Originally posted on Peter Navarro's website in Sept' 09-
Excellent piece on ending the Afghan War!
Orange Grove: Get out of Afghanistan now
By PETER NAVARRO
2009-09-24 17:16:02
During my senior year in high school, in 1966-67, our local congressman came to speak to us soon-to-be-draftees about the necessity of the Vietnam War. His basic pitch was a frothy combination of Red menace, yellow peril, and domino theory. While not particularly versed in geopolitics at the time – although, as a paper boy delivering and regularly reading the Washington Post, I wasn't a complete ignoramus – the speech rang as hollow as a beer keg after a frat party.
Today, I get the same kind of hollowness in my gut every time I hear President Barack Obama and a gaggle of Democratic and Republican hawks offer eerily similar arguments for the Afghanistan war. Terrorism is the new Red menace. Yellow peril has morphed into radical Islam. Dominoes, perhaps surprisingly, are still dominoes. In fact, sober analysis of the two major arguments in support of the war leads me to the same conclusion as my gut – let's get the hell out.
Consider the first argument: Afghanistan must not be allowed to be a staging area for al-Qaida terrorists. Of course, it was from Afghan soil that Osama bin Laden oversaw the 9/11 attacks so this argument seems at first glance compelling. However, Afghanistan is now just one of many possible staging areas for al-Qaida. In fact, hot zone that Afghanistan is, it is now much easier for al-Qaida's decentralized networks to conduct operations in numerous other places, with Algeria, Somalia, and Yemen emerging as the newest strongholds. Why aren't we invading them?
The second pro-war argument is domino theory redux. If the Taliban and Islamic extremists once again control Afghanistan, they will spread their poison to neighboring Pakistan. If the domino Pakistan falls to Islamic extremists, they will inherit Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability and use it to attack Israel and the U.S.
This argument fails to acknowledge that America's presence in Afghanistan is inflaming tensions on Pakistan's border and doing more to destabilize the country than protect it. The broader important issue is whether the United States can, or should, baby-sit a country like Pakistan. After all, with its own standing army and a growing middle class, Pakistan should be able to protect its own territory and political and economic institutions.
Even if you buy the pro-war arguments, consider this: The war can never be won in any quick or decisive fashion – if at all. As the British learned in two wars with Afghanistan in the 1800s and the Soviets learned in their bloodbath of the 1980s, Afghanistan is no country at all. Rather, it's a diverse collection of primitive tribes occupying a harsh landscape pockmarked with tens of thousands of hiding places ideal for guerrilla warfare. On the quagmire scale, it rates a full 10 and makes Vietnam look like a cakewalk. Why we want to send American sons and daughters into that trap is the question for this age.
In fact, our very presence in Afghanistan (and Iraq) is doing more to help al-Qaida recruit new members and develop new military and terror tactics than any other event Osama Bin Laden could have dreamed up. While American troop numbers are constrained by both the size (and battle fatigue) of our military and what American political opinion will bear, al-Qaida has an ever-deepening well of recruits. Why we want to help al-Qaida build its network on the back of anti-American sentiment is a mystery.
The saddest fact is that our new president has taken ownership of this war less for strategic and military purposes and more to show his backbone. As a strong and early opponent of the Iraq war, Barack Obama had to protect his dovish flanks during the 2008 campaign by talking tough on Afghanistan. Now, as he gets deeper into the quagmire, the supreme irony is that he doesn't have the backbone to realize this is an unwinnable war without any compelling strategic rationale.
Navarro on TheStreet.com
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