Exemplifying the great cultural gulf between those who build the country and those who rule it, U.S. troops in Afghanistan are rapidly losing morale as President Obama dithers over what to do.
The central question: what is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan?
Unlike the situation in Iraq, U.S. military personnel on the ground are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the United States cannot realistically hope to achieve any positive result by continued occupation of Afghanistan. Thus their morale sags as their comrades die or are maimed without a clear objective being served by the sacrifices.
An article in the Times of London describes the situation with sobering accuracy.
Key passages:
The men are frustrated by the lack of obvious purpose or progress. “The soldiers’ biggest question is: what can we do to make this war stop. Catch one person? Assault one objective? Soldiers want definite answers, other than to stop the Taleban, because that almost seems impossible. It’s hard to catch someone you can’t see,” said Specialist Mercer.
“It’s a very frustrating mission,” said Lieutenant Hjelmstad. “The average soldier sees a friend blown up and his instinct is to retaliate or believe it’s for something [worthwhile], but it’s not like other wars where your buddy died but they took the hill. There’s no tangible reward for the sacrifice. It’s hard to say Wardak is better than when we got here.”
Captain Masengale, a soldier for 12 years before he became a chaplain, said: “We want to believe in a cause but we don’t know what that cause is.”
The soldiers are angry that colleagues are losing their lives while trying to help a population that will not help them. “You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they’re still going to lie to you. They’ll tell you there’s no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia.
The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
While many on the right call for a big troop surge to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, it remains unclear what objective would be served by such a large investment in lives and other treasures.
If, as has been suggested by many, our goal is to go after al Qaeda and capture or kill Osama bin Laden, a mass occupation of Afghanistan is an absurd way to go about it. Information is what we need, and occupying Afghanistan has done little to provide it so far and has little promise of doing so. Moreover, upon receiving such information, having bases in Afghanistan merely cuts off a few minutes in the trip bomber jets would have to make to take out the al Qaeda leaders.
To pay such a large price for the saving of a few minutes on a bombing run is patently absurd, even if that few minutes would prove to be the difference between hitting bin Laden or missing him.
The alternative apology for our involvement in Afghanistan–to sort out the tangled and destructive political and social situation in that nation–is even less justifiable. It is in fact the very quagmire many people argued Iraq would be, to a vastly greater degree. At least in Iraq it could be argued that most of the locals wanted us there. In Afghanistan that is clearly not the case, and everybody is armed to the teeth. We simply cannot win there without destroying Afghanistan and inflicting huge damage to our own society.
Fortunately, a principled alternative is available, and one that sets our real national interests as its foundation. As I have argued in the past, classical liberal principles, reflecting the thoughts of a great tradition extending all the way back to Gen. George Washington, provide an unsurpassed guide for deciding on when to undertake military action:
[T]he classical liberal position on international affairs would be as follows:
Every nation is sovereign over its own affairs.
Every nation is entitled to conduct its affairs as it chooses unless its actions affect other nations.
When actions affect other nations, those nations have a right and indeed a responsibility to their own citizens to remedy the situation. The obligation on the part of the reacting nation is to formulate a response that redresses the offense and ensures that there will be no imminent repetition of it.
An affected nation responding to a wrong has no right to impose additional consequences on an offending nation, even if the intended effect is to ensure that the offender will not resume the offending activities beyond the foreseeable future.
That is clearly a principled position that provides a definite guide for action against foreign aggressors while upholding the idea of national sovereignty that is crucial to the protection of any people and their government.
In the same article in which I outlined these principles, I pointed out how the Iraq War failed the test:
Just as obviously, this is not what the United States has done in Iraq. Changing Iraq’s government and overseeing their writing of a constitution certainly stepped well over that line. Assisting the new Iraqi government in pacifying the nation and policing it were thoroughly unjustified on classical liberal principles and remain so.
It seems evident that the situation in Afghanistan fails this test a good deal more spectacularly than even our Iraq involvement did. The current goal is murky at best, achievement of any large objective by an outside country in Afghanistan is difficult to the point of foolhardiness, and other means would achieve the benefits sought in our involvement there more readily and economically in all respects.
–S. T. Karnick
That’s a good question, Fortunato. My answer: Yes, it would not have been our business to intervene in Germany, just as we have refrained from getting involved in Rwanda, the Sudan, and numerous other African nations in more recent times. We got involved in WWII because we believed it served our interests–after all, we didn’t know about the mass killings until after we got into the war. Whether the original U.S. involvement in WWII was a defensible choice is a debatable matter.
” Every nation is sovereign over its own affairs.
Every nation is entitled to conduct its affairs as it chooses unless its actions affect other nations.”
I hate Godwin arguments, but let’s try one: had Hitler never invaded or threatened any other country, he might have been free to do what he pleased in his? Agressive imperialism certainly doesn’t mix with classical liberalism, but neither do dictatorship and mass slaughter.
Here’s a thought, instead of squandering our Blood Treasure and bleeding our treasury in an effort to make Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s borders unassailable, let’s secure our own. If the attacks on the U.S. were perpetrated by those who had no business being here in the first place, enforce our immigration laws. Crack down on visa violations and place a moratorium on visa’s and immigration. We have enough of our own out of work.
Afghanistan and Iraq are sovereign nations. I surely would not want foreign troops in this nation prosecuting a war against an idea, or at all.
Man, this is sad news. I don’t want the U.S. to lose in Afghanistan or Iraq. There’s a lot at stake there and if this goes down the drain, then evil truly has triumphed in the world.
I have some quibbles, Sam, as you might expect since you know I support both our war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I believed in 2001, and believe today, that it is the national security interests of the United States — in its most vital form, i.e. protecting innocent American civilian lives — to crush the terror-sponsoring regimes that pose a threat to us. We could consume infinite ones and zeroes here disagreeing on that broad point. Better to just say we disagree.
Now, for some specifics on the first three conditions of your test.
Of course. One could argue that this means the US did not need “the world’s” permission to react militarily after 9/11. (Though that’s a side point. You were merely stating a basic principle here to set up another point. …)
I believe you’ve constructed a bit of a Catch-22 here, Sam. It is hard to think of any action — peaceful (say, economic sanctions or a blockade) or militarist (bombing or invasion) — that would not violate this tenet.
Ok. It appears we can in certain circumstances violate the second rule, as long as we take steps to “remedy” the situation. We did that in Europe after World War II, and we’re doing it now in Iraq. We’ve also done it in Afghanistan — building schools, infrastructure, supporting attempts by “moderates” in the country to govern after initially toppling the Taliban. This was done precisely to “ensure that there will be no imminent repetition” of our initial military actions in Afghanistan. It hasn’t worked out so well, but we’re still attempting to do this.
I don’t see us as “imposing additional consequences” on Afghanistan — other than the justified consequences of continuing to kill al-Qaida and its Taliban allies. They’ve been popping up more now and our response has been weak, thus the low morale. We need a more aggressive strategy to remedy that situation, as the foremost authorities on fighting such wars have suggested to our president.
The key to ending “quaqmire” is to win. Iraq War critics went from screaming “quaqmire” to conspicuous silence in about the span of a year. What happened in that year? The “surge.” Iraq is not perfect, and won’t be. But our objectives have largely been met — toppling a dangerous regime and fostering the creation of a key regional ally (or at least a regime that will no longer pose a threat). Even if one does not approve of our entry into Afghanistan and the strategies the Bush administration employed there, it would be a bigger mistake to simply say “my bad” and retreat. It is simply morally indefensible to hand the country back to the Taliban. Not only would America’s sacrifices in blood and treasure have been for naught, we’d be consigning the population (especially women) to a killing field. And, on top if it, we’d revert to the “send a missile into a tent” strategy that did nothing to prevent the training and plotting that led to the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans. I simply cannot sign up for that.
To make an important side note about troop morale, which is also a reason for our lack of success in the Afghan theater: Our “light footprint” strategy in Afghanistan is mistake, just as it was in Iraq until we changed tactics. And in Afghanistan, the strategy is even worse. The Afghan campaign is a NATO operation — in which most of our NATO allies are either incapable of fighting or refuse to fight. And even the Americans are hamstrung by rules of engagement that put our troops in greater danger. I’ve read many posts and commentary from actual troops on the ground who bemoan these restrictions, and say: “Just let us fight! We can win this if you just let us!”
I argue that we should give it a shot.