A Will But No Way
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George Will has had sensibly critical things to say about the Iraq War for a few years now, and in his column today he extends his critique to nation building in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the half-measures he recommends for accomplishing whatever mission it is in Afghanistan that he thinks is necessary are bound to be counterproductive. He writes:
America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.
Will is engaging in wishful thinking here. These offshore measures will generate plenty of resentment against the United States — those drones and cruise missiles have a habit of taking out civilians as well as their intended targets — and aren’t going to destroy al-Qaeda, which can afford to lose a few leaders so long as bungling U.S. policy keeps eliciting more terror recruits. Will’s strategy is reminiscent of nothing so much as the “decapitation strike” against Saddam Hussein that was meant to be George W. Bush’s quick and painless way of eliminating the Iraqi dictator. If you only hazily recall that effort, here’s Human Rights Watch’s account:
On April 7, a U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer aircraft dropped four 2,000-pound satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) on a house in al-Mansur district of Baghdad.79 The attack killed an estimated eighteen civilians.
U.S. intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein and perhaps one or both of his sons were meeting in al-Mansur.80 The information was reportedly based on a communications intercept of a Thuraya satellite phone. Forty-five minutes later the area was rubble.
This was the most publicized of the leadership strikes. The U.S. military lauded the short turn-around time “from sensor to shooter,” the time it takes from development of information to when the strike is executed. “From start to finish, it took 45 minutes from the word that Saddam Hussein and other leaders may have entered the building until the bombs hit the structure,” said Major General McChrystal.
The military value of this operation was zero — it failed to take out the target or any other Iraqi commander. But it did create a big crater in Baghdad and take the lives of 18 innocent people. Who in his right mind would think of this as a winning strategy? Maybe it’s a winning strategy for al-Qaeda, but that’s about it. The U.S. has a lousy record of strategic assassination, whether it’s the CIA giving Castro exploding cigars or the Monica missiles that failed to kill bin Laden in 1998.
George Will has come a long way in rethinking U.S. policy. But he still has a long way to go.
George Will, whose writing and thought I admire, has come a long way at the precise moment when that trip became entirely cost-free.
Saying what he said won’t cost him anything. As the author of this piece points out, he’s still taking a moderate stance. Furthermore, he’s taking it at a time when the foreign-policy neocons who earlier might have ripped him are not only irrelevant (that change happened sometime between 2006 and 2008) but also invisible.
Will has principled, smart, courageous things to say on many subjects, but this statement strikes me as a calculated concession to a reality that has already passed him by.
Daniel McCarthy wrote:
“George Will has come a long way in rethinking U.S. policy. But he still has a long way to go.”
To get to what better destination, Mr. McCarthy? You don’t say.
While it would be grading my own paper I think I could do a pretty good job of defending Will’s “get out and go offshore” suggestion re Afghanistan. Of course I wish that things had been done differently so that we weren’t in the present circumstance, but we’re talking about what to do now that the cards have already been dealt, right?
So what would you have us do differently than what Will suggests? Even from the mouths of our own officials (!!) Afghanistan is sounding more tar-babyish every day.
Cheers,
Hey! McCarthy! I want my own damn blog here! After all, I can spell, and, judging by David Lindsay, as well as recent posts by J.L. Wall, that appears to be the only criterion.
@Adam Rurik – there are 2 more requirements. You have to loudly proclaim that you’re conservative, while your thinking, sources, and opinions somehow seem identical to the rabid-libs.
You have to learn to use “snark” so that you can denigrate any of the popular conservative icons, and you then pretend to “criticize” libs and other pseudo-conservatives, with snide back-handed compliments.
For example, when the earth slides into it’s ice age,this is the earth “healing itself” from the evils of big manufacturing and our “use and discard” society. But wait, new science indicates a “global warming”, but the part about the earth healing itself is still valid. But wait, indications about the “warming” and the “cooling” are unclear, but we can always scare people with predictions of “change we can believe in”, so the weather changing is the earth healing itself from our evil western materialistic society.
Rumors that, because the tree huggers haven’t let anybody cut their brush in CALLY-FOWN-YA for 50 years, that the wildfires are nature’s way of healing itself from stupid liberalism, these rumors are evil and the sign of an unstable neo-connish mindset. We think, instead, that a law should be passed that all Americans step up to the plate and donate to CALLY-FOWN-YA’s recovery (rates and amounts to be determined by governmental administrators at a later time, upon implementation, with small amounts to be diverted to pet projects of supporting legislators).
[...] Daniel McCarthy [...]
You wrote, “The military value of this operation was zero — it failed to take out the target or any other Iraqi commander. But it did create a big crater in Baghdad and take the lives of 18 innocent people. Who in his right mind would think of this as a winning strategy”?
You’re confusing a mission with a strategy. The strategy was to keep Saddam moving from place to place, denying him a central command center. The strategy worked. That mission failed. Many do. People resent having property and lives destroyed from the air. That has been understood since 1916 or so.
In this piece and Williams S. Lind’s article in TAC, I detect a certain abhorrence at long range remote weapons, such as the JDAMs and drones. But surely it’s the misguided policy of occupying deeply alien countries, particularly with no clearly defined or obtainable objectives in place, that is the seat of our problem. I fail to see the logical objection to killing al-Qaeda operatives using such means.
My argument is that Will’s strategy amounts to a bungling decapitation strike writ large.
You’re right that there’s a great deal of skepticism at TAC about the value of long-range remote weapons — that skepticism is predicated on the belief that these weapons are ineffective at “killing al-Qaeda operatives,” or rather that for however many al-Qaeda operatives they succeed in killing, they create many more potential al-Qaeda operatives because of the collateral damage involved.
Daniel. I agree that so far it’s been hit or miss with the drones, (Sorry for the terrible pun). But that is a function of poor intelligence on the ground. And that brings up the whole topic of CIA performance. Will does mention the use of commandos as well as drones.
With regard to creating more al-Qaeda operatives via collateral damage, If we are talking drone attacks the collateral damage is light. The drones fire hellfire anti-tank missiles. I understand the concept of creating more enemies via collateral damage, but if we are stymied by the problem of how to kill al-Qaeda leaders while sparing their dinner guests, then we just lack the will to fight. Inviting Mulla Omar over for dinner and a sit down should be a hazardous undertaking after all. Pushtun’s understand certain basic principles and vengeance is one of them. If they understood our mission against Al-Qaeda in that light from the beginning we might have had less trouble with them.
It seems to me that the Taliban problem is at base an ethnic one, and given that the Pushtun are on both sides of the border, unsolvable beyond exterminating them as a people. Given the reality that Afghanistan does not exist as a nation state we should withdraw in a public way, while working with the Indians to bribe the local factions to keep them busy. Given our eight year stay is it too much to suppose that we would have some stay-behind intel assets? Our real national interest is to hunt down the perpetrators or 9/11. This would actually be easier in the chaotic state of affairs that would result after we withdraw. Beyond that who cares who controls Afghanistan?
I think Thom Meehan has a point in terms of saying that if you simply outlaw any tactic or weapon that eliminates the idea of collateral damages totally you are simply saying you lack the will to fight.
The idea that I think important to remember here—and one that Andrew Bacevich keeps making—is that it’s simply a mistake of the first order not to distinguish between the Taliban and al Queda. We no longer have a beef with the former it seems to me, and limiting our strikes to the latter—which it seems to me can be done from stand-off/off-shore bases and etc—will eventually demonstrate that it’s one thing to hang around the Taliban, and another to hang around bin Laden’s people and become collateral.
I also think there’s another simply taken-for-granted idea that ought be challenged too that’s even more fundamental. Recently William Lind put up a post here saying we have to turn the present “war of exhaustion” into one of maneuver. (On the “political” and “moral” planes, which doesn’t make a difference to my point.) And indeed this clearly reflects the somehow built-in assumption that we have that the worst thing for us would be a war of attrition.
But why shouldn’t we question this? Why wouldn’t a war of slow steady attrition against al Queda be smart? I realize that our in-built Western lack of patience pushes us to try to just damnit have it out once and for all. And indeed a big central kernal of much of our Western military thinking is to find, fix and destroy our enemies.
But why wouldn’t a low-level war of attrition against al Queda be in our favor really? After all even with our “big war” so far we haven’t been able to find and fix bin Laden and destroy his efforts. But this guy seems to be dying anyway, and his people are living in caves, with difficult access to resources at best, and heavily dependent on new recruits who of course are more drawn to his cause so long as it is seen as involved in some great pitched battle with us.
So why wouldn’t a lower-level, sustained, quieter effort be able to better tax bin Laden right where it hurts? We clear out of Afghanistan and say we have no problem with the Taliban so long as it doesn’t go harboring al Queda anymore. Bin Laden’s fame and repute and attractiveness goes down, we focus more on starving him of resources, both physical and human, publicize to arabs the kind of regime he would want to impose on them, question his version of Islam and indeed ridicule it ….
In essence get inside *his* game-plan, and seek to wear *him* down rather than blow him up.
Cheers,
I don’t think that there’s much hunting down of 9/11 perpetrators left to do. That task, if it wasn’t impossible from the start, certainly is now.
Bin Laden’s role was probably merely symbolic, he’s almost certainly dead, which is what happens when a man yellowed from kidney disease picks indie film-making and spelunking over dialysis, and the guys we can link more certainly than him to the crime are Saudi, and dead.