Exiting Afghanistan

What do you think of President Obama’s decision to end the American combat offensive in Afghanistan? We suspected Obama might use Osama bin Laden's death as an excuse to get out.

Obama is pulling the surge troops out smack in the middle of next year’s fighting season--disrupting the military’s plan to win in Afghanistan’s South then shift resources to the East--and instead encouraging “a battered Taliban to hang on [until we leave], rather than bargain for a truce.”

Washington insider Leslie Gelb is fine with Obama’s pull-out, writing

now is not the time for another nation-building crusade abroad, but rather for nation-building here at home. My main regret about Obama's speech on Wednesday was that [he talked] about restoring our domestic economy—without beginning to tell us how he would fight and win that crucial war. [emphasis added]

I had not realized that Obama’s call for “nation-building at home,” the president’s excuse for pulling resources out of Afghanistan, had become the subject of such conservative derision. Reason’s Matt Welch almost chokes on the phrase:

Like all vacuous Thomas L. Friedman metaphors, "nation building at home" dissolves long before contact with reality. After all, the president is not advocating [in the U.S.] "the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring transition to democracy."

As I pointed out [last November], Friedman had invoked domestic "nation-building" 34 times across 14 columns since June 2008, [none grappling] with the great unmentionable [truth] : Just about everything government provides has gotten too damned expensive, because government is a definitionally corruptible monopoly, and as a result there is [little] left over to pay for whatever shiny new government-monopoly [Friedman and friends want.]

. . . the Wall Street Journal[‘s] James Taranto notes that Friedman has only used [nation building at home] once since then, and concludes, “How can anyone take seriously Barack Obama's status as the World's Greatest Orator when he uses Friedmanisms that have become so Friedmanistic that even Friedman avoids them?”

Bing West, a combat marine veteran of Vietnam, Reagan’s International Security Affairs assistant secretary, and a military affairs writer who chronicled the success of the Iraq surge after 2006, is sour on America’s war in Afghanistan, and supports Obama’s troop pull-back. West writes:

[Create] a 20,000-member Adviser Corps. . . We need more advisers at the point of combat to call in fire, so that the Afghan soldiers gain a sense that they can win. [We should] bolster the size of the adviser teams from about 20 to 60. . .
replace . . . combat units with enlarged adviser teams. Currently, there is one American in Afghanistan for every two Afghan soldiers. [We need] one American for every 10 Afghan soldiers.

In addition, for the next 10 years, the U.S. should pay members of the Afghan army directly, without going through unreliable civilians in Kabul to do so. If there is a negotiated settlement, the Taliban will emerge as an armed faction of subversion within the state. But without a settlement, the Afghan army faces a long war. Either way, the Afghan army must be confident of direct U.S.support -- at a cost of $10 billion a year, even when our forces are gone.

The West approach takes strategy way back to the Vietnam war’s beginning, 1961-64, when we fought insurgency with an advisors corps imbedded in South Vietnamese army (ARVN) units. West apparently thinks that was a winning approach, and would have worked had we circumvented the highly corrupt South Vietnamese superstructure, instead paying and dealing directly with the ARVN troops themselves.

Who knows? The White House reportedly doesn’t think much of West, but at least he provides a way out that doesn’t equal total defeat.