The Corner on National Review Online
After eight years in Afghanistan, coming up to 600 dead, and untold billions of dollars spent, we have nothing to show. As Secretary Gates has said, our only interest in this dustbowl is to prevent it being used as a staging area for attacks on our territory — the same interest we have in Somalia, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, and other places we have not invaded (including, if you want to stretch a point, Britain). We should cut a deal with the Taliban — a deal with suitable punitive clauses — and get out of there.
If we weren’t actually going to use the Iraqi victory to wage war on the true cause of Islamofascist terror, we should have done the same thing in Iraq about two weeks after that Bush “Mission Accomplished” announcement.
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Without being a Bushbot, this is wrong on so many levels.
Come to an understanding with the Taliban? Even assuming there is a centralized Taliban entity with whom one could come to such an understanding, what kind of message does that send? We’re really pissed off at you guys, and if you do it one more time, well we’ll….
So far as the costs, by any historical standard, the costs are extremely low. A military presence there coming on eight years at a cost of less than 500 combat related fatalities at a cost in dollars of say $200-300 billion. What it adds up to is probably 1 percent of gdp, maybe less.
I don’t claim that it’s been a smashing success, or even at this point, there can plausibly be an ideal outcome. But it’s no answer to say the nation should just throw up its hands and say “don’t do it again.”
They shouldn’t. They should say, “Don’t do it again, or we’ll come in an blow your ass to hell all over again, just like we did the last time, only worse.”
Go read some Codevilla before you blatter on about how “wrong” that notion is. What’s wrong is the notion that we have to “establish democracy” or “rebuild the infrastructure” or “win the hearts and minds.” All we need is for them to be terrified of harboring or supporting anti-American terrorists. Other than that, I don’t give a rat’s ass if they eat each other.
I initially supported the wars against the Taliban and Saddam. If I had known how they would be conducted, I doubt I would have supported them. I thought these were punitive missions: go in, smash the government, and tell the tyrant who picks up the rubble not to threaten us again.
And if they did cause a problem in the future; lather, rinse. repeat.
If we had done that, we would not have lost thousands of soldiers and spent a trillion dollars (give or take).
If we had crushed Afghanistan and left, then crushed Iraq and left, there would still have been money, military capability, and public will to have done the same to Syria, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps even Saudi Arabia (though I doubt this last one).
I know I’m repeating you, Bill, but I wanted to say it. It was such a collossal screw-up.
“Grab ‘em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.” Blow gentle, sweet-smelling drafts up their behinds and don’t be surprised if they think we’re a bunch of perfumed pussies. The only thing these folks understand is the mailed hand. They do understand that anyone who wants to talk, talk, does so because they’re weak.
If it were me, I think I’d drop a nice tac nuke on Tehran and then ask if they wanted to talk..
Since such a good job was done blowing their asses to hell the last time, I’m sure they’ll believe it this time around.
I suppose that’s intended to pass for intelligent argument, Daniel, but in fact we did blow their asses to hell in Iraq, at almost no cost to ourselves in blood or, relatively speaking, treasure.
Ask Saddam and his brute sons about it. Ask the Taliban who used to rule Afghanistan.
We did blow their asses, and their power, to hell. We could keep right on doing it. A far smarter thinker than you are, Steven Den Beste, was once asked if we could wage more than two wars at once. He replied, “Of course. It’s just that some of them would be nuclear.”
We have always had the power to instill fear in those who would hold power in any Islamic state. Saddam couldn’t prevent us from running daily bombing missions over his country for years on end.
It is only the spurious notion that we should stay our hand against our avowed enemies that leads to idiocy like GWB’s Iraq Democracy project, which has done nothing to make us safer and, in the end, will make us less safe by convincing our fanatic enemies that we lack the will to actually destroy them, no matter what they do to us.
Like Mullah Omar? He’s still around isn’t he.
Also, what is the difference between the Taliban the Derbyshire is referring to and the old Taliban?
As far as a nuclear threat, what possible basis does this “new” Taliban have to believe such a threat, besides taking our word for it? You’d think that destroying the WTC, attacking the Pentagon and attempting to destroy the Capital and/or the White House (far more damage to the homeland than Japan ever could have inflicted in WWII) would have warranted a nuclear response in the first place.
I agree though that we should not be in the nation-building and democracy spreading business. But that’s not the same as cutting a deal with the same people who were directly responsible for an attack that we’re supposed to be reminded of at every waking moment of the day.
Are you being deliberately stupid, Daniel? Here’s a question in return: Is he still leading the regime that rules Afghanistan?
We don’t need nukes to wreak terrible havoc on bronze-age people with AK-47s. Napalm the poppy fields and bomb their cities, and they don’t have much left.
No, of course there’s no reason for any of these barbarian savages to believe we’ll do anything like that. We’ve already demonstrated we’re the weak horse, thanks to people who think like you do.
And because of people who think like you, we are the weak horse.
I said cut a deal with the survivors who replace the regime that earned our wrath. There are warlords in Afghanistan who understand perfectly how to deal with the Taliban. We don’t permit them to do so, because people like you would regard their methods as uncivilized, possibly unAmerican.
The proper approach to Afghanistan would have been to destroy the Taliban’s grip on power, pick whatever warlord or lords survived the succession struggle, tell them they had carte blanche as long as the Taliban did not return, and they themselves did nothing to support anti-American Islamofascist terrorism. We should have done the same thing in Iraq. And then we should have turned and looked directly at Iran, and said, “Well?”
If they didn’t respond to our satisfaction, as Tod says, “wash, rinse, repeat.”
We would be safer, the world would be safer, and Obama would probably not be president today if that had been US policy following 9/11.
Fine. I was referring to Derbyshire’s talk of a deal with “The Taliban”, not some backward warlords who only want to do so on their own time.
And by the way, where have I once said that we need to have civilized folks running things there. In fact, I’ve said the exact opposite, or at least that it was neither necessary nor sufficient.
The point is, whatever should have been done in the past, clearly has not, or was aborted mid-stream in favor of a policy of helping Afghans find their inner-American. The Taliban, in some form or another, is back. Their leader, while driven from his country, is still alive notwithstanding that he is still wanted, dead or alive. Any renewed threat of annilation, especially to a group of people who value suicidal “martyrdom”, rings hollow.
Well, the future starts today. If we don’t want future threats to ring hollow, we should start following through on our threats better.
Oh, you mean like Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, all of whom value suicidal martyrdom so much that they have gone to any and every length to avoid it? The leaders of these suicide cults only value suicide in their underlings, not for themselves.