Over There:
Escalation or Afghanization?

These reputable talking heads neatly sketch the question.

I side with the person from Harvard — who argues against American/NATO escalation, in favor of Afghanization, one might call it. Thinking of Vietnam.

The person from Princeton (whose name happens to be Slaughter) argues the view expressed, more or less, by both McCain and Obama across the campaign years: Gotta be in it deeper to win it.

All three, then, are at odds with the Brit commander over there, who in October told the world: “We’re not going to win this war.”

Princeton leads off a bit carelessly — arguing that a western withdrawal, under cover of Afghanization, would grant the Taliban and Al Qaeda victories comparable to the time they “kicked the Soviet Union out” of Afghanistan.  But neither Al Qaeda nor the Taliban existed in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union went home in 1989.

Mere details perhaps. Princeton’s broad vision is to bring in large numbers of GIs to police Afghanistan village by village — “in with the people” — not unlikely for “ten years” or more — until we “get local loyalties back to the central government.”  And, incidentally (?), until the Taliban treats women better.

For until they treat women better, they will find President Obama unwilling to do business with them.

The Princeton plan seems to me folly.

To begin, Afghanistan is a map overlaid on a loose affiliation of tribal lands. It’s true we have appointed a nice man to run a central government, but there is little sociological basis for loyalty to it. The problem is not (as Princeton says) an “insurgency” troubling the capital. The problem is tribal warfare — the state of affairs time out of mind.

The Princeton plan brings Vietnam again to mind: the ill fated Strategic Hamlet program, in which the farming peasants were half-herded into half-protected villages and then provoked by CIA terrorists to join the puppet-governmental struggle against the insurgency.

The big idea — born in the USA — had been to force the Vietnamese peasants to cease bystanding and take a stand.  Finally they did. With the insurgency.

As for policing Afghan society with Americans until it reforms its gender bias …

Bush-Cheney and the Likud Lobby sold our current wars with the notion of bringing Democracy to the infidels. Now it would seem we must bring Women’s Lib. Or does Princeton equate the two?

Why start this crusade in Afghanistan? Because our foot happens to be (crushed) in the door? And after Afghanistan, shall we stop there? All of Islam awaits chastisement.

Princeton winds up by arguing that the “stakes” for Uncle Sam in Afghanistan — a resource-less desert in the middle of nowhere inhabited by a pre-technological society — are “vital in ways that I don’t think we can say the Iraq regime was.”

But Iraq sits between Iran and the Levant and Turkey, upon something like the third largest pool of oil on the globe.

To back up this final and most implausible claim, Princeton nods to the official story of 9/11 (deeply flawed) — implying Cheneylike that Afghanistan left to fester will produce another such spectacle.

Well … At least we weren’t exhorted to Get Osama.

Our focus over there should be on Pakistan — a nuclear power on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  The risks of its confusion are incomparably greater than anything that might happen in festering Afghanistan.

If Princeton might counter that the way to fix Pakistan is to first fix Afghanistan and then march southeast (after Alexander), I would say that the opposite is a better strategy. Pakistan cannot sit on the backburner for ten years while the Afghan tribes get civilization.

War as McCain and Obama talked it up, in short, seems not the cure for what ails over there.

This does not imply there is a cure.  Pakistan, several strangeloves and Joe Biden have said, is probably the western world’s biggest problem, and perhaps has been so since the wild rise and ride of BCCI.

What happened on 9/11 is clear as mud, but there is more public evidence of Paki involvement — in the secret service and its penumbra — than Afghan. Bush-Cheney told European leaders in the summer of 2001 to clear their calendars for war in Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban were dicking Unocal around on a pipeline.

It’s not clear, then, that there has ever been a casus belli for Uncle Sam worthy of the name in Afghanistan, and Princeton says nothing to persuade one otherwise.  And the notion of stabilizing that desert, then using it as a staging ground to impose our will upon the Paki Tribal Areas, seems …

… a reason for Obama to vote for Harvard.  At least until the world post Bush-Cheney has a chance to take shape.  To come out blazing over there next year would not be Change We Need.

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