Winning.

There’s a pretty strong essay by Andrew Bacevich in the November issue of Harper’s (“The War We Can’t Win”) that looks at the impasse of the Afghan war and the fallacy of believing we can make America safe by continuing to occupy a foreign land. One would hope that Obama reads it – I have my doubts he’s hearing this point of view with any regularity. Bacevich observes that Obama is carrying forward the legacy of failure his predecessor established in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and while I don’t agree with every nuance of his analysis, he’s spot-on when questioning the general approach to the “War on Terror” that Bush took and which has since become a matter of conventional wisdom (or lack of same). The impetus towards revenge, stoked by the Bush team, that swept us into both wars has proven a dismal failure, as Bacevich points out. It is also a criminal abuse of power that has sowed the seeds of future disasters.

The September 11 attacks represented a colossal failure of our political leaders, our commercial airline industry, our national security apparatus, and our intelligence community, as Jim Ridgeway so aptly described a few years ago in The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11 (note: not a “9-11 truth” work by any means). The problem wasn’t so much in Afghanistan as it was – and is – right here. The attacks were planned largely in Germany and in flight schools in the United States. So… are we planning to occupy Germany and Florida? Prolonging and expanding the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan is not going to make us safer – it’s simply going to inspire more people to try to take a shot at the empire that’s subjugating two Muslim nations and helping to oppress a third (Palestine). Bacevich contrasts our policy in Afghanistan to America’s relationship with Mexico, pointing out the absurdity of the notion that an army of occupation can be used to impose a more effective, less corrupt government and to disable international criminal networks operating within that country’s borders. To suggest this approach in Mexico would be to invite ridicule – even more so when you consider the degree to which our own trade policy has fueled the disintegration of the Mexican state and created a flood of economic refugees and illicit drugs across our southern border.

Truthfully, our policy in Afghanistan is the same as though we had allied ourselves with some of the worst drug cartels in Mexico in the hope that they might someday voluntarily adopt at least the pretense of virtue as not to embarrass us any further. The objective is not good governance for the Afghans – it is denying Al Qaeda safe haven, and we seem willing to do anything to bring that about… including a lot of things that seriously undermine that very goal. Like support for figures like the warlord Dostum and his ilk who would, I’m sure, tolerate their former jihadist allies if they saw benefit in doing so. Like killing senior Taliban leaders, so that younger, more energetic, more zealous militants can take their places. Like sacrificing some of the best among us for an unworthy cause.