The Triangle

Issue date: 3/7/08 Section: Ed-Op

Media Credit: MCT Campus

John McCain, the Rambo wannabe who's comfortable with the idea of spending the next century in Iraq, forgot to add our other war in Afghanistan, which at nearly six and a half years (and counting) already exceeds the amount of time we spent fighting World Wars I and II combined. If anything, it is even more hopeless a mess than Iraq, and one for which no one even pretends to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Afghanistan was not, like Iraq, a war of "choice." It was forced upon us, politically if not militarily, by the attacks of Sept. 11. In retrospect, however, it is clear that it should have been fought either more restrictedly or wider. By not making the right strategic decision at the outset, we ensured quagmire and defeat.

A restricted war would have been one waged from the air and aimed specifically at Al Qaeda training sites. It would not have attempted to dislodge the Taliban regime that ran the country, but would have made it the object of sanctions. It would not have involved a partnership with the Northern Alliance, the rag-tag coalition of anti-Taliban warlords and freebooters that we used as a surrogate army and who are now, returned to their several factions, de facto masters of the poppy fields of northern Afghanistan. In the way of the world, we would probably have kept the Alliance going as a thorn in the Taliban's side, though it hardly represented a preferable alternative on humanitarian grounds--marginally less bigoted, marginally more corrupt. These are the practical choices left in Afghanistan after decades of Cold War meddling in an impoverished tribal society.

The far riskier and costlier alternative to this would have been to have built up a substantial expeditionary force to overthrow the Taliban and occupy Afghanistan on a long-term basis. We have seen the consequences of such a policy in Iraq. Afghanistan was an even less fertile field for "nation-building," and would probably have become a permanent ward of the international community. No one, from Alexander the Great to Leonid Brezhnev, has ever entered Afghanistan in force and not lived to regret it.

The Bush administration attempted to split the difference by fighting a war of conquest on the cheap, and it has gotten the worst of all possible worlds on every front. The Taliban, ousted from Kabul but with its leadership and organization intact, has become, as it once was, a major guerrilla presence effectively controlling wide if shifting swaths of the Afghan South. The warlords are running their profitable opium enterprise in the North. The puppet government of Hamid Karzai does not control the 30 percent of the country generously assigned it by American estimates; it does not even control Kabul. It has no future, and would have no present either but for American support and round-the-clock security. It is a very frayed fig leaf on a policy of utter failure.

Continued...

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