You'd be amazed at how often George Will is right about stuff and how often this upsets professional Republicans and asshole bloggers. It's actually one of the great joys of my life to watch.This week, Mr. Will wrote two columns that have set the blogosphere alight with anti-intellectual indignation, which is also great fun to watch. The columns deal with the rapidly deteriorating situations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Bush administration followed a ridiculous strategy for both nations. Essentially, they sent in very few troops and set up democracies in countries filled with competing ethnic groups that enjoy murdering one another.
Without sufficient troop levels, the United States co opted a warlords, drug deals and human rights monsters every bit as bad as the Taliban to keep the peace, which has worked out about as well as you would have expected it to.
Worse, the lack of troops has made NATO overly rely on bombing, which has destroyed civilian support in the Pashtun south for both the military mission and the Karzai government. Karzai himself has called for a halt to the bombing. If he's ignored, questions will arise to the very sovereignty of Afghanistan and the point of a democratic government. We are either guests of the Afghan government, or we're occupiers. There really isn't a third option.
There has always been only four countries doing any significant fighting in Afghanistan, and Canada is leaving in 2011. Our boys and girls want to stay, but there isn't the political support for the mission and our equipment can no longer handle it. Political support is also drying up in London and Washington.
Furthermore, the enemy is now in Pakistan, which no serious person envisions NATO invading. In fact, the answer to Afghanistan lies in the tensions between Pakistan and India, which no one is seriously addressing.
From the earliest days of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Pakistani ISI saw an opportunity in the CIA's financial support for the Afghan mujaheddin. Since the ISI was distributing the American aid, some of it was set aside and training bases were established in southern Afghanistan for the purpose of infiltrating Indian occupied Kashmir. As soon as the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Kashmir exploded with anti-Indian terrorism.Prior to 9/11, Kashmir was widely regarded as the most dangerous place on earth.
Unless and until the Kashmir question is resolved, Afghanistan is always going to be a terror training ground, because it is in the Pakistani national interest for it to be. Indeed, Pakistan continues to support the Taliban and al-Qaeda because they see a hostile India building influence with the Kabul government.
The West is unwilling or unable to commit the hundreds of thousands of troops that counterinsurgency doctrine demands. We're fighting exactly the same war the Soviets did with half the troops and expect a different result. And we're not even addressing the cause of Afghanistan's chaos, Kashmir.
Time and political support is running out for this March of Folly. In time, western governments will begin to fall over the issue. Iraq ended Tony Blair's career and Afghanistan could very well end Barack Obama's. Anyone who doubts that would do very well to closely read the history of how Vietnam consumed Lyndon Johnson's presidency. And Johnson had a vastly greater mandate than does Obama.
We were never serious about winning in Afghanistan and the costs of that failure of will are going to be enormous someday. Where South Asia is concerned, they always are.
Iraq is an even more intractable because the goals there were always unattainable. The Bush administration repeatedly said that they wanted to leave an Iraq that is "democratic and whole", not recognizing that the two are mutually exclusive.
Iraq is an artificial country, thrown together after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the same way Yugoslavia was. To remain a political whole, Iraq needed a tyrant in Baghdad to maintain order and cohesion. Saddam Hussein wasn't the first dictator in Iraq, and he won't be the last ... presuming that Iraq as we know it survives at all.
If anything, American strategy made an even bigger mess of Iraq than it did Afghanistan. Almost immediately after the fall of Saddam, the United States dissolved the only indigenous forces that could maintain order, the army and police.
It then instituted a de-Baathification policy that was as dangerous as it was ridiculous. Saddam's Baath Party wasn't to Iraq what the Nazi Party was to Germany. It was more like what the Communist Party was to the Soviet Union. To get anywhere in life, you had to be a member in good standing. No one expected post-Soviet Russia to be governed without the participation of former communists - including presidents Yeltsin and Putin - but that's exactly what was expected of Iraq.
De-Baathification and the disbanding of the Iraqi police, combined with the centuries old-hostility between the Sunni and Shia, created almost immediate anarchy which the United States and Britian were ill-equipped to contain. Democratic elections, which established the Shia as the dominant political power, exacerbated the suicide of the country.
I was always reluctant to endorse the 2007 surge or declare it a success because success could only be determined by what happened after it de-escalated.
As George Will notes, we're beginning to find out.
More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of U.S. forces from the cities. All U.S. combat units are to be withdrawn from the country within a year. Up to 50,000 can remain as "advisers" to an Iraqi government that is ostentatious about its belief that the presence of U.S. forces is superfluous and obnoxious.What Will leaves unsaid is the obvious, Iraq is already for all intents and purposes an Iranian client state. George Bush's war had the twin results of increasing Teheran's paranoia while substantially increasing its sphere of influence into southern Iraq and western Afghanistan. The only clear winner of recent American adventurism, Shiite Iran is now to the Sunni Middle East what Germany is to Europe: the centre of gravity. Even if you ignore their nuclear program, Iran is now a political superpower in the Middle East and western South Asia.
The advisers are to leave by the end of 2011, by which time the final two years of the U.S. military presence will have achieved . . . what? Already that presence is irrelevant to the rising chaos, which the Iraqi government can neither contain nor refrain from participating in: Security forces seem to have been involved in the recent robbery of a state-run bank in central Baghdad.
And then there are the poor Kurds, who are going to be destroyed regardless of what happens. Even absent the inevitable declaration of Independence from Iraq, the Kurds are still likely to be smothered by a combination of the rest of Iraq, Iran and Turkey, who all have interests in either the Kirkuk oil fields or smashing an independence movement that threatens their own national sovereignty. A declaration of independence will lead to immediate and total war, which will bury the Kurds alive. The Kurds only have two allies in the whole world, the United States and Israel, neither of whom can or will save them.
As Will points out, the desirability of an American evacuation from Iraq is inevitable, since the overwhelming likelihood is that the Iraqi people will reject the Status of Forces agreement in their January referendum. And in a Made in America democracy, the United States has little choice but to abide by the demands of the Iraqi people, lest the entire adventure appear even more ridiculous than it already does.
When a voice as conservative as George Will's joins the withdrawal choir, you know that all is well and truly lost.
What you're seeing is the final vindication of Colin Powell and the first great repudiation of the rest of the awkward thinkers that populated the Bush White House. What we're finally learning is that the doctrine devised by General Powell and then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger couldn't have been more correct.
If you're going to fight, deploy such overwhelming force that you win early and win decisively. Democracies are not designed to support long wars with seemingly unattainable goals, which we all should have learned from the French and American experiences in Vietnam or Harry Truman's Korean nightmare.
If you're not prepared to fight as though you mean it, it is far better for everyone involved if you don't fight at all. If you fight and fail, you will have to face certain questions.
-Are South Asia and the Middle East more strategically dangerous or less than before 2001-03?
-Is NATO stronger or weaker than it was before?
-Can the member states of NATO take any comfort in Article 5, given the Afghan fiasco?
-What lessons will other hostile states take from recent history, having seen Iran's power rise dramatically as a result of the Iraq war?
- Do western powers need to reinstitute the draft given the probability that guerrilla warfare is more likely in the future than at any time in the past?
- Should the United States military train specifically for nation building and should the State Department be dramatically expanded to direct such measures?
-Should efforts to stop WMD proliferation be stopped, given the failures over the last decade in India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea, and should we instead have a policy of defensive deterrence?
-Can Iran be contained and if so, how and at what cost?
Oh, and Happy Labor Day!
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