What I’d like to see happen is that the US learn from its mistakes.
Thankfully Obama has already stopped using the phrase.
They are supported and based in Pakistan. They are practically nonexistent in Afghanistan. If there is no Ben Laden presence in Afghanistan, how will blowing it up solve the problem?
Then we will arm and train the Afghani army who we will eventually wind up fighting. We will want them to go after the Taliban. Why should they?
Iraq is simple: as someone noted upthread, Bush already agreed to a withdrawal timetable, so let’s stick with it.
Afghanistan/Pakistan: I’d revise our goals considerably.
Goal 1: Do what we can to make sure conditions in Pakistan continue to make it difficult for Muslim radicals to take over the government. Pakistan has nukes, after all. This means aiding Pakistan in ways whose benefit trickles down into the everyday lives of the citizenry, but not backing a particular leader. And not dropping bombs inside of Pakistan unless the odds are really good that bin Laden or Zawahiri will be on the receiving end of the bomb.
Goal 2: Drastically reduce our objectives in Afghanistan. Nobody else has been able to nation-build there; we won’t be able to, either.
Goal 2A (al-Qaeda): Specifically, I’d reduce our objectives to the hunting of bin Laden and Zawahiri. There doesn’t seem to be much left to al-Qaeda as a centralized terrorist organization. Killing or capturing them would pretty much finish them off, other than as an inspiration to local wannabes around the world. Besides, they organized the killing of 3000 of our people eight years back, and payback is still owed.
Goal 2B (Taliban): As far as the Taliban is concerned, I’m an agnostic on whether they’re our problem - but I don’t think we can beat them militarily. Maybe we can help the locals contain them militarily. But given that we’re spending three times Afghanistan’s GDP on the war there, buying them off seems more cost-effective. Maybe let them turn their areas of strongest local support into a Taliban state-within-a-state, and pay them off to not try to take over the rest of the country. But we should seek to either stalemate them, or buy them off, in a way that involves as minimal a troop presence as we can manage.
And a more general point: a few years ago, people like me on the left side of the political spectrum were noting how heavy a burden we were piling on a rather small volunteer military force, that we were in danger of wearing our troops out. I doubt that’s changed any: I read somewhere the other day that our combined troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was only about 7000 troops short of what it was at its high point during the Bush years. That means we’re still wearing out our Army. Troops aren’t getting enough rest before being rotated back into the combat zones, equipment’s wearing out, we’re having to take new volunteers who would have never been allowed into the Army seven years ago, just to keep the numbers up.
We need to wind down our not-so-great mideastern adventure so that our troops can catch their breath. We shouldn’t fight wars this way in the first place, at least not those that get this big. We’ve got a military that’s designed to handle big-but-quick operations like the first Gulf War, or much smaller operations of longer duration, like Serbia/Kosovo. But we really, really don’t have the manpower for wars of this size and duration. We really should have had a draft back in 2004, either that or scale back our involvement considerably. It’s worked out, sorta, but it’s been far harder than it should have been, on a far smaller segment of our citizenry than it should have been. Plus we’ve covered a good part of the gap between what our leaders decided to do, and what our military was really capable of, by hiring military contractors of various sorts, which has created problems of its own.
The main thing is you can’t fight a war on the enemy’s terms.
For instance, now-a-days in the politically correct world we would NEVER think of telling the Emperor of Japan he must renounce divinity. After WWII we had no problem with that.
In Vietnam we refused to bomb certain sites, so the enemy simply puts their valuables in those sites.
In Afghanistan they want the US help so long as the USA does exactly what they want.
Israel lost a war a few years back because they had to bomb Lebanon on the enemy’s terms
The only way to defeat a determained local populus is to surround them, cut them off from all contact and force them into submission, to the point where they will change. This is very cruel in the short term. This is what the British did in the Second Boer War. It was so bad that the world protested and that was in the early 1900s. So you can imagine what would happen now.
But the fact is it worked. The British broke the will of the Boers who only gained control decades later, but they did it through the ballot box.
Mass movements of populations work too. But it is very cruel. But it works. When the Soviets took over the Karelia from Finland they moved the Finns out. Now 70 years later, Finland doesn’t want that land back. Almost no Finns live there.
Same in between Greece and Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, India and Pakistan. All those mass movements of people were cruel. There is no disputing the suffering. But in the long term it works. One third of present day Poland used to be Germany. But the Germans were either pushed out or the fled before the Russian troops got them. There’s no call in Germany to get their land back today.
War is cruel and it’s awful, that is a fact, but the first Gulf War seemed to push into our heads that wars could be won with little or no casualties.
In the 80s, we invaded Greneda, bombed Libya, (into the 90s) Gulf War I, bombed Serbia into giving up Kosovo. All these things happened with very little deaths. So we got to thinking wars can be won by technology.
They can’t, the only way to effectively win is to occupy and force the occupied people’s to submit to your will. This is creul so we don’t have the political will to do it.
Of course deaths and casualties don’t solve anything either. Look at Africa or the Iran/Iraq War.
The thing is to win a war effectively you must occupy totally and teach the occupied people the errors of their way, like we did in Germany and to a somewhat lesser degree Japan. We didn’t allow Germany or Japan to have politics that effectively preached hate or anything else that went against pacification.
Could we do this in Afghanistan or Iraq? In theory yes, but it’d take an all out effort by the USA. We have no political will to do that. We are not going to spend the next ten years at full mobilization to pacify and re-educate Iraq. Can we nation build? Absolutely, IF and IF you have the will. When we built Germany up after WWII we put forth plans like the Marshall Plan or the Truman Policy, but these costs. But the result was a peaceful (and united) Europe that is much, much more unlikely ever to go to war again.
And we did win those wars, and in fact we won Iraq and Afghanistan too. What we didn’t win was the occupation.
And there were plenty of deaths. What we lack isn’t cruelty or ruthlessness; its the willingness to take even small casualties on our side. We are willing to slaughter Iraqis by the tens of thousands, but even tiny causalities on our side horrify us.
But they knew that they started it; they knew that the previous system had failed and brought disaster down on them. And the dogma that was overcome was one of their own superiority and invincibility; that’s not a worldview that deals well with losing. In wars where we are the aggressor we don’t have that advantage.
Try more like a hundred years. And even then they’d still hate us; we’d simply be changing a society that was no danger to us into one that was. What we’ve already done in fact.
I think you’re confusing your average Hussein supporting Iraqi soldier with groups like Al-Qaeda or Taliban.
BP wins biggest Iraq oil contract The original neocon claims were the oil revenue would make the Iraq war cost free for America. How did that work out? But ,by virtue of them making that statement, how can you think it was not about oil? They always had their eyes on the prize.