Afganistan and the War on Terror

Much of the debate about "the war on terror" in Afghanistan and beyond, with all the politics that pretty well stems from it, needs a complete rethinking and re-packaging. If it continues to be viewed in the context of something primarily military in nature, then like "the war on drugs", it to will prove un-winnable. The simplistic thinking and chest thumping piety that the previous administration launched this effort with has been the most significant hindrance to any type of understanding of the actual events; and that is fundamental to just being able to craft a definition of success, let alone to actually attaining it. So we really do need a new approach both in defining and then executing a plan.

It has been said before and yet continues to be ignored, so it bears repeating; this is not a state to state conflict. The opposing team here is not a country. It is true that there are states that sponsor terrorist groups but those are still a different animal than the actual terror groups themselves. The sponsoring states can still be dealt with through traditional means ranging from diplomacy to invasion to tit-for-tat covert, who knows what. But there is no country called Terrorainia and that makes the factors so radically different that any comparison becomes one of apples and oranges. Those who engage in terror have no infrastructure of their own. That's why they are reduced to using terror tactics. The hijackers of 9/11 did not make the airplanes that were used as missiles and in fact didn't even craft the box razors that were used to take them over. They relied exclusively on the existing "stuff" that the infrastructure of our functioning and buzzing along society just had laying around. Also, as long as we are briefly recalling the events of 9/11, it should be noted that while the 9/11 plan was indeed very bold, it was not really all that brilliant. Flights going from the East Coast to the West Coast will have a lot of fuel on them, so that's a no-brainer. Further, the flight schedules were not just public knowledge but were in fact publicly posted. So that pretty well put the logistics of the whole thing right into anyone's lap. The only tough part was finding people with the knowhow to fly the planes. Again, while we certainly didn't supply the pilots, we did help with the training via our own infrastructure in the form of aviation schools. It's apparently one of the courses not offered at any of the Bin-Ladin 'U' campuses.

So, what we really have here is a planet-wide "gang" problem with a current focus on Afghanistan. Bin Ladin and company are really just a glorified Baader-Mienhof gang with, admittedly, a bigger reach but yet an equally nil chance of attaining there stated goals. The Hell's Angels, the Bloods, the Crips or even the Mafia will never be governing bodies but instead just criminal thorns in everyones side and purely parasitic in nature. As such they are nothing even remotely close to being like Tojo's Imperial Japan, Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. Yet when the press and government verbalize and act as though they were, the groups get more standing than is due and that in turn causes views to get skewed and this in turn causes policies to be developed that are ineffective because they miss the true nature of the problem. Currently, the political right is quite pleased with the President's decision to put more troops into Afghanistan because to them, more troops mean gaining the victory and no doubt with visions of the Marines hoisting a flag on some distant Mount Suribachi. Meanwhile on the left, they are howling because they see another quagmire. Each holds their respective views because each is looking through the lens of a military conflict and of course with the addition of a political lens filter. Now if we continue to operate in that fashion, the left will be proven correct and yet will never find any peace because the "gangs", and their gang activity, will continue to exist. The right, on the other hand, will continue screaming for more muscle while endlessly pounding their heads against a wall in pursuit of a not just unattainable, but an actually "non-existable" military victory because strategically it is not a military problem but in fact a social one. It's the upshot of poverty, ignorance, human degradation and rabble rousing opportunism.

But if we look at it through a model based more on a city with a gang problem, the whole picture comes more into focus. While the troops involved are indeed the regular military forces that would be used in a state to state conflict, the mission here should put them more in the role of a SWAT team being tactically used in a bigger strategy intending to break a gang that is menacing a neighborhood. An army repelling an invading force here just doesn't apply. Maybe some type of confederated multi-national gang squad effort would be a better answer to the problem, both tactically and politically, but that entity currently does not exist and maybe that too is the upshot of using the wrong model.

Like a gang infested neighborhood, the residents of Afghanistan today are looking at the possibilities and trying to decide how to keep their lives safe. If they overtly side with the city, read governing apparatus, and it's police who are its front line contact, then they run the risk of getting killed and held up as examples of what happens to those who would oppose the gang. Now if they can trust that the police, and much more to the point, the rest of the city will "be there", then they just might welcome the effort and take the opportunity to get things back to their own definition of normal. It should be noted that while the citizenry would much rather live without the gang, in the end they do prefer life itself. It really is a united and confident people here that are the key element to any success.

Now of course states are both players and factors. Yet in dealing with global gangsters, national sovereignty and borders become simply factors of jurisdiction as in "they can't touch us once we cross the border". To be sure, in the state to state sense, borders are very much a part of the very definition of sovereignty. Yet somehow that truth simply by itself misses a major point. While it is not wrong to express concern regarding the issue of Predator drone attacks and any "black" outfits doing cross-border missions inside Pakistan. It does tell an incomplete and thereby misleading story when that subtle change in context is lost or missing. It is by no means an invasion in the classical sense. If the "jurisdictions" can accept a sort of quasi "hot pursuit" rule and accept mutually beneficial efforts, even if unofficially, then that should be a secondary consideration, though admittedly not an inconsequential one.

So the answers given by General McChrystal in his 12/13/09 interview with Christiane Amanpour on her CNN program, along with the recent statements of President Obama, make it sound like the above is the current view being used in shaping the current policy; complete with new troop deployments. So behind all the so called "dithering", we seem to have finally crafted a definition of "victory" in Afghanistan. Indeed, with a definition now in place and a policy constructed around it, for once we finally seem to have the horse before the cart! So the goal is to make it safe for the Afghanis to build a gang free Afghanistan and the plan seems a good one at that because it recognizes that if the Afghanis don't do their part, then we ourselves will have no further part save maybe to hold Afghanistan in quarantine. Thus if Hamid Karzia wants to continue just running a crooked little fiefdom, then he can do it without Coalition help and that's a built-in default exit strategy for the Coalition. Thus we leave with a now defined victory or we leave in disgust. No quagmires because the victory is no longer defined militarily but in the proper socio-political terms instead.