Sultan Knish
Some wars are lost in a matter of moments, others stretch on
indefinitely. The defeat in Afghanistan crept up silently on the
national consciousness and even though we are negotiating with the
Taliban, the "D" word is hardly used by anyone.
According to Obama, in one of his interminable speeches which all run
together and sound the same, there really isn't a war, just a mission,
and the old mission is now becoming a new sort of mission, and the
missions, all of them, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, have been
successful which is why we are wrapping them up, except that we aren't
really. And that's about as clear as the message from the big white
building with the neatly mowed lawn out front gets, except for the part
about how its occupant singlehandedly parachuted into Pakistan, killed
Bin Laden, and then stopped off for some curry and a humanitarian award.
Had McCain won in 2008, we would no doubt he hearing a lot about the "D"
word and the quagmire in Afghanistan. But the "Q" word doesn't really
get mentioned either. No war has been lost. Only a mission is ending.
And missions, unlike wars, can be defined in so many creative ways that
it's hard to know what to make of them. It's easy to tell when a war has
been lost, but a mission can never be lost, only renamed. And renaming
is what Obama did to the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. Those wars
weren't lost; they're only hiding out in the history books under new
names and identities.
Wars are usually remembered according to the proclivities of their
historians. The history books tend to record the Republican presidents
of the last hundred years as either losing wars or winning wars that
weren't worth winning. Democrats however usually win every one.
The Korean War and the Vietnam War were not that far in perception at
the time, but are worlds apart in the history books. Had John F. Kennedy
lived to serve out two terms and then passed on the big chair to his
brother, would the history books even record that the United States lost
the Vietnam War? Or would it, like Afghanistan, have gone down as a
story about a difficult temporary intervention that ended successfully
under the leadership of a wise and caring president?
It is difficult to imagine the left's narrative of the last century with
such a big and meaty chunk taken out of it. What would have become of
Oliver Stone's career without the JFK assassination and the mythology of
a cruel and senseless war in Vietnam? Or imagine the last decade if
Biden and Gore had managed to talk Clinton into going after Saddam. As
entertaining as such speculations might be, renaming missions and
tampering with the history books does not alter the outcome of wars.
From the early days, the left had gloated that Afghanistan would become
another Vietnam. And like the appointment in Samarra, in attempting to
escape that Vietnamness, it repeated many of the follies of Vietnam and
few of its triumphs, failing to press the advantage while expending
thousands of lives based on abstract theories hatched by the bright boys
in Washington and fraudulent books passed on by the wives of generals
to their husbands.
We are now in the Afghanistanization stage, hanging around a country for
no particular purpose, except that we aren't very good at departures
and the men who made this mess still think that Karzai and his crew can
make this work if we provide them with some more training and air
support without being shot in the back.
And when we have finally left and Karzai's cobbled together government
collapses, its ministers absconding to Paris and Pakistan with suitcases
full of stolen aid dollars, what comes after the war?
The old conflict aimed at denying Al Qaeda one base of operations had
been outdated a few years after it began. That was something that Bush
instinctively understood and that his critics have only slowly become
aware of. Al Qaeda is not a country or an ethnic group. It is a
religious vanguard that was always meant to serve as the core of an
international Islamist terrorist movement. That function had been
fulfilled long before an old man watching porn in a covert compound with
no authority over anyone except his many wives was finally put down the
hard way.
Al Qaeda, like the Communist Party, can rise anywhere. It rose in Iraq,
in Somalia, in Mali, in Syria and in countless other places. Like Burger
King, the franchise possibilities are endless and the brand name
recognition is universal. And unlike Burger King, you don't even need to
pay for the privilege of using the name. Set off a few bombs or kill a
few foreigners and watch the money start rolling in from the fat sheiks
of the oil-swollen Gulf who have never slit the throat of anything
larger than a goat, but like having their own terror armies.
Obama, despite his third culture cred and his ability to carry around
important books about world events while on vacation, has no clue what
to do about any of that. Obama at War is really a dumber Bush at War,
rehashing Bush era ideas and tactics with completely botched
implementations. With Kabul in the rear-view mirror, all he has left is
Bush's policy of targeted drone strikes on Al Qaeda terrorist leaders.
The only other foreign policy idea that the Obama crew brought to the
table, aside from ending the support for the dictators, which ushered in
the Arab Spring and the Islamization of the region, was to avoid ground
wars and focus on limited drone strikes and intelligence operations.
This approach has been rebranded as the smarter and smaller war. A true
conflict for the 21st with Muslim grad students in Yemen chatting on
XBox Live with Muslim teenagers in Jersey City to convince them to make
and carry liquid explosives on board a plane in tiny shampoo bottles
while overhead a drone piloted by a formerly unemployed middle-aged professional skier
with a degree in drone piloting from Kansas State hunts for them
silently in their clan territories. It's the world of a William Gibson
novel, except it's also our world now.
The targeted strike approach was largely borrowed from the Israeli
playbook. Like Israel, the United States is in a tangled conflict that
won't end any time soon. And like Israel, it's relying on saving some
lives and weakening the terrorist infrastructure by taking out a few
leaders here and there. Israel's targeted strikes on Hamas and Islamic
Jihad leaders never ended the conflict, but aborted more than a few
terrorist plots by killing the bomb-makers and planners who were making
them happen.
The actual conflict did not end. Neither did the attacks. Rather than
shooting soldiers, Israel was shooting officers, because shooting
soldiers required extended ground engagements and occupations that had
become politically untenable. The United States has embraced the same
strategy for the same reasons using technology that came out of Israel.
But it hasn't given much thought to what comes after that.
The failure of the targeted strikes and arrests of terrorist leaders led
Israel to pursue a physical separation through barriers and fences. The
terrorists compensated for that with rockets and shelling. That led
Israel to develop the Iron Dome, a defensive anti-rocket system. The
suicide bomber, once ubiquitous, became a rarity, but the attacks have
grown more powerful as the terrorists used the territory that they
gained through Israeli withdrawals to deploy heavier long-range weapons
that can reach major cities.
If the United States follows this same pattern of withdrawal and
fortification, then by 2028, there might be an actual Fortress America
guarded by anti-missile systems against Pakistani, Iranian and Egyptian
nukes. And that scenario, as troubled as it sounds, is probably one of
the better ones.
Israel withdrew from physical territories opening the way for a Hamas
takeover of Gaza. Obama withdrew from geopolitical territories,
announcing in Cairo that the United States would no longer support the
undemocratic dictators of the Muslim world unless they had oil. Hamas,
or its Egyptian parent organization, took over Egypt. Across the region,
Islamist regimes rose and American allies fell. The Islamist winners of
democratic elections turned into dictators leaving the United States in
the awkward position of supporting new dictators while being jeered and
denounced by the Arab Street.
What's the next step? It doesn't appear that there is one. Geniuses like
Brennan only thought as far ahead as draining Muslim anger by rewarding
political Islamists while using drone warfare to decimate violent
Islamists. Not only is this distinction mostly imaginary, but the rise
of political Islamists has made for more Al Qaeda takeovers and more
work for the drones in North Africa.
The plan has failed and the second term is underway. It is very doubtful
that Obama, whose big plan for Afghanistan was to copy the Bush plan
for Iraq that he denounced in the Senate, has a backup plan. Brennan
certainly does not. Secretary of State John Kerry is spending a lot of
time talking about Global Warming while waiting a week for a callback
from Russia. It's hard to think of a worse bunch of people in whose
hands to put the fate of the nation and the world.
Both Bush and Obama largely missed the point of September 11, which is
that it matters less how many training camps Al Qaeda has in some desert
where there are more drugs and RPGs than people, but how many
operatives they have in the United States. The terrorist attacks carried
out by Al Qaeda in America all required that their operatives either be
in the United States or have permission to enter it. The truly
dangerous training camps aren't in Mali or in Afghanistan; they are in
Jersey City and Minneapolis. The easiest way to stop the next Al Qaeda
terrorist attack is to end immigration from the Muslim world.
That is not a position that any presidential candidate, Republican or
Democrat, is likely to run on any time soon. Instead anyone who wants
the job is salivating at the prospect of pinning Green Cards to anyone
with a university degree. Articulating it is taboo even in Israel. And
yet after Afghanistan, the United States might find that it has no
choice but to build that southern border fence and to slash immigration
from the more explosive parts of the world. That revelation may not come
tomorrow, but it likely will come.
In Israel, it was Rabin who stated that Gaza had to be taken out of Tel
Aviv and who began the construction of the West Bank security barrier
because he realized that terrorism would destroy the peace process. An
American Rabin may well be a liberal who is forced to come to the
realization that the only way to avoid constant conflicts with the
Muslim world is to begin cutting off the flow of Muslim immigrants to
America.
Such a realization, if it ever comes, is still a long way off. For now
the drone war remains a clumsy fallback position. As long as there are
no major terrorist attacks, the limited drone strikes are enough to
satisfy most Americans. But when one of the Al Qaeda franchises begins
poring over blueprints of a major American landmark and another
September 11 follows, then the question that has been held in abeyance
after Afghanistan will suddenly reappear. What do we do now?
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