Interventions Really Suck!

The Geek has spent nearly his entire post-pubescent life either practicing or studying interventionary war. He's lectured on it. He's written on it. He's taught it. He's read it. And, he's fought it.

His conclusion?

Interventionary operations are a bad idea. Outside of a few, well delineated situations, military interventions are as bad a concept as tossing down a botulism cocktail.

Our two current adventures in intervention prove the case for the limited applicability of this mode of war. Even though the battlefield situation has improved in Iraq to the extent that one can say with a high level of confidence that there is little chance of the US not achieving the minimum necessary goal of not losing, there can be no justification for the intervention in the first place.

In Afghanistan where the potential for the US to lose the war on the ground still exists, the same conclusion of non-necessity is easily justified.

The original goal of the Afghanistan invasion was two fold: Topple Taliban. Capture or kill Osama bin Ladin and others of the al-Qaeda leadership cell.

Had the original goal been kept firmly in mind during the short duration planning phase leading up to the invasion, the intervention might have been both justifiable and successful. But, as is so often the case in interventions the phenomenon of mission creep was at work even before the first American Special Forces and Marine boots were on the ground.

One good reason for intervention is the ruthless pursuit of a narrowly defined national interest. In Afghanistan that narrow national interest was not only to kill or capture the al-Qaeda leadership cell, but to show governments who harbored killers of Americans that there would be severe negative consequences involved.

One of the worst, if not the worst, reason for intervention is epitomised by the statement of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson making reference to the landing of Marines in the Mexican city of Vera Cruz. "I shall teach the Mexicans to elect good men."

The siren song of Wilsonian morality played loud and clear in the ears of the current administration as they looked at Afghanistan. It would not be enough to seek the heads of Osama et al, or to topple enough Taliban occupied mudhuts. It would not be enough to kill a sufficient number of Taliban and al-Qaeda personnel quickly and cleanly so as to inflict condign punishment upon the organisations.

No.

The neocon reincarnations of the every-so-progressive Wilson (Doesn't the irony tickle your innards? It does the Geek's.) concluded that the US must mount a crusade for democracy, pluralism and equal rights in a society which had no historical experience with any and no seeming desire to enjoy the benefits of American style democracy and free enterprise.

This conflation of a realpolitik approach and the fantasy of implanting US approved institutions by force made damn sure that the intervention in Afghanistan would not only be endless miles of bad road but would ultimately come a cropper.

The confusion between fantasy and the legitimate ends of showing that support of outfits like al-Qaeda doesn't pay in the long run assured that our planning and execution of the endeavor were both fatally flawed.

The planning was flawed because it was impossible to focus on an achievable goal--neutralising al-Qaeda's leadership cell and slapping Taliban hard enough so that no hostile government could fail to catch the message. The demands of the Wilsonian mission creep combined with the political need for rapid action and the limitations on forces which could be readily and quickly employed assured we would have an incomplete success at best,

A very incomplete success as the last several years generally and the past eight months in particular have shown.

True, Taliban fell as a government. But that was all that happened. Taliban lived on as an evil incubus waiting to grow again battening on the blood and devotion of human shaped empty shells wanting to filled with the ecstatic brew of True Belief. So it has happened. Safe in the mountains of Pakistan's FATA and aided by factions within the Pakistani ISI and military, Taliban has grown in numbers and military competence.

And, of course, the US did not capture or kill Osama bin Ladin even though other key personnel of the leadership cell have been removed from the board by either death or capture over the past several years. Al-Qaeda did not die. If anything it grew.

Perhaps it did not grow in direct institutional size. It did grow in mythic power. It may not be a global terror machine as some "experts" would have us believe in the sense of exercising direct command and control over tactical actions. Al-Qaeda did increase greatly in its ability to seize the imagination and the commitment of empty shells of men seeking fulfillment and completion through Belief. More accurately, completion through action emerging from Belief.

Now the US has only two viable options, (The Geek considers an indefinite occupation of Afghanistan to be a viable course of action.) One option is simply to leave. The other is to deploy enough forces on the ground along with taking necessary actions into the sanctuaries of FATA to assure that we do not lose the shooting war.

Neither option is good. The first is disastrous. The short and long term effects of withdrawing might not be predictable in detail, but the general outline is dismal at best and catastrophic at worst.

The second option would allow the US to achieve, at best, a stalemate in the armed conflict which would allow retraction from the theater without necessarily horrible consequences. (Yes, this implies that even under the best circumstances, the outcome will be far worse than if the Wilsonian mission creep had been strictly eschewed.)

There was no justification for the Iraq operation. The Geek isn't even willing to put that war into the category of interventionary operation. Sure, there were anti-Saddam elements in country as well as Kurds who were quite happy to see American tanks on the ground and fighter-bombers overhead. Even more there were any number of expat groups eagerly pawing the ground in hopes that the US would do something.

None of these make the invasion an intervention. They make the invasion an invasion, an act of aggressive war thinly covered by UN Resolutions.

Later operations on the ground in Iraq were counterinsurgent, and counterinsurgency is a primary form of interventionary warfare. It should be noted that insurgency is the expectable consequence of an exercise in regime change. The fact that the US was not prepared either in its military or civilian plans either to preclude or to mitigate the possibility of insurgency shows that there was little, if any, realistic understanding of the nature and character of interventionary warfare.

Or, if there was some appreciation somewhere within the massive bureaucracies of the national security community (as the Geek knows there was), these were overridden by the winds of Wilsonian hallucinations in the heads of the neocons.

Interventions can work effectively. Interventions can be justified by both results and motives. The landing of the Marines in Lebanon in 1957 shows that as do some of the operations in the wreckage of the Wilsonian policy artifact once called Yugoslavia.

To work, to be justifiable, interventions must meet two criteria. The goal must be limited. The goal must be kept firmly in mind at all times of planning and execution by all hands at all levels from the White House to the grunts.

Most of all the Ghost of Wilson must be left in the crypt of bad ideas.