With the Afghanistan War now surpassing -- at least by some reckonings -- the Vietnam War as the nation's longest running, it should be
abundantly clear that there is no Vietnam-style mass antiwar movement
in the offing to bring this one to a halt. Stanley McChrystal, then,
may have performed the most valuable service of his military career in
directing the country's attention toward this war, for however brief a
time it may be (although I wouldn't necessarily be the one to want to
tell him that.) The General, after all, was not shown the door
because he was responsible for some special military outrage or
anything like that -- actually he had been criticized for restrictions
designed to reduce civilian casualties. His transgression, really,
was revealing too much of the weaknesses of the thinking behind a war
that we might call foolish -- if it weren't tragic.
Of course, nearly nine years and counting is not necessarily such a
long time in everyone's eyes: a Council on Foreign Relations opinion
piece in the New York Times was already pleading that "his plan can
work. We just need to give it a little time" even before McChrystal
had been fired. The rest of us, though, might take the opportunity to
focus on something a little deeper than the "Al Qaeda=Taliban=bad,
therefore, war against them=good" logic that has consumed strategists
on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon for the past decade.
For instance, while a torrent of polling data will undoubtedly
analyze public perception of the McChrystal firing and its impact on
the Obama presidency and the course of his war, it seems high time to
revisit a far more important survey conducted this past April -- the
poll the U.S. Army itself commissioned to learn the opinion of
residents of Afghanistan's Kandahar province before launching a long
delayed offensive widely considered central to our "new" war policy.
If you were looking in the right direction during the nanosecond of
national attention given to this poll, you will recall that an
astounding 94 percent of those asked thought "negotiation with the
Taliban is preferable to continued fighting" and 85 percent considered
them "our Afghan brothers." 53 percent, in fact, thought they were
"incorruptible."
On some level we here can never expect to understand how a group with
outlook and policies we find so appalling could garner polling numbers
that American political parties would die for. Yet in another sense
it's quite simple. A relatively recent book on McGeorge Bundy,
national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, reports
that Bundy's notes from the early years of the Vietnam War demonstrate
Kennedy's growing understanding that a guerilla war cannot be won by
foreign troops for the simple reason that the foreign troops will
eventually leave while the guerrillas stay. And even Predator
missiles do not change that basic fact.
If we were to seek the one fundamental flaw in the current American
military equation, it would probably be the Al Qaeda=Taliban part,
without which the war makes absolutely no sense. After all, there are
currently thought to be no more than about a hundred Al Qaeda in all
of Afghanistan. The reality of the situation was probably best
captured by Jeffrey Addicott, a former legal adviser to U.S. Special
Forces. In explaining why some CIA operatives oppose the increased
use of drone strikes, Addicott explained to reporter Gareth Porter
that in most parts of the Muslim and Arab world, Al Qaeda was not so
much an organization as "a mentality," a mentality reinforced by the
continual U.S. wars against Muslim nations and the civilian casualties
they inevitably bring.
This month's Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project report
seemingly confirmed that fear when it reported that while Obama
currently retains greater popularity in much of the rest of the world
than he does at home, the great exception is the Muslim world. The
report found the number of Muslims approving of Obama in Pakistan --
the other country Washington claims to be saving from Al Qaeda and the
Taliban -- had fallen to 8%.
Osama bin-Laden's got to be pretty pleased with those numbers, along
with one other set -- the ones tallying the costs of our wars. Whether
you think they cost "only" a trillion dollars or the full three
trillion that economist Joseph Stiglitz says will be the long run
cost, it's a lot of money in a world facing economic difficulties in
almost all quarters. Remember that Reagan era plan to drive the
Soviet Union into bankruptcy by forcing it into unsustainable military
spending?
So General McChrystal, if your passing from the national scene is a
cause for reconsideration of any of these aspects of our current
Afghanistan War policy, I say we owe you.