I owe Senator John Kerry an apology. During his failed Presidential election campaign, there was much talk about his opposition to the Vietnam War. I joined the chorus of folks criticizing that opposition. After serving (or perhaps during his tour) in Vietnam, he came to understand the futility of it all. Rather than simply follow along with the rest of the myrmidons, he chose to voice his opinion. Although I still do not condone how he chose to do this, I can now understand his opposition better.
Futility, I think, also best describes the mood here. As I travel around, speaking to folks on the ground, the mood is quite somber. This is in stark contrast to high-level briefings I’ve attended. While war-supporting talking heads in the media spout talking points for the military-political counterinsurgency cabal, the facts on the ground continue to cast doubt on our ability to see this through to an end worthy of the effort. Briefings in Kabul accentuate the positive, facts on the ground are a bit more realist in perspective. For example, there has been much talk of late regarding the military successes in the south. This success is not in doubt as many good men and women have paid for that success in blood, sweat, and tears. However, the south is only a small part of the picture.
While Taliban and associated groups are being hunted down or run off in the south, they are making a resurgence in the Afghan heartland – the few provinces surrounding Kabul. A recent report from the International Crisis Group indicates that this resurgence is due, in part, to collusion between corrupt Kabul government officials and insurgents. From these provinces, insurgents are able to stage attacks on Kabul to exercise psychological control over the capital. Although secondary to physical control, psychological control is crucial to long-term insurgent goals because it demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the Kabul government. This, combined with endemic corruption, sets up an end-game for post-American departure. Once the Americans leave, the locals think, no one can prop up the ineffective Karzai government so we must shift from passive acceptance of the Taliban to active support. This is completely within Afghan cultural norms – await a winner and then throw your support that way.
Perhaps John Kerry recognized this during his generation’s seemingly never-ending war. I have now begun to see this with my generation’s war as well. I see a strategy wherein money seems to be the answer to all problems. We continually pour money into this country only to have, by some estimates, nearly 4 million dollars per day leave the country earmarked for deposit into the Dubai accounts of corrupt Afghan officials. We continue to measure success in metrics that have no real bearing on the ground truth. Make no mistake here; I do not protest the effort as a whole like John Kerry did so many years ago. I firmly believe in the application of military force to remove threats to our country when negotiations or the like fail to achieve our objectives.
I subscribe more to a Clausewitzian view of war in this respect (Carl von Clausewitz is a, some would say the preeminent, military strategist). War cannot be made bloodless; it must consist of violence directed toward the enemy to put him in a situation that is more unpleasant than the sacrifice you ask him to make (i.e. what you are trying to compel him to do). Instead, we are trying to buy our enemy. Sure, the COINistas (adherents of counterinsurgency as a panacea) will say we’re engendering support from a passive population, but this really isn’t the case. As mentioned above, the passivity of the locals here disappears as they calculate a winner. Our money is being used to buy influence with corrupt officials and locals who see that we are soon leaving and the Taliban will remain. Thus, our enemy and our “allies” are nearly one and the same. I see this now and it is quite disheartening.
Generals get on television and tell us we can’t kill our way to victory. They are the COINistas. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, they continue this line of thinking as if repeating it enough will make it true. Meanwhile, Americans (and Canadians, and Norwegians, and Germans, etc.) are dying. I get it now Mr. Kerry, I do. War is about killing – killing a lot. It is about the controlled application of violence to the extent that your enemy is either utterly destroyed or is in such fear of that occurring that he will surrender to avoid it. If we are not willing to apply this amount of force (or if the situation doesn’t call for it) then we should not use our military.
So why are we doing this? A friend of mine here said that we’re doing it because we’re doing it. What did he mean by that statement? Well, inertia is a powerful thing. Once something as big and powerful as the military-political complex gets going, it’s hard to turn it around I guess. So the war machine keeps doing the same thing over and over, despite the lack of real results, just to perpetuate its existence. Like the self-licking ice cream cone it exists just to enable itself. I thought about this quite somberly as I listened to Senator Lindsay Graham tell a crowd at the US Embassy in Kabul that we’d never leave Afghanistan. God, I hope he’s wrong. I hope the Afghanistan war machine really is like that self-licking ice cream cone and ultimately consumes itself.
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