The US should have learned this critical lesson during the Vietnam War. Our ability to convince the Saigon governments to do what was in our and their best interest declined steadily as the number of American troops (and corpses) rose. The (often) corrupt, (usually) inefficient, (typically) self-involved, (normally) legitimacy lacking Saigon regime(s) could ignore American urgings, hectoring, advice, and guidance with the impunity of knowing that we had no choice but to stay and fight their war.
Only in the fading days following the Easter Offensive did the denizens of Saigon realize that the big Yankee Train was leaving the station for home--sooner rather than later. Not only did the train leave--it rolled right over the now fully alert, ready to act, able to fight South Vietnamese government and armed forces. (The latter was courtesy of the now robustly anti-war Democrats in Congress with the sainted Ted Kennedy baying in the van.)
Of course, by then it was way too late. The absence of an earlier credible capacity to de-commit had set up the South Vietnamese for failure. It had also cost the Americans lives and treasure needlessly.
Now the US is traveling the same road in Afghanistan. In large measure due to the utter and complete idiocy of the Bush/Cheney administration, we entered Afghanistan without either a narrowly defined mission such as the eradication of al-Qaeda and Taliban as well as the ground forces necessary for the task but without any credible capacity to leave the place.
As a result we have been joined hip and shoulder to an indigenous regime which is every bit as corrupt, odious, inefficient, out of touch, and unwilling to do anything in the way of effective war fighting as the worst days in Vietnam. The full extent of the failure to establish both a limited, doable mission and a credible capacity to de-commit is becoming all too visible in the wake of the presidential election.
The primary challenger to the incumbent Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, has provided evidence of a high probative value demonstrating election fraud on a scale which might make even Ahmedinejad blush. Karzai can afford to blow off American and other outside protests or demands for a run off vote of demonstrable integrity as he is convinced the US has no choice but to stay and fight the war against Taliban and al-Qaeda for its own reasons and benefit.
Hamid Karzai is, of course, right in his stance. Because the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld crew entered Afghanistan without having limited the mission, providing sufficient forces on the ground, and allowing "mission leap" into the vacuum of nation-building, the Islamist jihadist entities grew in strength, numbers, and sophistication.
While Afghanistan qua Afghanistan has no importance to US national and strategic interests, the appearance, no matter how unjustified by fact, of an American military defeat by the Islamist jihadist is absolutely critical to the US--and the West generally. To redeem the failure of the past several years in that unpleasant place is essential for our future peace and security.
That is a brutal fact. It is, nonetheless, a fact, a real, powerful fact. Any odor of an American military failure, including a loss of political will on the part of We the People, will embolden the Islamist jihadists everywhere, meaning we will be neck deep in the martyrdom seeking, human rights abusing, True Belief driven thugs for years to come.
Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
The Obama administration must make it utterly clear and unmistakable that the troops in country as well as the augmentation which must necessarily come in the future months are there for one purpose only. The purpose is not to build a nation. It is not to prop up the Karzai regime. It is not there to guarantee peace and security for all Afghans for all time to come.
The troops are there to kill Talib, destroy Taliban as a threat now and in the future. And, to do the same to al-Qaeda and any other Islamist jihadists who hope to gain paradise by killing Americans or other Westerners.
The only doable mission now, or in the future (or in the past for that matter), is the squashing of Islamist jihadist entities and the teaching to future Afghan governments that providing safe haven to Islamist jihadists is too risky to contemplate. The realities of Afghan culture, society, history as well as the foundation truth of human social groups as self-organizing precluded and precludes any more.
The current governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan must be brought to understand, to know in their collective guts that we are interested only in the obliteration of Islamist jihadism in the region now and in the future. What the locals do with their own governments, their own societies, their own lives is their concern alone. Not ours.
Sure, it would be lovely as all get out to see Afghanistan as a liberal, pluralistic, secular democracy with free enterprise and social welfare, sexual equality, an independent judiciary, a free media, and clerics sticking to the mosque, but that is a self-defeating delusion. Good intentions, good hopes, high minded thoughts are simply a form of pavement.
Pavement for the road to hell.
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