I’m posting my Dispatches column a day early directly to the blog. I’ll repost as a link tomorrow.
DISPATCHES: Wrong questions
On Afghanistan, it’s not how to win, but why are we still there
By Hank Kalet
If you keep asking the wrong questions, you are going to keep getting the wrong answers.
That’s what we have been facing in Afghanistan.
Rather than asking the correct question — why are we fighting in the south Asian country? — we seek the elusive winning strategy: What do we need to do to win what is, plainly, an unwinnable war?
The uproar over the comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff to Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine, comments that led to his ouster as commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, focused on the general’s insubordination, his dismissive attitude toward civilian leaders and the frat-boy environment the general appears to have encouraged. These were legitimate concerns, especially given the need to ensure civilian control of the military.
Gen. McChrystal resigned — or was forced to — and is expected to be replaced by Gen. David Petraeus, his boss and the chief architect of the counterinsurgency philosophy that is governing our war strategy. As Roger Daltry sang, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
President Barack Obama, in choosing Gen. Petraeus, made it clear that he is committed to his failed Afghan policy and is unwilling to ask the right questions about Afghanistan, the war on terror and U.S. war-making power in general.
As The Washington Post put it in its coverage last week, the decision to turn to Gen. Petraeus “allowed the president to keep his war strategy intact” and maintain “crucial (Republican) support for a war that a majority of Americans routinely say is no longer worth fighting.”
The president, in announcing the change, called it “a change in personnel,” but not “in policy.”
But shouldn’t the policy, itself, come under scrutiny? We have been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly nine years with little to show for it. The Taliban, which we forced from power, remains a factor and the government of Hamid Karzai, which we support, is viewed as corrupt and out of touch with the population.
Al Qaeda, which had used Afghanistan as a safe haven in 2001 before the 9/11 attacks, has moved across the border into Pakistan and has organized itself in a number of failed states around the globe, according to numerous press reports.
And yet, we continue to wage this misguided war.
The question is why. The answer, I think, is that the foreign policy establishment has gamed the argument by only asking questions that result in the answers it wants to get and by building its rationale on set of questionable premises designed to elicit its desired result.
Basically, it has built its arguments on statements of value masquerading as statements of fact. It is an argument premised on the notion that Afghanistan’s stability and movement toward democracy are imperative to safeguard Americans in the United States, and that our ability to disrupt terrorist activities and dismantle terrorist cells depends on victory in a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan.
These premises, however, are debatable; they express opinion and not fact. Before we can argue about the best strategy to employ in Afghanistan, we need to discuss the premises of the arguments made by the Obama administration.
Afghanistan’s stability and movement toward democracy are in our national interests. No doubt, a stable and democratic government will be better for the people of Afghanistan and the region, but are they any more important to our national security than a stable Somalia or a democratic Egypt? Isn’t it likely that the terrorist networks will just flee a suddenly stable Afghanistan for some other failed state, forcing us to chase them and putting us in a position of waging a roving, worldwide war?
Victory in Afghanistan is required to fight terrorism. Given that the United States has broken up several, unrelated terror plots in recent years, it seems evident that our efforts in Afghanistan are, at best, tangential to the fight against terrorism. Just as importantly, al Qaeda no longer calls Afghanistan home; rather, it has moved across the border into Pakistan, a nation we consider an ally. The foreign policy establishment is not questioning these assumptions and remains committed to this nasty war, one that has grown deadlier by the month for American soldiers.
The situation is analogous to the American experience in Vietnam, down to the language used to describe our counterinsurgency strategy, as numerous commentators have pointed out. There is no winning strategy in Afghanistan, but fight we must our leaders say because, well, to not fight is to admit defeat. It is a dangerous tautology, and not only because it has resulted in a growing number of American casualties. Our continued presence in Afghanistan — along with the seemingly forgotten, but no less deadly, misadventure in Iraq — is like a spark to the gasoline of resentment that creates new terrorists.
Like Vietnam, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are draining the treasury and busting our federal budget, siphoning needed money from domestic aid programs.
It’s time we asked the correct question about Afghanistan: How many lives are we willing to sacrifice to a war we never should have fought?
