The Armed Liberal over at Winds of Change has a piece up that thinks we might just be. He takes a long look at our operations there and compares them with Vietnam. While this may be the most over-used analogy of this war, he uses it to good effect. With COL Summers book "On Strategy" as his guide to the mistakes we made in Vietnam, he finds far too many of them reappearing. So who today would say that things in Afghanistan are significantly different? We are consistently winning engagement after engagement. Even Wanat was not a tactical defeat, regardless of the cost. But is there anyone who can confidently say that we are on a path to victory? Bueller? No one? The reason is simple; we don't know what victory looks like. We don't have a political-strategic context for the war we're in, other than killing the people who shoot at us and who intermittently murder their countrymen. That's my core point. We have no strategic objective. That's the basic failure that Obama inherited from Bush - who failed to build a strategic justification for the war either. What are we doing here? What will winning look like? We never set out a simple and clear "this is what we're going to do and why" so that the generals - who are supposed to figure out the How - could do their jobs. Instead we treated Iraq and Afghanistan - and the smaller engagements and the security measures we're taking domestically - as if they were unique responses to individual situations, rather than part of a global strategy. What, simply put, is the militarily obtainable Objective of these wars? This is a long and useful piece that really deserves a good reading at the Pentagon and CENTCOM. He correctly points out that we can aim our troops at just about any problem and they will salute and move out smartly. The question is are they being deployed smartly. I recently spent some time out in Cali and enjoyed his hospitality while he was writing this and we had many chances to talk about the distressing lack of a coherent and articulated strategy for our efforts in Afghanistan. Even worse is our complete lack of a Grand Strategy for American foreign policy that ties our military efforts into a larger "whole of government" approach. I still come back to one core principle regarding Afghanistan, we cannot afford a loss to al Qaeda and the Taliban. The military loss would be bad, but the propaganda bonanza would be far more dangerous in the long run. We are engaged in a war of ideas and a clash of cultures with radical Islam and we cannot afford to be the weak horse. So it is time to push the Obama administration to get it's agencies and efforts into something vaguely resembling a Grand Strategy.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/Ot256al-FvY/are-we-just-flatly-screwed-in-afghanistan.html
Posted
Aug 02 2010, 12:28 AM
by
BLACKFIVE