I talked here about why George Will’s suggestion for leaving Afghanistan would not work. It appears that Vice President Joe Biden is supporting a similar view:
"The opposite view [to that of General McChrystal], espoused for some time by Vice President Biden and a growing number of liberal Democrats, is that such an effort has a slim chance of success given Afghanistan's size and complexities: the suspicion of outsiders, the harsh terrain, the lack of an educated civil service, the endemic corruption and the tribal rivalries. Instead, they argue, the United States should scale back its operations and focus directly on trying to ‘disrupt, dismantle and defeat’ al-Qaeda, the core counterterrorism goals for Afghanistan that Obama endorsed this spring. Special Forces teams and combat aircraft would remain at the ready to target any terrorists with international ambitions who seek to set up shop in the country."
I wanted to come back to the problems with this approach because I did not develop one of the points as much as I should have. What I said in my prior post was just this: "First, why would the government of Afghanistan let us do it?" Let me elaborate.
If the government of Afghanistan does not want us to stay, how do we stay? What is the legal basis? How do we do it practically? This is important because you have to consider whether the government, and the people, of Afghanistan would let us stay if we are only interested in killing the occasional Al-Qaeda terrorist leader. If we are not going to help them against their enemies (i.e., the Taliban), they may not want us to stay. It may not be worth it to them to have us around. They may figure they are better off working out a deal with the Taliban and not worrying whether al-Qaeda re-establishes itself, as long as al-Qaeda focuses on targets in the West.
If we don’t have bases in Afghanistan, if our planes and special forces units are based off-shore, what is the legal basis for attacking terrorist leaders in Afghanistan (or any other country) – unless you say that they are all part of one global battle against Islamic totalitarianism/extremism ("war on terror" being an unfavored term these days)? Is that something Vice President Biden, or even the Obama administration, believes in?
Also, if we are off-shore, what if Afghani leaders don’t want us to fly into Afghanistan to kill a terrorist leader or group of terrorists? Are we just going to do it anyway? What if they fight back; are we going to shoot at them, too? What is the legal basis for doing this? Is it preventive war again?
If the Obama administration does take the Biden approach, I will be interested in seeing how they answer these questions.
Update (10/5/09 10:40 p.m.): One further thought, actually a variation on the question I looked at above. This other question struck me as I was reading this article by James Traub, "The Distance Between ‘We Must’ and ‘We Can’". Mr. Traub asks whether losing Afghanistan to the Taliban would be "a disaster, or merely, as with Vietnam, a terrible misfortune for which the United States could compensate"? Which brings me to my other question: If the United States, after President Obama called for "an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy" in Afghanistan in March and said the fight in Afghanistan was a "war of necessity" in August, decides to change course and adopt the kind of policy that Vice President Biden and Mr. Will suggest, why would Afghanistan, or any other country in a similar position, ever trust the United States enough to cooperate with us on any thing in any way?
Comments