It’s time to get down to the business of thinking about America's strategic interests. What do we want to accomplish in Afghanistan? Obviously, we want to leave a country in place which does not support terrorism. That would be nice, but does it make us any safer? No. Because, so long as Waziristan provides a sanctuary for terrorism, it doesn't matter whether the terrorists also have Afghanistan. The problem compounds, if you want to leave Afghanistan a place which is not safe for terrorists you must also convert northwestern Pakistan into a place which is not safe for terrorists. If one of these places is not permanently "pacified" the other will equally not be pacified.
How do we propose to do that, with American boots on the ground? With 50% of America against the war in Afghanistan, what percentage of America do you judge will support putting troops into Pakistan? Assuming you can get public support for putting troops into Pakistan, can you be sure that the Pakistani government will not oppose our troops? Can you be sure that the Pakistani government will not threaten to use nuclear weapons against our troops? Even if such a threat were hollow when made, can we afford to disregard it? Can you see an end game to the pacification of Waziristan? I cannot. Neither could Winston Churchill more than a century ago.
Could it be done with drones and conventional air power working in close alliance with the Pakistani government and with some tribes in Waziristan? I do not know. As in every war America fights, we are in a foot race between our own casualty count and the enemy. Some might argue that the Serbs were pacified by air power alone, but is Afghanistan the same as Yugoslavia? Does not history teach us that "pacification" unavoidably means occupation? Have we figured out how to do that in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan without unacceptable casualty counts?
If casualty counts are not problematic enough, do we have the money? How broke are we? Is the debt growing to 11 trillion? Will the entitlements inexorably carry us to $26 million, as recently reported? It has now become a real question whether we can finance such a war.
While we are exercising our vision about how to pacify Waziristan, can we be sure that our efforts will not radicalize the reasonably sane portion of the Muslim population of Pakistan further against America? Will it turn the military against us? The Secret Police? What about those people who control the nukes? How much would take for people like A. Q. Khan who sold nuclear secrets to turn over some nukes to the Taliban or other terrorists in retaliation?
Would an American invasion with ground forces into the Northwest of Pakistan make that more or less likely? How do you know? But can we conduct our foreign policy out of fear or should we simply pursue our own best interests and let the chips fall where they may? According to Michael Scheuer, ex-of the CIA and responsible for watching bin Laden, we are not acting and have not been acting in pursuit of our own interests for years. He says that's why we are fighting these wars in the first place.
So we come back to my initial premise which is we must enlist the sane Muzzies to fight our war for us. We cannot win it alone. The way we enlist support from Muzzies is to show them who is boss. They respect power and they despise appeasement.
But let us not deceive ourselves. It required only 19 Muzzies to bring down the World Trade Center and kill 3000 Americans. We can kill all the Muzzies in Afghanistan, and they will still be able to scrape up from somewhere among the godforsaken corners of the world another 19 Muzzies to deliver what this time might be a weapon of mass destruction. And that weapon might just come from Pakistan. We cannot hope to conquer and hold every square inch of territory between the Atlantic coast of Africa and the western border of China in order to stop the formation of a terrorist squad only nineteen men (or women) strong.
So the war is primarily a war of intelligence. After we wring all the benefits we can out of our listening devices, we need indispensable local knowledge. Human intelligence must primarily come from the Muslim world because they have the language, the culture, and the tribal affiliation which we could never hope to penetrate. But we can hope to suborn them, turn one tribe against another, as the French did in North America and the British did so successfully in India and Pakistan. But conquering and holding territory is not the answer; it is probably not even the means to the answer.
A war of intelligence is primarily a war of alliances.
So when we do our strategic thinking about what the interests of America are in places like Afghanistan, we ought to consider what our goals are there and how we can accomplish them. Putting boots on the turf and holding it as an end in itself is worse than useless, I fear it is self-defeating.
Putting boots on the ground and fighting only to a stalemate is the equivalent of defeat because it unnerves our allies, encourages our enemies, and dispirits our grieving mothers. Rather than intimidating Muslim governments to cooperate with us, it encourages them to pander to their street. Intelligence suffers. When intelligence suffers it actually makes us more vulnerable, not less.
Whatever we do, must be done decisively and successfully or not at all.
Until we're able to answer fundamental questions and articulate exactly what troops there in Afghanistan can accomplish and at what cost, we are just spending blood and treasure without purpose.
