A week after giving the order to send tens of thousands of service members into Afghanistan, the President of the United States accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Nominated for this honor only two weeks after taking office earlier in the year, and having fulfilled only one campaign promise during that time—to send more troops to the South Asian theater of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) to kill and be killed—President Barack Obama gave a humble speech, as eloquent and articulate as war is ugly and unforgiving.
Exit Strategy
from the
"Graveyard of Empires"
The geographic entity recognized formally as the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (landlocked in South-Central Asia and described as located within Central Asia, South Asia, or the Middle East) borders Iran to the west, Pakistan in the south by southeast, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the north, and China in the upper most northeast.
Afghanistan (ancient focal point for trade, migration and geo-strategic connection to East and West Asia) is historically a target of foreign invaders and the source from which local cabals encroach upon the regions to form their own empires—the Durrani Empire (1747) commonly regarded as the founding of "modern" Afghanistan.
By the late 19th Century the capital shifting from Kandahar to Kabul (with many territories ceded to its neighbors) Afghanistan served as buffer between the competing empires of Britain and Russia until August 19, 1919, when the third Anglo-Afghan war regained independence from the United Kingdom with regard to Afghan foreign affairs.
This "country" known as Afghanistan would experience non-stop states of tribal warfare culminating with the 1979 foreign invasion by the Soviet Union that occupied the land until its 1989 expulsion by indigenous Taliban with the aide of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda dragoon, support from the United States and others.
After the September 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center and assault on the Pentagon, the U.S.-led invasion (Operation Enduring Freedom) toppled the Taliban government—without authorization from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)—and scattered bin Laden's al-Qaeda deemed responsible for the attack on America.
The goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda and its network through a counterinsurgency campaign that will ensure Afghanistan does not again become a haven for violent extremists.
Later that year the UNSC authorized creation of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) involving NATO troops.
The Afghan War nearing its 10th year continues with modest international support from NATO to hold the indigenous Taliban at bay while attempting to establish some form of centralized government within the corrupt administration of President Hamid Karzai while repairing the country as U.S. forces fight a formidable insurgency.
The proximate cause of the Soviet Union's collapse, its involvement in an intractable war in Afghanistan, drained the country of money, manpower, international prestige and the confidence of its own people. The CIA, and Saudis like Osama bin Laden, conspired to help the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan turn back the occupying Soviets; and allowing bin Laden to feather the nest for his safe haven in the northwest frontier of Pakistan. Twelve years later, the United States became the occupying superpower turning back the very Taliban insurgents it had once armed to defeat the Russians.
In taking ownership of the nearly 9-year conflict in Afghanistan, "the graveyard of empires", the newly-minted President of the United States in 2009 made an all-out effort to manage failure of President George W. Bush's administration. Facing 4,200 cadets in the Eisenhower Hall of West Point, the president removed the last vestige of DNA evidence that gave proof of his honeymoon with the American people. His celebrity forged through the medium of television as a master communicator did not disguise Mr. Obama's profound lack of understanding "the enemy"; and also revealed his cowardice by not being forthcoming with those young cadets in the hall and the American people at home.
President Barack Obama skillfully scaffolded his war speech, showing discipline but strain, but like all war speeches it ended on a note that sounded hopeful about a decision unwise. Well-meaning yet vague, his words (however elegant) left us with this half-finished feeling that adequately reflects where military operations now stand in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
What the president failed miserably to do was to call upon every United States citizen to sacrifice.
No mention of a bond sale or surplus tax to finance the war, or rationing to conserve resources; no draft to spread the burden fairly. No sacrifice in any meaningful way mentioned that would give people opportunity to express unqualified support or intransigent opposition.
Too politically astute and equally weak-kneed to put the burden of high risks and low rewards squarely on the table, so thereby on the backs of the American people, Mr. Obama chose to boost support and soften opposition with a "winning" timetable of July 2011 for pull-out of all combat units—unless thrown off balance by circumstances on the ground.
Around 30,000 Americans had already died in the Vietnam War by 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King spoke out against continuing U.S. involvement. Neither one live beyond the assassin's bullet that year, and six years later the number of war dead grew to more than 58,000 now haplessly commemorated on a memorial wall here in Washington D.C.
The Vietnam War ended in an argument, which is to say it never really ended (like the unpopular Korean War) but merely stopped.
Service members were unconscionably sent to Vietnam to fight a war with no clear ending under fragmented leadership, as lawmakers hear different takes on war review. The trend lines in Southeast Asia did not look good as the schism deepened between U.S. war leaders and Congress challenged Pentagon over progress.
Sounds familiar?
How is a war left unmentioned? Names of men who died recently of their Vietnam injuries are added to the Vietnam Memorial Wall.
Chants of "Hell no, we won't go!" and songs like "War" and "Bring the Boys Home" echoed the counter-cultural memes of the day, and the right not to fight, argued against patriotically serving in a war on the pretext of "Americans fighting for values our our nation holds dear."
The South Vietnamese government was irreversibly corrupt as more and more Americans started to question why the nation had taken that slippery step into fighting a foreign war. Consequently, the South was defeated by the North Vietnamese due to the Congress turning its back. Unless the funding stops, any war can go on forever.
Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, uniting the country for war set Lyndon B. Johnson on a collision course with fate. Taking the threat of communism to expand U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia after a second incident in the Gulf of Tonkin during August 1964, the president in 1968
was stunned by the initial attack of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army that took U.S. troops and the South Vietnamese by surprise. (South Vietnamese forces seldom ventured out to patrol and disrupt movement of the enemy; this more dangerous task let to U.S. troops.)
President Johnson
realized in the aftermath of what would be called the Tet Offensive that battles could be won but the war was lost.
Driven to war out of guilt over abandoning the Vietnamese people, sending more troops meant more coffins, more funerals, more hardship in the absence of military benchmarks with clearly worthwhile and achievable goals; instead, setting goals beyond U.S. responsibility, its means or the country's interests.
President Johnson in March 1968 announced that he would not run for re-election. His successor, Richard M. Nixon attempted to defeat the enemy by becoming the enemy, so the enemy could share the dread, which finally proved self-defeating. President Nixon would not end that ever-expanding war until 1975 after more cost and more loss.
Still easier to look for "red herrings" than to look inward, many Americans even today are troubled by a strange guilt when facing Vietnam veterans. All the major players of that theatrical epic drama have pushed off this mortal coil, leaving historians to sort out the mess that was the Vietnam War. Did the Congress and military leaders do their duty in protecting the interests of the homeland and the American people?
What history always show is that war will reduce the capacity of the enemy to make war but will not destroy that capacity.
The momentum of the Afghan War looks like Vietnam, going briskly into quicksand, having installed and backed a corrupt "client state" with a "central government" but no control over the countryside; innocent civilian deaths in tragic numbers; "winning hearts and minds" but ignoring the nationalist reaction that historically foreign troops provoke.
Predictability of the outcome notwithstanding, President Johnson, during the Vietnam War, vowed that "Asian boys" would do the fighting; and they did, but meanwhile more than 58,000 American service members died along with millions of Vietnamese.
The Afghan War is not Obama's "war of choice" but the surge of 30,000-plus troops is Obama's choosing, recalling President Johnson's Vietnam War strategy of escalate or lose.
Will the American people in the coming year(s) rue what the president describes as a "good war"? Not to win the war but peace and safety for the most people in a country capable of ensuring its own security. Otherwise, there can be no "nation building" when there is no nation to build, but instead a loose collection of "feudal tribes".
President Obama's attempt to develop a war strategy through historical analogy is not very helpful proffering these two proposition: Don't let the terrorist take over Afghanistan; but don't commit American troops in large numbers. How is it even possible for the two propositions to coexist?
Reality is that Afghanistan is not Vietnam, except both having the continuous flow of civilian refugees fleeing, most not compatible with the fallout of war—Vietnam not a promising example where the goal (as with the Korean War) seem clear but unattainable. Saigon was rapidly losing to the North Vietnamese Army. The Afghan War is grossly disproportionate to the American stake in its outcome.
Cultural and religious differences affect all aspects of Afghan life including politics. In the clutter of cultures that is the Afghan social caldron no amount of political strategy or military might will bend the hearts and minds of the people. Their minds are set and absolute. Any change must come over generations and from within.
Setting up shop in another country as a berm or suzerain against the tentacles of terrorism is no way to protect the country from within. Fighting the wrong enemy, the Taliban that pose no threat to America, makes no sense when our forces should be marshalled to protect the multiple gateways into the United States—with a keen military eye focused on the Mexican border states.
No matter how good our tactics in the field, if the United States supports a corrupt and unpopular government in Afghanistan, what goal might we achieve now as a means to minimize the chance of a major terrorist attack on America originating in that country or in Pakistan, Somalia and any other failed nation worldwide with nuclear ambition?
Afghanistan will soon be a 10-year/trillion-dollar enterprise, and feels like a trap the United States has been lured into with no visible exit. The circumstances of the country and conflict therein has proven far beyond any history the U.S. has had in managing a war or engaging an enemy. The strategy objective most likely the U.S. will achieve is to declare "mission accomplished" (disrupting the terrorists' Afghan base and routing al-Qaeda) then withdrawing from the country.
Any "morality" in the nature and necessity of warfare convolutes into two realms of thought, neither regards saving lives as good as saving political and economic advantage. Hu Jintao, the Chinese president is sangfroid in offering no indictation of bending on any issue. Coincidentally, and perhaps ironically, China had been the shadow of the Korean and Vietnam wars; and today the omnipresent white noise echoing over the mineral-rich battlefields of Afghanistan. For the People's Republic, war is both folly and necessary, because the Chinese know that terrorism will only be choked by the absence of war.
The strategy of peace is based on an understanding of social and cultural norms, mores and folkways of the Afghan people. "
Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan will take more soldiers and marines, more years, more money, more lives just to pacify the Afghans long enough in fostering the illusion of stability for a slow-grinding exit. In the end the only real question: Which service member will be the last to die for a mistake?
Military operations more in common with ideas than flesh and blood reality lack specific gravity and a sense of being rooted to an honest goal; a plan that comes with a shelf-life, an exit strategy with a date certain smells like a compromise. At best, Obama's War is another Iraq, and at worst another Vietnam in giving away the middle ground with al-Qaeda routed declare victory and mission accomplished.
Counterinsurgency is not counterterrorism and not the affair of the United States government or its military.
An expanded war means more troops, more coffins, more funerals, more stress for service members, more hardship for military families, and more costly long-term care for those who survive—that alternate universe well outside the walls of the White House, one of witnessing atrocities, overwhelmed by grief, and post-traumatic stress.
Otherwise, what does winning mean? What does it look like? How will anyone know? And how do you achieve so-called "victory" defeating the Taliban when al-Qaeda is the goal?
Following 9/11 the U.S. military stood idle in Afghanistan for weeks as Osama bin Laden fled.
Today, with no idea of bin Laden's whereabouts but with the assumption America had been struck from Afghanistan, the Commander-in-Chief by military might intends to coerce those fiercely conservative warlords in South Asia to dishonor covenants with the indigenous Taliban at war with Pakistan...who's at war with India.
Meanwhile, where in the world is Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda? After 9/11 then-President Bush showed a lack of concern about bin Laden, leaving open the possibility that the Saudi had been a "straw man" for the invasion of Iraq.
Fundamentally, nothing about Afghanistan differs from America's misadventure in Lebanon during President Reagan's administration or Somalia during President Clinton's. Four decades after Vietnam and the Johnson cum Nixon administrations, it all seems as if the United States still cannot recognize insurmountable adversaries fighting on their own turf with indomitable will.
Nothing in recent history suggests this formability is possible to overcome. The Obama administration following the generals into needless battle and dragging the country into another costly and endless war will harvest (again) massive loss of human life and another unwanted memorial wall on the National Mall.
President Obama speaking to those West Point cadets inside the U.S. military academy's hallowed hall named for President (né General) Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed unaware of his predecessor's ominous but informed edict—that all wars are unpredictable.
And some even unwinnable.
Frederick Louis Richardson
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