The surge of the quagmire mongers

Max Boot:

For years, opponents of the Iraq war claimed it was an unwinnable waste of resources that wasn't worth fighting anyway. The real war against terrorists, they argued, should be waged in Afghanistan. But now that Iraq has made heartening progress and we are finally sending more troops to Afghanistan, the critics are applying to Afghanistan the same arguments they once used in favor of partial or total withdrawal from Iraq.

Afghanistan, we are told, is a hopeless quagmire. A Newsweek cover story screams "Obama's Vietnam." Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University writes, "Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste."

Skeptics, including many in uniform, contend that we need to downsize our goals in Afghanistan. Establishing a functioning democracy, they say, is too ambitious in an underdeveloped Muslim country with little sense of nationhood. According to the Associated Press, a Joint Chiefs of Staff report advises "squeezing Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries inside neighboring Pakistan while deemphasizing longer-term goals for bolstering democracy."

But don't worry, the naysayers assert, we can still achieve our core objectives in Afghanistan. George Friedman, of the private intelligence firm Stratfor, opines in the New York Times that Afghanistan requires "intelligence, and special operations forces and air power that can take advantage of that intelligence. Fighting terrorists requires identifying and destroying small, dispersed targets. We would need far fewer forces for such a mission than the number that are now deployed."

It is striking the extent to which the arguments now being made about Afghanistan were previously made -- and discredited -- in the case of Iraq. The only thing we haven't heard yet is a proposal to dismember Afghanistan into mini-states. But with Joe Biden in the White House, we can expect that brainstorm to pop up soon.

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Within the Democrat party there are many who oppose the use of force for anything short of Republicans coming back into power. Now some of the arguments against a surge in Afghanistan are more sophisticated than others.

The major concern for the surge should be securing the supply lines. It appears that the alternative route is less dependable that the current route through Pakistan. We need to help Pakistan regain control of the route through the Khyber Pass. It is the closest to a sea port which means it should be the lowest cost route.

We should put some of our UAV fleet on that route to protect the convoys. It is a task the Reaper should excel at. We should also school the Pakistan army in convoy protection. The Taliban's willingness to fight on the route should be taken as an opportunity. Normally they are difficult to find and take advantage of the ambiguity as to time and place of attack. Those lose both those advantages with the convoys, which means we have a better opportunity to destroy them.