Do Not Blame Barack

I assume you're referring mostly to Glenn Beck about whom I have posted on this issue at length. My beef against Beck is that he might not be a reliable conservative and he is certainly not a reliable Republican. My views on this subject were published before before he made his remark that voting for McCain would be worse for the country than voting for Obama.

I called this a preposterous remark and debated it at length. In essence, I applaud Glenn Beck for his wonderful muckraking and his talent for dramatizing the issues. More, Glenn Beck has a talent for explaining these matters thematically which is an overview lacking even in the presentations made by Rush Limbaugh. Beck goes to the blackboard and shows the interrelationships of corruption in the Obama administration, for example. But his remark quoted above betrays an utter ignorance of the American two-party system and a naïveté (or a megalomania) which I think is close to what you're talking about.

The Libertarians on the right are similar to the leftists who are locked in their psychic cage to the degree that the Libertarians permit the perfect to be the enemy of the good. The leftist exploits relativism to destroy all values which leads to nihilism so he can destroy the system. The Libertarian says your ways are imperfect therefore I withdraw entirely from the game. Glenn Beck, for example, explicitly tells his viewers not to vote for either Republicans or Democrats. He clearly wants a third-party movement to emerge. The problem with a libertarian approach is that it encourages frustrated conservatives to withdraw from the fray and go into their bunker with their bottled water and their gun collection-a kind of nihilism after all.

The matter becomes more complicated when we get into the area of your expertise, military engagements abroad. The complication is that is difficult to distinguish libertarianism from paleo- conservatism. Libertarians actually have an argument to make but they extend the implications of their philosophy absurdly and leave the country vulnerable and weak. In this effect, if not in the intent, Libertarians resemble leftists who would leave the country weak and vulnerable so they can destroy our system.

I confess to playing Hamlet on these issues myself and you and I have had long exchanges on the issue of Iraq. I think you were right and I was wrong, and I have said so. One would think I would have learned my lesson but I find myself mounting the same arguments against our involvement in Afghanistan. I am ambivalent because I do not see a war aim nor a strategy. Mostly, I do not see the utility of "winning" in Afghanistan if we cannot "win" in Waziristan at a price we can or should be willing to pay.

I like to think that in these struggles to find a proper course in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan that I am acting in the long American tradition of paleo conservatism. The danger of course is that we say we are looking to pick our shots but we are actually seeking to avoid the fray. I honestly do not believe I am doing that.

Domestically, the history of the United States demonstrates clearly that a third-party movement only ensures the victory of the party most alien to the goals of the movement. There is no conservative success outside of the Republican Party. The modern national electoral contest is so expensive and so vast that the apparatus of the party is indispensable for coordination, discipline, coherence of message, and fundraising. The Internet can not substitute for these purposes but the Obama campaign demonstrated that the Internet can be used as an arm of a party apparatus. Therefore, conservatives must reform the Republican Party but not abandon it. The Internet can be used to reform the Republican Party but it cannot be a substitute for a party apparatus.

In a way, it is the technological application of the difference between Rousseau and locke.

I am sorry for the rambling reply, but your comments have touched a sore spot with me. If the Glenn Beck's of the world have their way the Republican Party is liable to be fractured, not reformed, and the country will never be released from its psychic cage.

On Afghanistan.

There are no good answers here.

Part of the reason we went to Iraq was to avoid having to fight this battle in this location. We wanted to draw them out into more favorable terrain. It worked for a while but unfortunately once the terrorists realized they were losing in Iraq, they pulled back to fight in Afghanistan. Now what do we do?

Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires” for a reason. It is hard to get too. You have long vulnerable supply lines, it borders are almost indefensible, it's neighbors provide safe havens to the terrorists. It terrain and demographic and ethnic diversity favors the enemy efforts.

So what do we do?

Part of me thinks we should stop spending blood and treasure on this. Declare victory and come home.

We have a strategic interest in maintaining a position in Iraq. Iraq is the strategic high ground of the Middle East. Being in Iraq gives us an unassailable position to counter any belligerence from Syria, Iran or, who knows the future, Saudi Arabia. There is no such reason to stay in Afghanistan. It is a dead end theater that gains us little and costs us much. If we can maintain a presence in Uzbekistan where we can keep an eye on Afghanistan and swat any resurgent Al Qeda presence with massive air strikes and provide aid to those forces opposed to the militants we can achieve our national security interests without the drain this perpetual mission of trying to “national building” is causing on our troops, on our allies and on our treasury.

We have done a lot of good since 2001. To start with we are paying attention now. No one was paying any attention to Afghanistan after 1989. Soviets pulled out, we won, game over. We went to sleep again.

Part of the reason the Taliban were successful in the 1st place was because the Pakis were giving them aid so that they could bleed off their militant into Afghanistan.

Now Taliban and Pakis are at open war. Future regimes in Islamabad are going to know they cannot use an unstable Afghanistan as their militant dumping ground. We will be watching. And since we will be watching we can give money and support any native Afghanistan forces if they seem to be losing to a resurgent Taliban.

Downsides? We embolden all our foes from Iran to NK to the Terrorists and serious damage US credibility with our allies. Being able to claim victory in Afghanistan is going to help the terrorists raise fund and recruit troops. Plus we are going to have to stand guard for decades watching what is going on in Afghanistan which means maintaining a presence some where in the country or in the area to fly drones and support covert ops. US Govt after US Government is going to have to support that effort meaning both sides of the political spectrum will have to buy into that effort. Cannot have this administration do it, then have the next one drop the ball. This is an effort that will require decades of slow patient effort on our part.

Like I said at 1st, no good answer. But from everything I am hearing the situation in Afghanistan is seriously deteriorating and nothing the current Admin is doing right now is going to change that.

Johnny: I have written two pieces on Afghanistan which I wish you would review partly because they are very close parallels to what you have just written and because I would value your opinion. However, I warn you that the replies are up to my usual standards of length and, when strung together as I have done with these, they extend to the horizon. Here are the posts:

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and we cannot kill all of them. The way to deal with any Islamic (Islamicist) movement is to enlist the sane Muzzies to liquidate the insane Muzzies because we have convinced the sane ones that if they do not police the crazies in their midst, we will kill them if the crazies do not. Even if we could kill them all, the mothers of America will never tolerate the kind of casualties required to do so unless you want to go nuclear in which case we in America will not be able to tolerate ourselves..

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.

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In discussing this topic, how do we identify and pursue the national interest of the United States, we stipulate that we have a president in power who wants to advance our national interests. It is astonishing and terribly revealing that we have to stipulate this about our president merely to have a coherent discussion of American foreign policy. I am well aware that there is a body of evidence which indicates the contrary of the stipulation. Let us assume that we have a president who will consciously choose the options which he believes will advance America so we can at least get on with an analysis.

When a chief executive and commander in chief weighs new strategic options he must consider whether a particular option will cost more than it gains. This is the analysis which I am asking us to undertake concerning Afghanistan. Even our military officers whom you want to turn loose are divided in this judgment.

When we "oppose evil and thump those who attack America" a Commander-in-Chief must ask himself do I have the resources, including the support of the American people, sufficient to see this option through or am I pursuing a feel-good policy which ultimately weakens America in a generational asymmetrical world war? If I choose this course, will America be stronger 20 years from now to contend with an enemy who can move from Afghanistan to Waziristan to Cairo or even to Detroit at the speed of commercial air transportation? A president must ask himself, do we have the wherewithal in the midst of a financial and economic crisis, the dimensions of which we still do not know, to wage wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost literally of millions of dollars a day? If we indulge our emotions to wage war in Afghanistan, whose war are we fighting, ours or the enemies? Who will ultimately win a war of casualty count?

Can I honestly tell my people, as president, that if they pour their blood and treasure into Afghanistan they will be safer against a stealth strike in the homeland? Can I honestly tell them that we will be stronger after we spend our treasure and our blood? Can I say to them, "my fellow Americans, we are not just shoveling flies in Afghanistan, we are making the homeland safer?" Can I say, "this is the best use of our precious resources?"

What are our strategic interests? Certainly high on the list comes the issue of nuclear proliferation to Islamicists. Clearly the Taliban in Afghanistan is not a threat in this regard. Are the Islamicists in Pakistan a very real threat to acquire nuclear weapons? Obviously the answer is yes. Can I honestly represent to the American people that to pursue an asymmetrical war against the ragtag Taliban in Afghanistan makes it less likely that the Taliban will acquire nuclear weapons in Pakistan?

It is certainly in our strategic interest to enlist Muslim countries in support of a war against the Islamicists. Concededly, if we are just flat whipped in Afghanistan the whole Muslim world, especially the Arab world, will feel emboldened to confront America openly and through terrorism. But what if we only fight to a stalemate in Afghanistan? Will we have gained the support of the Muslim world? How many lives is the propaganda value of a victory in Afghanistan worth? How much treasure?

I think the Mr. Obama should ask himself, why is the war in Afghanistan different from the war in Iraq? Does the whole thing turn in the accident of a choice by bin Laden to locate a few dusty tents and ramshackle buildings in Afghanistan? Of what significance is that?

I think the president should also ask himself, why, by all accounts from our senior military observers, are we losing the war to a bunch of rag tag illiterates after seven years? Our initial invasion was done with the help of some Afghan tribes, why have we been so unsuccessful in building upon that model? Why are the tribes against us and against the national government and why did the national government have to resort to voter fraud in order to retain its majority? Do these questions indicate that our fundamental strategy in Afghanistan is utterly flawed?

Do these questions indicate that there is no realistic possibility of substituting Afghan boots on the ground for American boots on the ground even if we supply logistics and air power for the Afghan boots? It has, after all, been seven years.

I as a president who actually wants America to prevail, must know that our resources are stretched and our reserves are virtually exhausted. A miscalculation here could cause the decline and fall of the American century. Is the game in Afghanistan worth that?

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