I said an “offensive” military solution. That is, the idea of taking the fight to whoever we’re calling Taliban this week. If it were possible to hold the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, then an attempt to defeat the Taliban might produce fruit. But so long as fighters can move across the border to regroup, i don’t see how they’ll ever be defeated. That those same (or allied) fighters have the ability to attack the main supply line of US forces only complicates the situation further.

And it certainly doesn’t help that the only other supply options require relying on either Russia and/or Iran.

Nor did i say that the US shouldn’t be involved, only that it should not be in charge. Now, i recognize that the best option for handling this situation does not – and will not – exist. My feeling is that peacekeeping deployments are not robust enough in general. They should never shoot first, but they should be able to fight attacks vigorously…and pursue attackers.

Theoretically, the US could gain trust if spent it’s time/force defending cities and villages. A truly multi-national force (one with Central Asians, Muslims, etc.) that acted as a defensive and infrastructure building force might actually win hearts and minds.

Providing security is not what we’re currently doing. We’re fighting a low-intensity conflict and hoping that we can win that conflict in order to provide security. (But that strategy returns to the Af-Pak border situation.) And we’re doing it with far too few troops.

We’re probably not going to find any agreement on what the US should do with a government that gives aid and comfort to a group like AQ…mostly because i think that the AQ threat is pretty overblown. But whatever threat that comes from groups like AQ should be dealt with as a law enforcement issue. You can’t just invading countries because they do things that might, tangentially threaten our “national security”…especially if we define national security as broadly as we do.

We (the United States) are not in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people. It’s an imperial project. It always has been an imperial project. If that’s the way we’re going to operate in the world, fine…i obviously can’t change it anyhow. But if that’s the case then we need to A. own up to it B. do it right and C. just start calling it The Afghan Provence.

To me, you have nothing if you don’t have security. I don’t know how to do that without some sort of military solution. How would a “robust international peace-keeping/nation-building operation” NOT be a military solution of some kind? And how does this differ from what I said when I suggested that this is a long-term issue that the “world” must come to grips with? And, BTW, can you point me to the UN peace-keeping effort that has a prayer of working without the use of US troops? Who would lead such a force that isn’t subject to the same sort of resentment and trust destroying focus of attention that accompany the US’s leadership role?

As for using a scalpel to take out a government that aids and abets international criminals, I don’t understand what you mean? How would that be done? Could you please give specifics?

Thanks.

As for

JS, i agree that we must do something, but i don’t see an offensive military solution to the problem. I seriously doubt that our bag of new COIN tricks will work effectively in Afghanistan A. because they’ve seen it all before and B. because they’re based on establishing trust…which we’ve pretty well destroyed already.

What we must extricate ourselves from is the military solution that runs around in circles. What Afghanistan really needs is a very large, very robust international peace-keeping/nation-building operation…not led by the United States.

Shy of occupying Pakistan too, we simply won’t remove “the Taliban” from the region. But when a government like the old Taliban government gives aid and comfort to international criminals, we need to use a scalpel. It’s interesting to note that the Bush admin (perhaps Clinton too) had all the plans for the regime change laid out pre-9/11. And there’s good evidence that CIA was already working with Massoud. Bouncing around form one warlord to another is not going to bring stability to Afghanistan.

Johns, that’s the plan, but the Afghan surge is half the size of the Iraq surge, spread over twice the time, added to a smaller force, and being deployed in a bigger country. And the dynamics are far different. I’m not sure that the US has the stomach to be the baddest warlord on the Afghan block.

I don’t like being in Afghanistan, and I’m sorry we helped the Soviets break the place. Personally, I believe the US would have been best off allowing a communist government to rule in Kabul, after the Soviets withdrew, instead of supporting the insurgency until the Taliban overthrew that government.

Having said all that, I really don’t know what choice the US and the rest of the world now have except to be in Afghanistan and to try to fix the place so it’s no longer a threat to others. From my perspective, an overview of the world as it stands now is that very powerful weapons, which were once the purview only of other governments, are now available (or can become available) to relatively small groups of stateless ideologues. Governments can’t always be reasoned with, but at least there is the possibility. Many of the ideological groups are not subject to reason. Right now, it’s religious fanatics but, in the future, it can be any ideology.

The world has to find a way to control these groups, and one thing that simply must be done is to destroy any government that actively supports such violent groups (as we did in Afghanistan) and aid any government that finds itself unable to exercise enough power to destroy (or at least defang) these groups. The world can no longer tolerate violently anti-social elements that can and do acquire powerful weapons.

The issue, to me, is not disengaging from Afghanistan. That will simply guarantee more attacks on the US and/or other countries, as well as adding fuel to a very dangerous, and potentially explosive, struggle between Pakistan and India for hegemony there. I believe the issue is working with other countries to decide how to get Afghanistan, and any other country that will someday become another Afghanistan, right.

One thing Afghanistan needs is hope. Economic activity there is depressed by reluctance from both internal and external investors to bet on the long term. Why build a business when the security situation can wipe it out at any moment? As for pomegranates, I’m told by someone who is an expert in the area that any attempt to change from growing poppies will result in the opiate dealers killing the farmers who switch to different crops — and probably killing their families, too. The world simply must get the security situation there under control, and it must be done with intelligence and careful planning.

There is much systemically challenging in Afghanistan, and it cannot be fixed without a very long-term commitment from the international community. But it must be fixed. There is really no other reasonable choice.

It is our “traditional” way of dealing with recalcitrant undeveloped nations, but doing it in the open and with our own uniformed troops instead of clandestinely as we have done elsewhere. It would win little homeland approval, but it would, at least, be meeting them on their own level instead of at the level of our often ill-considered and overreaching nation-building-at-the-point-of-a-gun visions. I can even imagine that Obama imagines that, over time, “progress” could be made for the Afghanis.