Liberals begin making the case for losing in Afghanistan

Bob Herbert:

The economy is obviously issue No. 1 as Barack Obama prepares to take over the presidency. He’s charged with no less a task than pulling the country out of a brutal recession. If the worst-case scenarios materialize, his job will be to stave off a depression.

That’s enough to keep any president pretty well occupied. What Mr. Obama doesn’t need, and what the U.S. cannot under any circumstances afford, is any more unnecessary warfare. And yet, while we haven’t even figured out how to extricate ourselves from the disaster in Iraq, Mr. Obama is planning to commit thousands of additional American troops to the war in Afghanistan, which is already more than seven years old and which long ago turned into a quagmire.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, wrote an important piece for Newsweek warning against the proposed buildup. “Afghanistan will be a sinkhole,” he said, “consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.”

In an analysis in The Times last month, Michael Gordon noted that “Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain.”

The U.S. military is worn out from years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. The troops are stressed from multiple deployments. Equipment is in disrepair. Budgets are beyond strained. Sending thousands of additional men and women (some to die, some to be horribly wounded) on a fool’s errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness.

The time to go all out in Afghanistan was in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks. That time has passed.

With no personal military background and a reputation as a liberal, President-elect Obama may feel he has to demonstrate his toughness, and that Afghanistan is the place to do it. What would really show toughness would be an assertion by Mr. Obama as commander in chief that the era of mindless military misadventures is over.

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In his article for Newsweek, Mr. Bacevich said: “The chief effect of military operations in Afghanistan so far has been to push radical Islamists across the Pakistani border. As a result, efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are contributing to the destabilization of Pakistan, with potentially devastating implications.

“No country poses a greater potential threat to U.S. national security — today and for the foreseeable future — than Pakistan. To risk the stability of that nuclear-armed state in the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake.”

Our interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists bent on attacking us. That does not require the scale of military operations that the incoming administration is contemplating. It does not require a wholesale occupation. It does not require the endless funneling of human treasure and countless billions of taxpayer dollars to the Afghan government at the expense of rebuilding the United States, which is falling apart before our very eyes.

The government we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels whose customary salute is the upturned palm....

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I don't agree with Bacevich or Herbert. Our initial strategy in Afghanistan was an economy of force strategy based on a concern that the Afghans would see us as occupiers like the Soviets. That does not appear to be the case now so adding additional troops can address the inadequate force to space problem that has made the conflict drag on.

The situation in Pakistan is very different than it was six to twelve months ago. The Predator Hellfire strikes are having a serious impact on al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. The Pakistan army has also disrupted the sanctuaries forcing many of the insurgents back into Afghanistan where they can be defeated by US and allied forces. Several recent battles have bee devastating to the Taliban at a time when US combat losses are near record lows.

The economy is another false premise in the argument for scaling back in Afghanistan. Most historians and economist now recognize that World War II is what pulled the US out of the recession that Roosevelt had made worse with his economic tinkering. That suggest that military spending is a better stimulus than returning to the failed programs of the new deal.

I also question the premise that the military is broken. It has performed magnificently once it developed a winning strategy in Iraq and that strategy should be implemented in Afghanistan. We do need to add more troops and if Obama wants to create some government jobs, increasing the size of the military would be one of the best ways to do it.