A Few Thoughts on Afghanistan

In advance of the Obama administration’s announcement of its new plan for Afghanistan later this month, I call your attention to this article by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman from Thursday’s Washington Post. Senators McCain and Lieberman get it right when they warn that a scaled-back approach in Afghanistan won’t work.

This is important because we are already hearing some of those same people who complained about Iraq, especially on the left, start to complain about Afghanistan. It’s too hard. It will be a quagmire. It will be another Vietnam. Everybody loses in Afghanistan (which may be true if they are trying to conquer the place but we’re not trying to that). Etc., etc.

As Senators Lieberman and McCain say, scaling back our troop commitments and focusing on anti-terrorist activities, as some suggest, won’t work. It is what we were doing in Iraq when we were failing. The fact is that to attack terrorists you need intelligence. You get intelligence from local people. But they won’t cooperate if all you are going to do is come in, kill a couple of terrorist leaders, and then go back to your big base. If you want local people to help you, you have to help them. And the most important help you can give them is to protect them. That was the idea of the counterinsurgency strategy General Petraeus implemented in Iraq, and we need a variation of that same idea in Afghanistan – a variation that takes into account the peculiarities of Afghanistan.

But mainly we have to realize something that our politicians got wrong for too long in Iraq. Here is what I said back in May of 2007:

"It looks like what they [unnamed Washington officials] are trying to do is to come up with a policy that will ‘work’ in Washington. Then, since it works in Washington, they are going to follow it in Iraq, even though we have absolutely no reason to believe it will succeed there. What we need to do is to figure out what will actually work in Iraq (which is what General Petraeus is trying to do). Then we have to either do it or admit that we are going to lose. … We don’t need a policy that works in Washington. We need a policy that works in Baghdad and Anbar province and Kirkuk and Basra."

The same is true in Afghanistan today. The key is not what will be acceptable in Washington. The question is what will work in Afghanistan. We need to figure out what it will take to actually succeed in Afghanistan. If we think that is too much or if we aren’t willing to do it and we instead decide on some halfway strategy, we will wind up losing long and slow. In that case it might be better to just leave and start dealing with the consequences now.

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Update (3/23/09 11:50 p.m.): I fixed the link to the McCain-Lieberman article.