On the march to Baghdad, back when America's war on terror was young, a rising star in the United States military lobbed this enigmatic bon mot to an accommodating reporter: "Tell me how this ends." Thus did then-Maj. Gen. David Petraeus in 2003 neatly frame the issue that still today haunts the U.S.-led effort to defeat violent anti-Western jihadism.

To know how something ends implies knowing where it's going. Yet eight years after it began, the war on terror is headed back to where it started. The prequel is the sequel, Afghanistan replacing Iraq as the once and now once again central front.

So are we making progress? Even as President Obama escalates the war in Afghanistan, that question hangs in the air, ignored by all. Rather than explaining how the struggle will end, the President merely affirms that it must continue, his eye fixed on pacifying a country of which his own secretary of state recently remarked "We have no long-term stake there."

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In the wake of 9/11, American statecraft emphasized the first approach: President George W. Bush embarked on a "global war" to eliminate violent jihadism. President Obama now seems intent on pursuing the second approach: Through military escalation in Afghanistan, he seeks to "finish the job" that Bush began there, then all but abandoned.

Through war, Bush set out to transform the greater Middle East. Despite immense expenditures of blood and treasure, that effort failed. In choosing Obama rather than John McCain to succeed Bush, the American people acknowledged that failure as definitive. Obama's election was to mark a new beginning, an opportunity to "reset" America's approach to the world.

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With his latest escalation, President Obama will more than double the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan compared with when he took office. The president is saying, in effect, that a large-scale counterinsurgency campaign there is necessary to keep Americans safe from terrorism.

This is a dubious proposition at best. As Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, noted in October, "The al-Qaeda presence (in Afghanistan) is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies." We don't need 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan chasing down 100 al-Qaeda fighters.

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The conventional wisdom among most Republicans is that while the United States had serious difficulty in Vietnam during the early years, by the early 1970s things were turning around, and victory was on the verge. Unfortunately, the craven Democrats in Congress bowed to widespread anti-war sentiment and forced the Ford administration to end almost all support to South Vietnam, allowing the North Vietnamese to win the war in 1975. In the GOP version of the story, this decision was a disastrous mistake.

There has been a lot of talk lately about what the Vietnam War tells us about Afghanistan. According to the Republicans, the United States is once again at the crossroads of losing another critical war because of feckless Democrats, only this time in Afghanistan. They contend that while, yes, the United States has mismanaged the war over the past eight years, Washington has now found a formidable military leader in General Stanley McChrystal. He knows how to defeat the Taliban and keep al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. However, the major obstacle he faces isn't in Afghanistan, it's here at home: the American public is war-weary and the Democrats -- who control both Congress and the White House -- have no enthusiasm for the greater sacrifices that General McChrystal recommends.

This narrative is unconvincing for at least two reasons.

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Richard Holbrooke, America's special envoy to South Asia, maintains that if the Taliban succeed in Afghanistan, "without any shadow of a doubt, Al Qaeda would move back into Afghanistan, set up a larger presence, recruit more people and pursue its objectives against the United States even more aggressively." That, he insisted, is "the only justification for what we're doing." This is an especially ardent presentation of the "base camp," or "safe haven," myth. Stressed by virtually all promoters of the war, this key justification--indeed, the only one, according to Holbrooke--has gone almost entirely unexamined.

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by Michael A. Cohen

This summer, Stephen Biddle wrote one of the more influential and oft-cited articles in support of the current U.S. mission in Afghanistan. In "Is It Worth It?" in The American Interest, Biddle argued that by the narrowest of margins, the United States had strategic interests that necessitated the maintenance of a robust military presence in Afghanistan.

In "Is There a Middle Way?" in the most recent issue of TNR, Biddle has focused instead on the operational elements of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan. He argues that a mission oriented around half-measures—such as paying off Afghan warlords or building up the Afghan security services—as opposed to a fully-integrated counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy that incorporates all of these measures is destined to fail. But then as now, Biddle's argument is predicated on a dubious straw man, which reduces the Afghanistan debate to a simplistic, binary argument between two unfeasible options.

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by Andrew J. Bacevich

The "strategic" debate over Afghanistan is a diversion that serves chiefly to distract attention from the condition of strategic bankruptcy that President Obama inherited. The issues in Afghanistan do not qualify as strategic. They barely rise to the level of operational. To the extent that the war in Afghanistan can claim to have any purpose, that purpose derives from its relationship to the larger struggle variously called the global war on terror or World War IV or the Long War. To the extent that it ever made sense for U.S. forces to be fighting in Afghanistan, the rationale derived from the belief that Central Asia figured, however vaguely, as a campaign in that larger war.

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This week's announcement that there will be a runoff election in Afghanistan is the first bit of good news to come from the country for some time. Nonetheless, it is but one more illustration of how the sands of Afghanistan have shifted under America's feet and are forcing a major strategic reassessment.

The now-public report by Gen. Stanley McChrystal provides a stark assessment of the declining situation in Afghanistan. If major strategic changes are not taken within the next year, mission failure is a real possibility. Gen. McChrystal and his staff have dutifully laid out for the Obama administration what is needed to succeed in the current mission -- a fully resourced counterinsurgency effort. To this end, debate has focused on the need for more U.S. troops -- perhaps up to 40,000 -- raising the American force presence in Afghanistan to over 100,000.

Gen. McCrystal's report reflects the reality of the situation in Afghanistan after many years of catastrophic neglect by the Bush administration. Candidate Barack Obama was right to call for more troops to Afghanistan, as several years ago was the time to halt the resurgence of the Taliban. Now America finds itself with the right assessment and leadership in the field, but tragically three years too late.

Several core assumptions in the McChrystal report require serious reflection before any more forces are deployed into Afghanistan. Failure in any one of these areas would undermine the premise of surging more combat forces into Afghanistan.

Featuring
Prof. Daniel Wirls
Professor of Politics, UC Santa Cruz

and

Dr. Christopher Preble
The Cato Institute

Friday, November 6, 2009, 10:00 - 11:30 a.m.

University of California Washington Center
1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW
Washington, D.C.

The question of the moment, framed by the prowar camp, goes like this: Will the president approve the Afghanistan strategy proposed by his handpicked commander General Stanley McChrystal? Or will he reject that plan and accept defeat, thereby inviting the recurrence of 9/11 on an even larger scale? Yet within this camp the appeal of the McChrystal plan lies less in its intrinsic merits, which are exceedingly dubious, than in its implications.

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By Douglas Macgregor

Douglas MacArthur is regarded as a great commander because he got some very important things right, most famously the Inchon landing. He also got some things wrong, such as his push to the Yalu River.

His catchy statement, "there is no substitute for victory," was also wrong, though not so wrong as the armchair strategists who quote it out of context. In fact, "victory" is often an illusion, a will-o'-the-wisp that can lead nations and armies deeper into the bog of history until they disappear.

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan had the foresight to avoid the bog, to halt inconclusive military operations in Korea and Lebanon before they consumed America's strength. Such men are rare, and even more rarely honored for their actions. (Continue reading)

Eight years ago, a small number of U.S. personnel, working in tandem with local Afghan leaders, entered Afghanistan with a defined aim: to punish al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban regime that harbored them. Over the past year, that mission has morphed into the much broader objective of rebuilding the Afghan state and protecting Afghan villages. Most recently, America's top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said a new strategy must be forged to "earn the support of the [Afghan] people . . . regardless of how many militants are killed or captured."

Such an undertaking, amounting to a large-scale social-engineering project, is unwarranted. The cost in blood and treasure that we would have to incur -- coming on top of what we have already paid -- far outweighs any possible benefits, even accepting the most optimistic estimates for the likelihood of success.

The essential question now is not whether the war is winnable, but whether the mission is vital to U.S. national security interests.

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A group of eminent authors and international affairs scholars wrote President Obama today to express their concern about expanding the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan. The signers included many who had publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq before it began. In the letter, organized by the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, the signatories pointed out that the administration's goals in Afghanistan were growing overly ambitious, that achieving them was unlikely, and that their pursuit would come at expense of other national priorities, both foreign and domestic.

The signers wrote "Today we are concerned that the war in Afghanistan is growing increasingly detached from considerations of length, cost and consequences." They added, "If we cannot leave Afghanistan until we have created an effective central government, we are likely to be there for decades, with no guarantee of success." They urged president Obama not to deepen the U.S. mission in that country, and implored him to situate the Afghanistan war in a broader strategic context.

The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy is a group of scholars, policy makers and concerned citizens dedicated to promoting a vision for American national security strategy that is consistent with American traditions and values.

To learn more, visit www.realisticforeignpolicy.org or e-mail realisticfp@gmail.com.

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