from French girls while saving the poor Jews from Hitler. The proper fantasy would have been imagining oneself a 19th century colonialist putting down native rebellions with massive firepower and technical superiority. As far as saving the Jews from Hitler/Saddam/Arabs, it's really the Palestinians who got the screw job this time from the creation of Israel, and this one-sided total support of Israel once again puts us in a poor moral position.
Suggest you put in five in alpha order.