Given the rapidly depleting American political will to continue the long war in Afghanistan and the strong need of the "progressives" within the Democratic Party to save money in the real world so as to spend it on the Great Agenda of Transformation, it is not surprising that Mr Biden has advanced his policy option. He is, after all, "progressive" to the core. He also has a finger constantly extended to the fickle winds of We the People.
The problem with the Biden Approach is that it misses the nature and character of the enemy. While al-Qaeda was the force behind the attacks of 9/11 and remains an icon for the Islamist jihadist movement around the world, it is not the main enemy. Nor has it ever had the status of being the only enemy of the US involved intimately in the attacks that bright and sunny September day.
The Taliban regime of Omar was equally culpable of the original offense against the US. The Taliban of Omar refused diplomatic requests that it turn over Osama bin Laden and others of the al-Qaeda leadership cadre. Omar and his associates made the refusal based upon their interpretation of the Islamic requirements that the "host" protect, aid, and comfort the "guest." In the view of Taliban, Osama and his coterie of jihadists were "guests" of the Taliban and thus merited full protection.
Joe Biden is a lawyer--as are so many of the Obama administration--and should know that the actions of Taliban, which were predicated upon advanced knowledge of the impending attack, constitute those necessary to meet the definitions of criminal conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and a bunch of other legal no-nos. As such, the Taliban is as much the main enemy as is al-Qaeda.
Beyond that sort of pettifogging detail, the real, the bona fide, the authentic enemy of the US is not simply al-Qaeda per se. Nor is it Taliban in and of itself. The enemy of the US--and most of the world as well--is the overall Islamist jihadist movement.
While the killing or capture of Osama bin Laden, Omar of the Taliban, and all the others would be both nice and necessary, the stakes in Afghanistan and the FATA of Pakistan run far beyond the personalities. The ultimate stake in the current war is whether or not the Islamist jihadists can with any shred of plausibility claim a victory over the US and its allies.
Should the worst case envisioned in General McChrystal's initial assessment come to pass, the consequences for the US--and many other countries as well--would be both disastrous in degree and very long term in duration. Even the slightest, barely plausible excuse for the declaration of a victory over the US and the other "crusader" states and their "apostate" allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan would have the effect of emboldening and encouraging the Islamist jihadist movement around the world.
Right now, as has been indicated in recent Pew assessments, the jihadists are and have been losing support within the Muslim communities around the globe. Apparently, the disgust and revulsion generated by both the methods and consequences of the Islamist jihadist way of war have undercut what was once almost monolithic support among Muslims from North Africa to the Indonesian archipelago.
To pack it in now in Afghanistan would be the answer to Islamist jihadist prayers. To pack it in now, to refuse to increase the number of trigger-pullers on the ground in Afghanistan, would be to hand the Islamist jihadists an unearned success. It would be an announcement to those in the Muslim states which wish the US ill that we do not have the stomach either to resist or strike back--particularly if the striking back took time and cost American lives.
Last month when President Obama stated to the veterans convention that the war in Afghanistan was "a war of necessity," he made one grave error. Now, Joe Biden is capitalizing on that error. The President maintained in Phoenix that the goal of the US in Afghanistan was the destruction of al-Qaeda.
Whether that statement of limitation was advertent or not, it was a grave error, perhaps a blunder. The limitation of the enemy to one group, and by implication, one individual, allows someone such as Mr Biden to argue that the US has no business going beyond that narrow target. It lays the foundation for a strategy and implementing tactics which allows the US to back off from the blood on the ground and revert to the sanitary approach so beloved by the Clinton administration--stand off attacks using long range missiles.
The experiences of the past two decades demonstrate persuasively that the clean and distant approach of using cruise missiles or UAVs might be able to kill people but cannot defeat the enemy, cannot destroy or deter the Islamist jihadists generally. The stand-off approach has a role to play to be sure, but it is not the way to achieve the minimum necessary strategic goal of "not losing."
The Obama administration is playing the game of "reviewing strategy" before making a decision on the deployment of more US combat boots to the unfriendly ground of Afghanistan. There are good reasons for changing the failed strategic and operational doctrine of the Bush/Cheney days, but that should not be an excuse for tossing in the sponge just now, just as Muslim opinion is swinging against the Islamist jihadists.
In any event, General McChrystal's initial assessment provides a strategy in outline form. His emphasis upon using US and NATO forces to both carry the war to the enemy and protect the uncommitted civilian majority is a strategy. It implies an operational doctrine as well as the tactics necessary to implement both.
The fundamental nature of the McChrystal approach is to force the enemy to come to us. By interposing US and other foreign troops between the uncommitted civilian majority and the Islamist jihadists, the latter face a limited set of options. They can come to us--and get killed. They can attack soft civilian targets--and provoke more hostility from the uncommitted majority, thus facilitating the mobilization of support to the less than credible Karzai regime. Or they can stay in the hills awaiting either a Hellfire or a fatwa telling them to cool it.
Whichever option the Islamist jihadists take, it will be one which inevitably leads to defeat. That is the outcome the US must seek. There is no viable option for either us or other states similarly minded.
All of the other factors presumably entering the debate over strategy in Afghanistan are secondary. It does not matter if Afghanistan has any chance of becoming a modern Western style nation-state. It does not matter if Karzai was returned to office as a result of fraud on a wholesale level or not. It does not matter if Pakistan's government is really, really committed to ending the Islamist jihadist presence in the country.
None of these secondary matters or even the aggregate should divert the US leadership from the central reality. Either the US and its allies defeats the Islamist jihadists in a convincing manner or not.
If we do not convincingly defeat the jihadists, then we must be prepared for a future which will be clouded for years, even decades to come, by the specter of Islamist jihadism. We must be willing to accept ever greater and more repressive restrictions on our freedoms. We must be willing to face a degree of pervasive insecurity such as we have never experienced in the past. We might even have to face the possibility of a militant Islamism becoming the primary force in global politics.
It is doubtful in the extreme that Joe Biden has ever thought through the consequences of even the slightest hint of a vague appearance of an Islamist jihadist success in Afghanistan. If he had he never would have started fighting for an American defeat.
And, make no mistake in the matter, that is precisely what Mr Biden is doing--favoring an American defeat.
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