Another Surge

A man named Fehrenback once said that “you can fly over a territory, you can bombard it, you can blow it to hell, you can even sterilize it, but you don’t own it until you stand a seventeen year old kid with a rifle on top of it.” That statement is very true, and unfortunately it’s something that our nation’s leaders appear to have either forgotten, or that they never learned. As a result of that lapse, we’re today paying the butchers bill in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two days before Mr. Obama gave the speech at West Point in which he announced that we would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a Senate Committee report was released that blames an insufficient number of troops for bin Laden’s escape from American forces in 2001. The committee chairman, Sen. John Kerry, implied that it was a lack of soldiers under the Bush administration that was responsible for “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.” Yet it was our democratic Congress who repeatedly refused the troop buildup that would have given us the necessary soldiers today.

Increased troop numbers was Bush’s policy, and since we all know Bush was evil (just ask the mainstream media), the opposite policy must be good. The aggressiveness that we associate with President Bush is actually, in Mr. Obama’s hands, the righteous corrective to Bush’s evil actions. (Perhaps a Democrat can explain that one to me?) Mr. Obama is proving himself an expert manipulator of public opinion, capitalizing on the McChrystal and Eikenberry leaks to give the impression of deep deliberations over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. He’s playing the old “good cop/bad cop” routine, with VP Joe Biden, who dutifully argued against more troops, overall a rather cynical act. And it’s almost uncanny to hear from the liberal Obama the same tales about nation-building and creating democratic institutions that led us into an undemocratic Iraq in the first place. Warlord-run Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq either, or any other civilized country for that matter. It’s more like warlord-run Somalia. Ahh… remember Somalia, with Bill Clinton’s hesitation to provide the military with the needed strength, and of course our rather hurried withdrawal? Today however the media is still using the word “surge” to describe the troop increase as if it’s only a temporary boost, when in truth it’s just another name for minimal “reinforcements”, which immediately brings to mind the image of a lost cause. Since the first day of combat action in Afghanistan we’ve heard calls for troop increases, with the latest being for forty to eighty thousand additional troops. Instead Mr. Obama decides to send only thirty thousand, with a large number of these being civilian contractors. One pundit commented, tongue-in-cheek I hope, that it’s too bad China isn’t in NATO, as their Army is big enough to stand shoulder to shoulder and march from Afghanistan to Iraq, cleaning up the whole mess! Quite so, but how do we get ‘em to go home afterwards?

Political writer Jacob Weisberg claims that one of Obama’s great accomplishments has been that, “after a much-disparaged period of review, he has announced a new strategy in Afghanistan.” But then, Weisberg praises Obama for “preventing a depression, remaking America's global image, and winning universal health insurance.” Never mind that unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades, and that any Democratic president with a Democratic majority in Congress could have passed a similar stimulus package. “Universal health care” is far from a done deal, and as for remaking America’s global image, well, images are made with actions, not words. But Obama is not Bush we are told, the people who dislike him are dreadful racists, the opposition is fierce, and, well, he’s the only game in town, etc, etc. No, Mr. Obama is not President Bush. If anything, he is solidly convinced that his radical liberalism is divinely guided, and that he holds “the truth” in his hands. Unlike President Bush however, Mr. Obama seems to withdraw into a blue funk whenever he fails to convince Americans that his is the truth of the ages.

It’s easy to say “pull out all the troops and let the Afghani’s deal with their own problems”. So if those issues spill over into America, what then? American troops cannot just pack up and leave with the snap of a finger. "Failure in Afghanistan would mean a Taliban takeover of much, if not most, of the country and likely a renewed civil war," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Taliban-ruled areas could in short order become, once again, a sanctuary for al-Qaeda as well as a staging area for resurgent militant groups on the offensive in Pakistan." (And Pakistan has nuclear weapons.) I'm sure that if we pulled out tomorrow, the people who strap bombs to themselves to blow up anyone who doesn't think that women are property, and that Jews and Christians should be wiped out, would happily join us in hammering our arms into plowshares. Ahh… our arms, not theirs.

But Obama has tied his decision ordering more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to a pledge that they'll start returning home in 2011. But he was rather quiet on his plans for the growing Afghan army, which still remains the best way to bring American soldiers home. As the 219th poorest nation in the world, Afghanistan simply can't afford to pay for a big military. Afghan forces today are largely slipshod and corrupt, professional U.S. officers say, capable of doing little more than basic operations. In fact, many U.S. officers say that Afghans have a "God-willing” mentality that "delays progress for all routine and major actions", and such tendencies “freeze subordinates into doing nothing until specifically ordered”.

One lesson we should learn from history is that soldiers seldom have much say in how their efforts are applied. Armed force is but a blunt instrument of politics, quite liable to do more harm than good unless aimed with exquisite precision. At best, all the military can do is buy time for the politicians to repair the political mistakes that left no choice but armed violence in the first place. Isn’t it nice to know that our man in the driver’s seat has absolutely no military experience, and apparently won’t listen to his advisors who do have that experience.