I liked Republicans a whole lot better when they were unanimously committed to the Weinberger Doctrine, which became far more widely known as the Powell Doctrine. After the nightmare of Vietnam, it seemed the most plausible way for a superpower to conduct a sensible foreign policy.The doctrine consisted of six central points;
1. The United States should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interests of the United States or its allies are involved.
2. U.S. troops should only be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning. Otherwise, troops should not be committed.
3. U.S. combat troops should be committed only with clearly defined political and military objectives and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives.
4. The relationship between the objectives and the size and composition of the forces committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.
5. U.S. troops should not be committed to battle without a "reasonable assurance" of the support of U.S. public opinion and Congress.
6. The commitment of U.S. troops should be considered only as a last resort.
Not only was that realistic, it was a truly conservative view of military policy. It is important to remember that, rhetoric aside, Republican presidents were historically far more reluctant to administer force than their Democratic counterparts, often in the face of harsh objections from their own conservative factions.
President Eisenhower refused to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union; and did not accommodate the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to use nuclear weapons against China to resolve the first Quemoy and Matsu crisis. Although he expanded the Vietnam War into neighbouring Cambodia, President Nixon rapidly deescalated the American force commitment and ended the draft that was tearing the United States apart. President Reagan was almost constantly hectored by his right wing to send U.S combat troops into Central America, and responded by saying "Those sons of bitches won't be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua, and I'm not going to do it."
All of those, of course, occurred before the rise of the so-called "Neoconservatives." Up until the end of the Nixon Administration, the neocons were all Democrats, and usually either admirers or staff members of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. They were, in foreign policy terms, liberal activists of the Woodrow Wilson mold, believing that the expansion of democracy by force would be the best protection of U.S interests.
It was only during the Ford Administration that they started becoming Republicans. They served in low to middle levels in the Pentagon and State Department during in the Ford and Reagan administrations, although to no great effect. As they began occupying senior positions in the first Bush Administration, they became more and more activist, as exemplified by a draft of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, written by then Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. Once the DPG was leaked to the New York Times, senior Bush officials were outraged and ordered it recalled and rewritten because it so inflamed American allies around the world.
During the Clinton years, the neocons became even more emboldened, using the offices of the Project for a New American Century to call for, among other things, regime change in Iraq. Many of those in the Project took senior positions in the second Bush Administration. Their activist influence, combined with Donald Rumsfeld's "light footprint" doctrine of combat, led to what became the military disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Moreover, President Bush's military adventures never had "clearly defined political and military objectives", nor the "capacity to accomplish those objectives."
After it became clear that al-Qaeda had vacated Afghanistan for Pakistan and that Osama bin Laden would be neither captured or killed, the mission came to be defined by girls going to school and building a Western-style democracy. Both are laudable, but neither is what great powers has traditionally used force to accomplish.
When it became clear that weapons of mass destruction would not be found in Iraq, the war became one of liberation, "rape rooms, anti-Baathism (although the Baath Party of Iraq was never really the problem, Saddam Hussein was), changing the Middle East through the expansion of democracy, and "fighting the terrorists in there so we don't have fight them here", although there was a notable paucity of jihadi terrorists in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.
The problems of U.S policy, however, were most pronounced in Afghanistan. Because the administration decided that the Taliban would be dealt with by the CIA and a tiny contingent of Special Forces, the bulk of the ground fighting was carried out by the Northern Alliance, themselves no strangers to corruption, narcotics trafficking and war crimes. It was only in 2002 that regular forces and NATO troops entered the country, largely for the purpose of stabilization and "mopping up" operations.
And almost as soon as they appeared, American assets started to withdraw. Military intelligence and CIA assets began being redeployed for the oncoming war in Iraq. Because the Americans, the attack on whom precipitated the invasion of Afghanistan, began withdrawing, the remaining NATO forces lacked the domestic political support to carry out offensive operations against the Taliban.
By 2005, as the chaos in Iraq was nearing its height, the Taliban was resurgent, first in Afghanistan, then in Pakistan. There was almost no attention paid to Afghanistan and Pakistan by the U.S government or media. The ground war was essentially being fought by British, Canadian and Dutch forces, with aerial support by the United States. Because imprecise air strikes, often based on targeting information provided by rival domestic tribal factions, killed so many civilians, Afghan support for the foreign intervention began to slowly decline.
The government of Hamid Karzai, crippled by corruption and unable to do anything about the bombing within its own country, began speaking of some sort of accommodation with the Taliban. That's the political atmosphere in which the populations of the non-American NATO countries began reassessing their commitment to the Afghan mission.
The Dutch announced that they would be withdrawing, the Germans are under heavy pressure to do so, and the Canadian minority Conservative government announced in 2007 an end-date of the summer of 2011. Canada stated that they would extend their mission on Kandahar only if it received a credible partnering agreement from NATO, which was not forthcoming.
At around the time of the Canadian parliamentary debate, the leader of the New Democratic Party, Jack Layton, called for some sort of Afghan coalition agreement with the Taliban, which, come to think of it, wasn't all that different from Karzai's own position. For his trouble, members of the Tory government and their friends in the media and blogosphere branded him "Taliban Jack." It was a disgusting display that was well beneath everybody involved.
I disagreed with Layton at the time. I hoped that either an Obama or McCain administration would commit something close to what was necessary to win in Afghanistan and somehow convince NATO to participate. By December of last year it became clear that this would never happen.
President Obama was about as courageous as he could afford to be, given the split among the American people and the almost uniform opposition of his political base. But it isn't enough, and it never will be. American domestic support for the war was cratering well before U.S servicemen began coming home from southern Afghanistan in record numbers. That being the case, the remaining nations of NATO don't have the political capital to participate in anything close to a proper "surge." And without that, a counterinsurgency cannot succeed.
The war is over. We lost.
Even if we train the greatest indigenous army and police forces in human history by next summer, or 2012, or 2016, or even 2020 ... it won't be enough for one simple reason: The cost of an Afghan-run counterinsurgency will cost more than the country's gross domestic product. No one has even bothered trying to explain to me how Kabul is going to run a $14 billion counterinsurgency with a $10 billion economy.
The idea that the West is going to financially support Karzai after we withdraw is fanciful at best, and an outright lie at worst. The United States abandoned Afghanistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, and the world economy was pretty healthy then. It isn't now.
So the governing Conservatives have essentially adopted Jack Layton's position that the only way to exit Afghanistan is by arranging Taliban participation in the Karzai government. That is now the offical policy of the Canadian government.
Of course, Layton's wrong in suggesting that there will be any "coalition" with the Talibs. Things just don't work out that way in Afghanistan, and they never have. The Pashtun Taliban will immediately overthrow Karzai and his Uzbek and Tajik supporters and the country will descend again into the chaos of civil war. We'd be lucky to get even the "decent interval" that the Nixon administration sought in Vietnam.
On the other hand, that's irrelevant. NATO has repeatedly demonstrated that it was never serious about this war. The Bush Administration certainly wasn't, and without the United States, there was never any real reason for NATO to be in Afghanistan at all. The current policy is merely delaying the inevitable.
If terrorism emanating from Afghanistan is the main problem, that can be resolved without war. Without Pakistani support, the foreign jihadists, such as al-Qaeda, wouldn't be in Afghanistan at all. Pakistan requires them to bulk up and carry out the insurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir, which coincidentally began the year after the Soviets evacuated Afghanistan. Afghanistan also provides Pakistan with strategic depth from which to battle back a hypothetical Indian invasion. And to accomplish that, Islamabad needs reliable Pashtun allies in power there. The Uzbeks and Tajiks are allied with Russia and Iran, and Karzai himself is increasingly in New Delhi's camp.
Al-Qaeda isn't known to have participated in the anti-Indian Kashmir jihad, but it is allied with several groups that are. Pakistan created the monster that is now destroying it, but they won't kill it only to continue to be under a mortal Indian threat. Unless and until there's a resolution to Kashmir satisfactory to Islamabad, Afghanistan will always be a terrorist haven. Pakistan will not abandon its own vital national interests just to allow NATO to withdraw because we're bored with and afraid of war.
The real counterterrorism war now is to bring enough diplomatic pressure on India to settle the Kashmir dispute, preferably by the referendum the United Nations called for 60 years ago. That should have been linked to the deal that essentially exempted New Delhi from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it wasn't because of strategic short-sightedness by the Bush Administration.
Afghanistan could have been won early by administering overwhelming force in the first six months of the war. If the United States hadn't farmed out the war to unreliable Northern Alliance mercenaries, al-Qaeda likely would have been utterly destroyed by the spring of 2002. After a speedy withdrawal, the Iranians - who very nearly invaded Afghanistan in 1999 - could have contained or destroyed the Taliban and limited Pakistan's influence.
I doubt that Jack Layton was ever a supporter of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, but he's wrong about a lot things. That doesn't make him "Taliban Jack" and it never did. But he was right when almost everybody else, including me, was wrong.
Special thanks to Alison at Dawg's Blawg.
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