George Will is in favor of, basically, pulling out of Afghanistan. Here is the conclusion of his column in yesterday’s Washington Post:
"[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: 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."
This is a nice theory. I have seen others suggest it. We don’t need to be on the ground in Afghanistan, or at least not many of us. We’ll just use drones and cruise missiles and special forces units to hit Al Qaeda and other terrorists who are a danger to us. We don’t need to get involved in nation building or population security. The Afghans can run their country however they want to. We’ll just focus on the terrorists who threaten us.
It’s a great idea, except for one thing: It won’t work. First, why would the government of Afghanistan let us do it?
Second, the reason why drones and cruise missiles and special forces can, at times, take out terrorist leaders is because we get intelligence as to where these leaders are. Where do we get this intelligence? From local people. But it’s dangerous for local people to pass this information on to us. Why should they do it if we aren’t going to stick around to protect them when the bad guys come back to find out who snitched on them. If we won’t protect them from the bad guys, they won’t tell us where the bad guys are.
Third, without good intelligence, which you can only get from local people (see above), our drones and cruise missiles and air strikes are going to miss their targets a lot more often, which means a lot more innocent civilians are going to get killed. We can’t do that.
We can leave Afghanistan, but we can’t do what Mr. Will suggests.
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