We can win either Iraq or Afghanistan but not BOTH

Great Debates
1

It seems to me that we will have to forfeit victory in one of our ongoing wars to ensure victory in the other. The Obama Admin. has talked about reducing forces in Iraq and escalating in Afghanistan. We have seen a great reduction in violence in Iraq, but we have not ensured victory there. The Maliki government is still a work in progress. If we reduce force, the violence will likely escalate again.

Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse. Will a troop escalation there work? There was more than the “Surge” that reduced violence in Iraq. The Anbar Awakening, for example. Also, Afghanistan is larger in both area and population than Iraq. Afghanistan’s terrain is less friendly. The country is less modernized/Westernized than Iraq was. What helped in Iraq probably won’t work.

We simply don’t have enough troops to fight on two fronts with a hostile nation(Iran) in between.

I believe we have to forfeit one war, which one?

Why we should forfeit Iraq: It was the war we shouldn’t have been in the first place. Afghanistan is more strategically important because it is next both Pakistan and Iran. We don’t want to be like the Soviets(1989 war in Afghanistan)

Why we should forfeit Afghanistan: We are closer to victory in Iraq. We have spent more in blood and treasure in Iraq. The Soviet example proves Afghanistan is unwinnable.

It is not a decision that should have had to be made(we should have finished in Afghanistan before going to Iraq or not gone to Iraq in the first place, but that bird has flown) and no one will want to make it. However, I think that it may be in our best interests if we leave Afghanistan to its fate. Better to win one war than switch our focus to Afghanistan and lose both.

Do you believe it is even possible to win both wars? If not(you agree with me) then which war should we try to win?

2

First, I’d like to see a definition of “win” in either war that makes sense.

3

Exactly. We can’t win either - we NEVER had the chance to win either - because we never had a victory condition. We just assumed we could blunder in, kill a bunch of people and they’d love us for it.

4

You seem to think that Afghanistan was ripe for the ‘winning’. I think that’s wrong, and I think one of the reasons the administration took the fight to Iraq is because they didn’t know what to do in Afghanistan.

What does ‘winning’ in Afghanistan look like? You can’t achieve a military victory, you know. The U.S. already did that. After the war, the Taliban has ceased to exist in Afghanistan. Now they’re back in control of some regions, and growing in strength. The military can’t win the war because the Taliban can simply retreat into the mountains in Pakistan. And even if you kill them all, so long as the region is full of hardcore Islamists in large numbers, new movements will rise to take their place.

In Iraq, there was a clear path to victory - pacify the country, rebuild it, and build a middle class engaging in commerce and with increasingly larger amounts of wealth to lose in a war. Iraq seems to be progressing in that direction, and may wind up a peaceful country soon (by middle east standards) even if the U.S. pulled out many of the troops. It could still go to hell, but right now the signs are very encouraging. There are soldiers patrolling in Iraq who have not even had to fire their weapons on this last tour.

But there’s no infrastructure in Afghanistan. There’s no middle class to rise as a moderating force. There’s no powerful central government that could even militarily pacify the country. You just have a very large region full of hostile people who don’t want to be controlled or pacified. The region is full of difficult terrain perfect for Guerilla warfare.

Afghanistan actually looks a lot more like Vietnam did, strategically. Vietnam was unwinnable because the U.S. had to fight under unwinnable conditions. They could not scale up the violence, and they could not cut supply lines into the country for fear of escalating the war with China. So the enemy could retreat across borders and be untouchable, and the U.S. mitary couldn’t cut their supply lines. Couple that with a peasant population hostile or indifferent to America (and willing to side with whoever happens to be holding the guns at any given moment), and you had a quagmire with no obvious exit condition.

Afghanistan looks similar. The U.S. has to fight a limited contact, can’t cut off the Taliban’s escape route into Pakistan, and cannot launch large-scale military missions into Pakistan without risking about 100 nuclear missiles coming into play.

Afghanistan strikes me more as a long-term peacekeeping effort. There’s no war there to ‘win’. The world just has to continue to commit enough soldiers to the region to prevent the Taliban or Al-Qaida from taking control of the country or Pakistan, and then work to build up Afghanistan’s infrastructure and educate its population and try to build a country out of nothing. This is a process that will take decades, not years.

5

His current position is almost identical to Dubwa’s with the difference measured in months. Withdrawal is based on Iraq’s continued progress of self rule.

6

You have to define what you mean by “win”. Winning in Iraq seems to mean pacifying and occupying Iraq with military basis indefinitely. That is not possible. Saddam was only able to do it through mass murder and because he was not a foreigner. Seen as a foreign infidel invader and unwilling to commit mass murder, we cannot indefinitely occupy Iraq, pacified or otherwise.

In Afghanistan, if driving out the Taliban is a goal, then yes, it can be done. Find each individual Taliban member, kill or capture him and put him in a POW camp, perhaps inside Afghanistan. They will once again retreat to the mountains or Pakistan, but we have the resources to do that.

7

It would help if you finished up in Korea, already.

8

In Afghanistan they just melt into the mountains and come back later. To defeat the Taliban you have to implement a program lifting the people and developing a government. They quickly become battling war lords when we leave.

9

Faulty premise. You have no evidence to back up your claim that win can either one or the other. We might be able to win both or neither.

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

10

You’ve got this exactly backwards. There is no reason why, given time and effort, Iraq can’t become a functioning autonomous country. It has a large middle class, an infrastructure, and oil wealth. What is needed is to build up a civil society and the middle class to the point where they have too much to lose in a civil war, and do too much trading with each other to be able to tolerate any one region collapsing. Iraq is currently progressing along that trajectory, and I’d say there’s a significantly better than 50/50 chance that it will wind up a whole, autonomous nation with one of the best standards of living in the region.

Afghanistan is completely different. you say that driving out the Taliban can be done. The problem is keeping them out. The Taliban was already driven out of the country, but they’re back in force now. What would you suggest the U.S. do differently to prevent this from happening again without a long-term occupation?

Also, the people of Afghanistan are so poor and so helpless that, absent a military protector, they can be controlled by warlords or insurgents and cannot put up much of a fight. If the U.S. leaves, the population will be pretty much helpless. I don’t see that situation changing in any timeframe shorter than decades. How would you suggest this be managed?

11

What Bush should’ve done, when U.S. world political capital was high after 9/11 and all NATO countries declared their intention to honor the NATO treaty that says an attack on one member state is an attack on all, would have been to make both the invasion and the nation-building a joint NATO project under U.S. leadership rather than a U.S.-only project. At the time, they would’ve gone along with it. Then France and Germany and the UK, etc., all would be in for a long-term commitment in Afghanistan; and the nation-building would be much more effective.

12

I see your point. As a side question, do you think we might gave encouraged and supported a democracy in Afghanistan after Russia was thrown out?

It may be that a democracy can be established in Iraq. Whether that democracy can sustain and protect itself itself is another issue. Whether it’s worth the cost to the US another. Am I wrong in thinking a true democracy is one that is able to say, “fuck American interests, we’re looking out for our future?” IMO our problem in the M.E. for decades has been that we’re willing to say screw the average Arab citizen for the sake of pursuing our own economic and perceived military interests.

I doubt this admin ever wanted a real democracy in Iraq. They wanted a government they could influence and manipulate and a spot for military bases.

13

How is Afghanistan supposed to become a nation? It never was-it is just a collection of tribes with a weak government in Kabul. The British never controlled it, nor did the Russians, or the Americans. The country is huge, poor (no natural resources to speak of), and backward. The Taliban liked that way-they murdered people for daring to run schools for girls.
I don’t see any future in continuing to fight there.

14

Iraq is also a country where bitterness has built up over decades between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. There are massive casualties (to avenge), serious religious differences (a single mosque bombing could spark civil war) and neighbours who will not hesitate to interfere (Iran + Turkey for starters).
Who is going to be the strong Government?

The British (150 years ago) and the Russians both failed to control Afghanistan. Why should the Allies do any better?
The US is extremely powerful against a conventional army. There’s no reason why it should succeed against guerilla warfare. See Vietnam, Korea (plus the British in Northern Ireland and the Israelis in the Middle East).

15

We destroyed the infrastructure, drove out, impoverished or killed much of the middle class, and have repeatedly tried to get a lock on it’s oil wealth for ourselves. If there’s any chance of Iraq becoming - or rather returning to being - a “functioning autonomous country” - it’ll be in spite of us, well after we are gone.

Nonsense; they HAD a civil society and a middle class, and we destroyed it. Iraq is a disaster area, and the chance of it being anything else in our lifetimes is near zero. They might have recovered from Saddam, but not from us.

16

What are you saying, that the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad was a bad thing? :confused:

:wink:

17

Does “winning” either war really matter any more than not winning Vietnam mattered in the grand scheme of things?

18

Consider too that the “surge” strategy that has been paraded around as so successful has really been a cover for our aiding the partitioning process that was already underway. We’ve gotten Sunni leaders to cut back the killings by putting them in charge in their areas, the way we’d set up the Kurds as the leaders of their own area after the first war. The bitternesses you refer to are no longer expressed quite so directly with bombings and shootings, no - because we’ve aided the breakup of the country, the way we aided the breakup of Bosnia. That was making the best of a bad situation in both places, there was nothing better we could do, but it eliminates the chance of a “strong, united democratic government” existing in either place.

So let’s not kid ourselves. “Winning” can’t mean much more than “reducing the rate of killings” in Iraq. In Afghanistan, it can’t mean much more than “keeping the local warlords from being too brutal”. In neither country will we ever be able to point to a real central government of a united nation.

19

Baghdad was a progressive city before we blew it apart. The sects lived together, and intermarried. Over half the university students were women and they could and did wear western clothes .if they chose to. They had a goofy and dangerous leader,but he did not make their lives as miserable as we have.
No matter how you define victory, don’t be surprised if Iraqis don’t share your definition. We have destroyed their country and they were not involved in 9-11.