A guest posting by Marc Danziger- The Armed Liberal from Winds of Change So Grim acknowledges readers’ votes on what to do about Afghanistan, and says: “The consensus from you ladies and gentlemen is... let it go.” If you’ve lost the readership of Blackfive – well, it’s obvious. Sec. Panetta is moving to end combat operations this year. James Joyner, Herschel Smith, Tim Lynch, and even Michael Yon (whose career kind of depends on conflict) have all called for a withdrawal. All of these commentators are people whose opinions about the war and the situations around the war deserve serious respect. And for me, reading these thoughts couldn’t come at a worse time. (Ed comment fm Uncle J- Yon and Smith do not make my list of serious) Three weeks ago, I flew to Fayetteville and helped my oldest son button down his house and pack. His girlfriend and I then dropped him off to head back to Afghanistan – again. He’ll have an interesting trip (he’s embedding with a bunch of Marines, so I expect he’ll be shortsheeted or whatever they do to Army guys working with them). Obviously I hope it’s not too interesting – in fact I’m pulling for outright boring. As a parent, do I want the war wound down and for him to come home? Are you kidding me? Of COURSE I want him home – tomorrow if possible. I’m sure that the parents and partners of those deployed feel the same way. I’m sure that throughout history, parents (well, non-Spartan parents) have felt the same way. Our desire to make our children safe by bringing them home has been tempered, in many cases, by our belief (true too often of parents on both sides of wars) that there is some greater cause that justifies the potential loss. We believe in something that must be fought for, and that belief makes the harm our children risk taking worth it. Does anyone see such a value in Afghanistan today? Did we ever? This isn’t a new problem – it’s not something caused by this Administration, or suddenly brought on by our fatigue with the wars. Jimbo and I discussed it some time ago, and I complained that neither Bush nor Obama had articulated a clear case for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan that made sense to the people paying attention, or resonated broadly with the broader population that wasn’t paying attention. Afghanistan was articulated as a punitive expedition to topple the government that harbored Bin Laden, and to pursue and ultimately capture or kill him. Iraq was articulated as – what, exactly? And once we’d toppled the regimes in either place, our justification became ‘to install democratically-selected governments’ and some basic civic process. We created cargo-cult democracy, in which the superficial forms of Western government - voting, political parties - were placed over a population that lacked the basic social and political capital to really make them work. In both cases, we acted as though we were at war with - and within - a nation. We felt that - like Germany, Japan and Italy, we could topple a government, operate the country for a little while while we stove a new one up, and things would be OK. Which was a complete misreading of the situation. And led to a stream of misrepresentations of what we were doing and what we would accomplish that completely destroyed the average American's faith in the justification and value of the conflicts. Wars are won, ultimately, by faith. Belief – in a religion, in a cause, in a leader – brings with it determination, perseverance, a willingness to sacrifice and suffer to see that belief prevail. “The moral is to the physical as three to one,” as has been famously said. None of the constructs set out to support the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq have been strong enough to sustain our belief in our cause there. And without belief, the spiral down to “well, we’re there to preserve the honor of those who died” is quick and certain. So we’re going to leave. I’d like to think that my son may be one of the last to see combat in Afghanistan, but I have a feeling that the planners are budgeting for a long, simmering, special-forces driven war, which gives him all kinds of opportunities to go back yet again. Sigh. Not only because of that, I want to drop a flag and say I think a covert war is the height of idiocy for a variety of reasons, operational and moral (http://prtcl.es/xJzoQt). So let’s close this chapter as quickly and efficiently as we can.But, as the title of the post suggests, let’s not presume that we’re looking at the end of the book. The landscape throughout the Arab world – and possibly throughout the Islamic world – is being shaken today. Looking forward at what might come, there is such a wide tree of possible outcomes, and so little on which to base any probabilities of those outcomes, that it’s hard to talk about where it will be in three or ten years. I supported the war in Iraq in large part because I felt that changes like this were coming, and that we needed to be on the right side of history –the side against bellicose tyrants, and in support of helping their people build civic societies that could join the broader community of free or almost-free nations. I felt that a small act of violence had the potential to forestall wider violence across the Middle East, and I believed that we had a chance to remake Iraq – and I was seriously wrong. I was a cockeyed optimist about our capabilities to act well, to act competently, to put the interests of the Iraqi people above our own. The troops were brave, resourceful and with a very shameful very few exceptions, honorable in their conduct. Sadly, the political and military leadership failed them. As,...
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/_QOWd-67KU0/closing-the-chapter-in-afghanistan.html
Posted
Feb 07 2012, 10:15 PM
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BLACKFIVE