It has been reported that President Obama is considering military options for Afghanistan that range from a complete military commitment, such as has been suggested by General McChrystal with 40,000 added troops, to a focus on training the Afghan armed forces and police, as has been suggested by Vice President Biden, to a drawdown or even a complete withdrawal of our troops. This debate has used historical analogies that range from the British experience in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century to the Soviet Union experience in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 and the American experience in Vietnam. The process has been deliberate, and it reminds us of the debates between Churchill, Roosevelt and the military command that occurred in 1942 and 1943 assigning priorities to the European and Pacific theaters and the invasion of North Africa. This may be frustrating to the news cycle of the punditry, but the lives of young women and men are at stake.
The rationales given for the United States range from the pragmatic necessity to deny al Qaeda a base and to protect the stability of Pakistan to the need to create a viable nation state in Afghanistan after our invasion, and our moral responsibility to protect the Afghan people, and particularly Afghan women, from the Taliban.
In our national debate, we have forgotten that in the twentieth century the United States faced a problem similar to the one in Afghanistan and that was much more serious and involved major United States economic interests on its southern border -- the Mexican Revolution. Through a combination of wise leadership and some fortunate historical accidents, the problems stemming from this Revolution were solved with only limited American intervention. With only a few exceptions American intervention was limited and covert.
After the expulsion of the Emperor Maximilian in 1867, Porfirio Díaz evolved from national hero, to president of Mexico, to a dictator who ruled Mexico for many years. In 1911, he was overthrown. In 1913, Madero, the elected president, was murdered in a coup supported by the United States Ambassador. General Huerta, who succeeded him, was in turn deposed a year later. The Federal Army was disbanded and Mexico became the bear pit for the armies of competing revolutionary generals. Generals Villa, Zapata, Carranza, Calles, Obregon were warlords leading armies they had raised. Mexico was also a base for attacks on the United States by indigenous forces that we would now call terrorists. As one example there was the raid on the U.S. by Pancho Villa. There were also United States military interventions in Mexico. It 1916, there was a punitive expedition led by General Pershing, and in 1914 the United States occupied the port of Vera Cruz. There were attempts by Germany to use Mexico against the United States, (recall the Zimmerman Telegram). The threats to the United States and its interests then exceed any threat posed by Afghanistan today.
The Mexican Revolution is estimated to have cost one million lives. This was almost ten percent of the population and was one of the bloodiest wars of the twentieth century. General Calles co-opted the Mexican elite and the political organization that they created evolved into the PRI, the political party that ruled Mexico until 2000. The revolutionary generals were brought under control through a combination of bribes, assignations and political cooptation. There was once a popular saying in Mexico: "No general can withstand a cannonade of fifty thousand pesos." Whether due to necessities that resulted from the war in Europe, wise leadership, or both, U.S. intervention in Mexico was limited and covert. This should be our policy in Afghanistan today.
President Wilson did not believe that the United States had a duty to intervene in 1912 to prevent one million casualties and create in Mexico a democracy that would be a model for Latin America. The Pershing Expedition in 1916 suggests that any American intervention would have been very costly. We suspect that if one were to poll Mexicans today, a substantial majority would prefer to have been allowed to develop their own institutions as opposed to having these institutions imposed by the Colossus of the North, even if it would have avoided the cost of the Revolution.
The overwhelming self-interest of the United States is its own safety. It does not have the political will to expend the resources that would be necessary to occupy and to control Afghanistan long enough to change the culture to one that would be to our liking, assuming this was possible. Like Mexico, there will be death and suffering. The Taliban are horrible, but so were the armies of the Mexican revolutionary generals.
There are two questions that must be answered. The first is political: should the Administration compel the citizens of the United States to pay for a war unless it is in the clear self interest of the United States and is a war of necessity.
The second question is one of morality. The war is not being fought completely by volunteers. We are compelling young women and men to go and die in Afghanistan against their will. Many regular soldiers are on their second, third and fourth tours. We are activating National Guard units for deployment overseas. It is true that negotiating with the Taliban will have horrible consequences, but do we have a duty to rescue Afghans from their own institutions? Do we have the moral right to compel our young women and men to risk their lives when it is not an American interest that is at stake? The question that should be posed to the generals is: Can you fight this war in the manner you propose if no one is compelled to serve in Afghanistan against their will?
If the answer is no then it is time to a return to the successful strategy that we had used when we first invaded Afghanistan right after the 9/11 attack but that has been forgotten or ignored in the eight years since then. That strategy was to send in CIA operatives with bags of money to buy off the warlords rather than troops with weapons. John Lehman, the former Secretary of the Navy, noted in an editorial in The Washington Post in 2006 that, "What made the Afghan campaign a landmark in the U.S. Military's history is that it was prosecuted by Special Operations forces from all the services, along with Navy and Air Force tactical power, operations by the Afghan Northern Alliance and the CIA were equally important and fully integrated. No large Army or Marine force was employed." [Emphasis added]
Dagobert L. Brito is Peterkin Professor of Political Economy at Rice University and Michael D. Intriligator is Professor of Economics, Political Science, and Public Policy at UCLA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Brydon
the Taleban have already successfully attacked isolated US outposts in large numbers (scandalously isolated), my sense is they are working towards a big one, attacks across the country designed to undermine US political position back home.
McChrystal will get his 40,000 troops and six-eight months to do something with them, you could have 600,000 troops wandering around the mountains of Afghanistan and little would change.
I agree with posts on the 'strategic' importance of Afghanistan, an 'important' piece of real estate wedged between Iran, Russia, India and China, the Vietnam parallel does seem over drawn but there are similarities, clueless militiary strategy, mass killing of civilians (which fuels the resistance - vicious cycle), isolated capital loosely controlled by bankrupt regime, external powers happy to see US bogged down, distracted, losing life and treasure at a time of major economic problems.
For every pipe or house they fix they practically kill a couple of civilians, just yesterday pictures on Al Jazeera showed a very young girl dead after a missile attack, the whole village/town was enraged, absurd battle 'for hearts and minds' like Vietnam is a complete farce, and to echo Frick's account of Iraq, this is fiasco number II. Military campaign is certainly unwinnable, politicial strategy is to do just enough so Obama can win the next election.
The folly is in believing that the USA has supported democracy at anytime when not in the interests of American businesses. We have overthrown democratically elected governments in Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, and attempted to do so under Bush in Venezuela and Bolivia - just in this hemisphere.
The lie is that anyone really gives a damn about insurgents (i.e. people who do oppose the American occupation of their country) when it is really all about protecting the pipelines that pass through Afghanistan. Hard to succeed at protecting the cities when troops are concentrated at bases along the route of the pipeline hundreds of miles away. The real military mission which is much different from the official military mission and there are not the resources to do both.
I fear not the Taliban or bin Laden and his followers, but I do fear our government, the military industrial complex that determines our government’s policies and actions, and I fear the power given to Blackwater and other mercenary organizations operating in the USA and abroad which operate outside the law.
It has no parallels to the war in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we protecting the flow of oil from the middle of Asia as it flows across the northern region into Pakistan and out to port. We don't import this oil, but a handfull of our richest citizens profit from the flow if this oil.
Our armed men and women must die while killing Afghanistans to protect the incomes of these few very rich US citizens, even though they pay no taxes on this income to pay for this security service we provide them, free of charge. We will die to protect the revenues of the rich, even when doing so is not in our national interests. Its the American way.
Great comment, reference to Monroe Doctrine is spot on! (manifest destiny) from the canadian border to the tip of Argentina, the great US backyard.
Afghanistan is not Mexico and the Islmic extremists are not Mexico's gangster generals. The Mexican warlords only wanted money and power, so they could easily be bought off. The Islamic terror orgs want to terrorise the West, and it is argualbly only a matter of time before they get nuclear or biological arms and do something really disgusting. Pakistan has nukes and Iran isnt far from them. And thse are the kind of maniacs who stone young girls to death for getting raped! These are the kind of maniacs who routinely murder their own daughters and sisters! These are the kind of maniacs who attach bombs to childern and retarded people and send them to play with the Americns.
Thse people make even Hitler and Stalin look reasonable. I am not sure there is rom on the planet for both Western-ahem-civilisation and radical Islamism. Utterly destroying them may be a matter of self-preservation , just as destroying the insanely imperialist regimes of Hitler and Tojo was.
What is happening today in the decision of what to do with Afghanistan is probably contrary to what occurred then--now the president is deliberately and openly seeking consensus as to what the objective of US intervention is. Is it Taliban, Al Qaida, Nation state building, or just retaliation against an attacker (a more serious one than Villa). Further the situation is less circunscribed. Getting rid of Al Qaida in Afghanistan does not eliminate the possibility of its morfing in Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Yemen, Sudan with satellite cells in European or American cities. The ideological force of the Taliban (wahabbism) comes from Saudi Arabia--nothing stops this ideology from moving on to other areas in Western, or Eastern Asia.
There is no historical precedent to the situation in Western and Southern Asia.
As for the troops, you are dead wrong. It is unfortunate that they are having to make multiple trip to the war zone. But make no mistake, they are volunteers. They signed up and took oaths, as I did. .
The professors are off base, I am afraid, about moral responsibility. SInce they are citing the past, present and the future, let's ask them about how we executed our moral responsibility in Iraq. The civilian administrator got the $16 billion to distribute to the hungry people--instead that money was misappropriated--where did it go? Even the defeated military revolted out of starvation and frustration, but we called them Saddam loyalists! What about our moral responsibility of finding WMD since that was the primary prtext-- and since we could not find any, our moral responsibility is should have been " sorry, no WMD, mission accomplished," and get out quick. No exit strategy was necessary.
In fact if this president has naything, he has always displayed moral responsibility and has been criticised by his reckless adversaries. Maybe the world is safer due to him alone, and the Nobel committee found him very important for world peace. This was lacking in his predecessor.
Gentlmen, we are fighting against an ideology. By itself it is not rogue, as we want to make it. And I know.
The way we are engaging, more civilian militia in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, will be driven to their conviction that continued war is not fair. It has to end, or else we will be strategizing for an exit strategy. Military fighting against a popular uprising against invasion is, in fact, a dangerous proposition.