Losing Afghanistan

The New York Times does us all a great favor with this retrospective on Afghanistan:

With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force.”

“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’ ” Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear.” [...]

The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.

Just about the only place in the United States where you saw substantial opposition to the Afghanistan War back in the day was on college campuses. That, conveniently enough, is exactly where I was at the time, so I got to participate in a lot of arguments on this subject. One thing I'm fairly sure absolutely nobody ever pitched to me was "well, don't you see that if we invade Afghanistan we're just going to wind up failing to achieve any of our key strategic objectives because the administration will divert crucial resources and attention to invade Iraq instead?"

That, after all, would just be ridiculous. And yet it appears to be exactly what's happened.

Comments

This is the first post of Matt's that I've seen in a long time that is pure cool-aid drinking. It's rediculous to say we have not achieved any of our strategic objectives. Do the Taleban still run the country? Ok, glad we back to reality. Are things perfect in afghanistan? No, but did anyone ever expect them to be?

Posted by Dave | August 12, 2007 1:39 AM

Actually, I specifically remember Bill Maher saying about the war in Afghanistan that we would kill some people, wreck the place, and then leave, because that's what the United States does.

Posted by Antid Oto | August 12, 2007 2:12 AM

I should probably say that I was one of the 25 or so people in the country who opposed the Afghanistan War at the time, mainly because I thought we were killing a lot of dirt poor, desperate, innocent people to validate bin Laden's premises. I thought it was wrong to elevate him to the status where he got to declare war on America; he was a mass murderer, not a country, and no one in the world would have said boo to us if we'd gone in after him on those grounds and then gotten the hell out. Invading and occupying the country seemed to me both unjustified and a terrible idea.

Posted by Antid Oto | August 12, 2007 2:23 AM

I can't remember if this is right or not, but I remember thinking we could have gotten Bin Laden diplomatically if we had pursued that angle more aggressively. But the Taliban government basically said "No," then, "Maybe," and by then it was too late. I can't blame Bush too much for the decision, because at the moment I might have done the same thing-just the idea that the Taliban was going to suffer to defend that sonofabitch would have made my blood boil, and when you have the US military at your disposal, it would be a difficult temptation to resist. While there was widespread sympathy for America after the attack, I think Afghanistan's relative economic and political insignificance on the world stage had at least as much to do with the failure of a significant mass of critical opinions to emerge on the matter. Afghanistan didn't have any real allies or sympathizers in the West. Then, when we invaded Iraq, precisely because the stupidity of the entire enterprise, Afghanistan became something relatively convenient to point to, as a way of demonstrating what a properly justified and executed military intervention should look like. I think that the Afghanistan/Iraq comparison is only useful rhetorically, and that it doesn't get us anything conceptually useful to attempt to compare the two.

I also think it's a mistake because it is an implicit admission that there might be real world circumstances that would justify in humanitarian terms the deployment of the military to destabilize and replace foreign governments. Admitting that Afghanistan was totally alright in practice, is the same as admitting that Iraq was totally alright in theory, and that the only real problem with our involvement in Iraq is that we botched the job. This is the widely held middle ground opinion on Iraq-not that we were wrong to begin with (WMD fantasies notwithstanding) but that we failed to execute the war properly. This concerns me, because it sidesteps the question of whether it's actually in our interest or the interests of the people we want to help to bomb their countries, kill their leaders, and install a "better" government more soothing to our particular set of cultural norms. It doesn't seem quite right for us to try to impose our notion of freedom on other people, in large part because it's inimical to the notion of freedom itself.

Anyway, I remain suspicious of "Good War" talk, and I urge others to be suspicious of it as well.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 12, 2007 3:32 AM

The initial objectives of deposing the Taliban and eliminating a safe haven for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan were achieved in spectacular fashion, weeks after Frank Rich et.al., had declared the operation a 'quagmire'. The ludicrous, politically-correct, tacked-on objective of establishing a functioning democracy in a perennial fourth-world hell hole has succeeded to a degree that has defied any realistic expectation.

The even more ludicrous objective of completely wiping out a religious movement inextricably woven into Afghanistan's dominant tribal group, the Pashtuns -- while half the tribe stayed safely "on base" in Pakistan -- hasn't succeeded. How could it have?

By the way: The war in Afghanistan was opposed a little more widely than just on college campuses. I remember seeing flyers opposing the imminent war in Manhattan's theater district on September 29th, 2001. This was when you still couldn't drive south of Canal Street on the West Side Highway do to the recovery efforts at Ground Zero.

Posted by Fred | August 12, 2007 3:46 AM

Oh no Fred, you saw flyers in the the fucking Theater District. It's the fucking Theater District. You do understand that, right? We're talking just a place not too far away from the Naked Cowboy.

"This is the first post of Matt's that I've seen in a long time that is pure cool-aid drinking. It's rediculous to say we have not achieved any of our strategic objectives. Do the Taleban still run the country? Ok, glad we back to reality. Are things perfect in afghanistan? No, but did anyone ever expect them to be?"

Well, the Taliban never practiced effective control over all of Afghanistan (Northern Alliance and all), but is the de facto local power in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is also becoming an even more explicitly Pashtun movement, thus making Afghan and Pakistani politics even more ethnically-based, which is not a good thing. I thought that capturing bin Laden was part of our strategic objectives. Considering how in 2002 the Bush Administration said that failed states were the next big risk to our security - probably their smartest judgment call, even if it was partly made to invade Iraq - one would think that establishing a government, democracy or otherwise, that could practice effective control and have a virtual monopoly on violence would be a major strategic priority. Instead, we've made Karzai look like an American puppet for no real reason beyond soothing Bush's ego. It was not a strategic objective to let bin Laden and Taliban elements escape into Pakistan and thus export the problem into a country that has nukes and an already unstable border region that is the area of the world where it is easiest to purchase illegal arms in a country with a land-religion rivalry with a large nuclear-armed neighbor.

Posted by Reality Man | August 12, 2007 5:14 AM

Does "spectacular fashion" denote allowing the enemy to withdraw and regroup next door or the wonderful diversity of Pashtun headwear in the FATA?

Posted by ka-bar | August 12, 2007 5:29 AM

The indispensable hilzoy (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/08/the-road-not-ta.html):

I had supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and I heard those words -- Marshall Plan, we will not repeat the mistakes of the past, we will not abandon Afghanistan -- and thinking: we are really going to do something wonderful. . . . We weren't in a position to do much about [Afghanistan] earlier -- naively, I believed that you don't just go around invading countries out of the blue, ha ha ha -- but suddenly we actually had a really good reason to invade, and there we were, the Taliban was in flight, the people seemed overjoyed, and I thought: dear God, we are actually going to do try to right by Afghanistan, whose people have suffered so much for so long. And back in that era of lost hopes, what gave me real confidence that we would do our best to actually help Afghanistan to transform itself from a failed state into a normal, functioning society was that for once, making a serious effort to do this wasn't just a wild aspiration. It was feasible, it was the right thing to do, but most importantly, as far as its actually happening was concerned, it was clearly, obviously, overwhelmingly in our interest.

It still breaks my heart just thinking about it. Read the whole article and weep.

Posted by Marty Lederman | August 12, 2007 6:29 AM

BTW, that's all hilzoy, not me -- I don't know how to do block quotes in these comments.

Posted by Marty Lederman | August 12, 2007 6:31 AM

Are things perfect in afghanistan? No, but did anyone ever expect them to be?

Do you know what failed state means? You people have a strange notion of not perfect and good enough.

Posted by novakant | August 12, 2007 6:46 AM

I seem to recall that American aid to Afghanistan in the period following the Taliban's fall was on the order of $1 million a year. We thought we could do it on the cheap while moving on to the real target, Iraq.

Posted by bob h | August 12, 2007 7:24 AM

The effort to keep the Taliban out of Afghanistan reminds me of kids at the beach building sand castles to stop the tide from coming in.

Kids arguing about the best sand castle design to stop the tide from coming in reminds me of...punditry.

I had a nice vacation, though.

Posted by alphie | August 12, 2007 7:31 AM

Well, I did not support the invasion of afghanistan, and nor did several people I know, and I'm pretty far from a college campus at this point (in years if not in geography). I did not do so on the explicit grounds that I thought they would fuck it up because the expressed intentions of the bush regime and its sycophants in the press and in the public was that the motive was revenge and that we had no longer term goals. I thought we should attempt to take over afghanistan through more peaceful means--I thought we should work to cut bin laden off from his oil and drug money, and that we should do what the afghans themselves have done for hundreds of years which is demand bin laden's head in return for renouncing random mass violence and also gobs of money. Does anyone seriously tink that if we had offered as much money as we have spent on that misbegotten war in the form of foreign aid (which, by the way, we continued to pay to the taliban right up until the invastion) we wouldn't have gotten bin laden and all his top aides?

After that we could have worked on a rehabilitation program for Afghanistan and worked on cutting the maddrassas out of existence. But we were too busy selling the american people on revenge, a revenge that (as far as I can see from polls) the american people embraced with gusto for the five short seconds they could waste on any deep emotion. Any adult human being who understood american politics and the american personality had a duty to resist throwing the whole might of the state into a war that the people supported for mere reasons of emotional gratification. Because it had to be known in advance, and plenty of us did, that when you run on emotion, like a toddler, you get exhausted and you can't see a project through in any meanignful sense. They stampeded us into war and then were unable to hold the american people's attention. Now we are all traitors, according to wingnut logic, because we can't hate as long and as viciously as they. And because we can see how damaging these two wars have been to all three countries. They were happy enough to get the american people into a war that was supposed to have no ill consequences for us, and now that people are waking up and seeing the damage we are accused of being weak and traitorous. Because an informed, thoughtful, engaged populace is the greatest danger to our government. Greater by far than any bombing of civilians or buildings. And that is why Stubykofsky or whatever his name is and all the top right wing pundits are urging another 9/11. Because fear is all they've got.

aimai

Posted by aimai | August 12, 2007 8:17 AM

See Atrios on this.

I want to give a more sympathetic reading to that last line, but it's hard. Being right in opposing a war does not require predicting with specificity what will go wrong - because wars are negative-sum games, if unpredictably so, it always falls on the pro-war crowd to describe in detail how a certain military action will have the effects that its supporters desire.

I was wrong on Afghanistan. That war has not been a good thing. By the rules of war, by just war theory, one can argue it was justified, but I think that (a) "reasonable success" has been demonstrated not to be the case and (b) obviously, just because you can make a case for justification doesn't mean you should send the army in.

Posted by DivGuy | August 12, 2007 8:41 AM

One huge problem I had with the discussion we had -- to the extent we had any -- regarding U.S. military action in Iraq is that most people seemed to imagine that operations in Afghanistan would be led by some fantasy figures not found in the Bush Jr. administration.

So, when someone of sound mind suggested that if the U.S. invaded Afghanistan it needed to do A, B, and C, I would find myself wondering how in the world they imagined that these petty criminals and anti-Constitutional thugs in the Bush Jr. administration would give a damn about A, B, and C.

Hopefully one lesson we have learned is that we cannot simply discuss military operations in the abstract; we must understand that they will be approved and led by our actual political leaders and institutions, not our roster of fantasy leaders since WWII.

Posted by El Cid | August 12, 2007 8:56 AM

I didn't oppose the Afghanistan war; but I was sure it would accomplish nothing lasting. Without even considering Iraq, I knew that America would not leave enough troops in Afghanistan long enough to make a lasting difference. Anyway, I doubt that it would be worth the effort. We are an empire. We should get used to terrorism.

Posted by Gary Sugar | August 12, 2007 9:01 AM

I wasn't opposed to the occupation of Afghanistan at the time. But I was laboring under the misconception that we would be invading for the specific purpose of rounding up Al Qaeda and capturing Osama Bin Laden and his senior leadership. Now I'm smarter and understand that our country doesn't engage in military action against non-state actors, because our defense apparatus and military-industrial complex are incapable of re-organizing to face that kind of threat. So instead we just removed the Taliban, which is nice, but we've left Afghanistan and its border with Pakistan as a breeding ground for terrorists, which isn't.

Posted by Freddie | August 12, 2007 9:15 AM

As I remember, there were more than just a few college students who questioned the war. Mostly it was along the lines of "do we really want our troops enmeshed in a land war in a part of the world where armies traditionally go to die?"

As it turns out, the military part of the equation went stunningly well. No doubt because the Afgans have always been better guerilla warfare than traditional set-piece battles and defense. The American invasion forced them into defensive battles for which they were ill prepared.

The political side of the equation is where Bush completely failed for basically the reasons cited in the article. They took their eyes off the ball.

Here's a question. In the past 7 years of the Bush Administration, is there a single major foreign or domestic policy initiative advanced by this administration that hasn't gone horribly wrong?
A single one?

Posted by Kent | August 12, 2007 9:50 AM

I was in college at the same time, and for the record if you had bothered to listen to people like that, you would have essentially heard that very same argument. Not the Iraq part, but that we'd just go in and wreck the place and leave behind a weak puppet state that couldn't fulfill anyone's needs.

In all likelihood, you simply stopped listening after the phrase "I don't support the war in adfghanistan..." Without caring about the because. In your mind, and admittedly in mine, at the time we didn't think there was a sensible Because. The truth is, we were wrong and they were right.

Posted by Soullite | August 12, 2007 9:59 AM

"So, when someone of sound mind suggested that if the U.S. invaded Afghanistan it needed to do A, B, and C, I would find myself wondering how in the world they imagined that these petty criminals and anti-Constitutional thugs in the Bush Jr. administration would give a damn about A, B, and C."

Really, I wasn't aware at the time of the Afghanistan invasion that Bush Jr. was an incompetent buffoon. Iraq was not on my radar at the time, either. Guess I was naive, and listening to the wrong sources.

Posted by Korha | August 12, 2007 11:12 AM

Oh, and I still think going into Afghanistan was, ultimately, a good thing. Al Qaeda was there, and the most effective way to get them was to invade. The war itself went well: our objectives were achieved. It was the postwar reconstruction that went bad.

Posted by Korha | August 12, 2007 11:16 AM

I was in grad school at the time, and there was little or no opposition to the Afghanistan war. Of course, I was at the University of Arkansas, not exactly a hotbed of anti-war thought.

Until it came to the Iraq War. Then there was a massive protest in the middle of the campus, which surprised me even while I took part in it, frankly.

Posted by Incertus (Brian) | August 12, 2007 11:22 AM

Well I opposed the invasion of Afghanistan at the time. Not because I thought military action couldn't be justified, but because I didn't believe that confidence in the political leadership could be justified. The events in Florida in 2000 taught me that Bush and Co. were clearly a do anything, say anything bunch with no respect for democratic principles.

The fact that they chose to frame 9/11 as a second "Pearl Harbor" and used it as a pretext for militarizing US foreign policy seemed indicative that Afghanistan would only be the beginning. It was clear even then that the rationale behind the "war on terror" was one that could be generalized to any country that happened to get on the wrong side of the regime in Washington. Against this eventuality there was only the argument that we should "trust" the President and his partisans to "do the right thing."

I'm still amazed that intelligent people could have bought into that line.

Posted by WB Reeves | August 12, 2007 11:29 AM

Amen, WB.

And I can't believe I'm even wasting my time reading a 9/11 undergraduate.

Posted by dms | August 12, 2007 11:44 AM

Oh, and I still think going into Afghanistan was, ultimately, a good thing. Al Qaeda was there, and the most effective way to get them was to invade. The war itself went well: our objectives were achieved. It was the postwar reconstruction that went bad.

I don't understand how chasing bin Laden and his buddies into Pakistan where they can reestablish themselves (remember, they're in the strongest position they have been since 9/11) counts as achieving our objectives. Isn't it worse now that he's in an unstable, much more strategically important nation where there's no hope of getting him? This was a fairly predictable outcome.

Something no one has ever explained to me - aren't there are other ways of going about capturing/assassinating/deposing people which don't include a full-scale invasion? I'm pretty sure there are.

Posted by Brian | August 12, 2007 11:48 AM

A sufficient reason to have opposed invading Afghanistan is that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld thought it was a good idea and were in charge of making it happen.

Some of us realized that instinctively at the time; now, after almost six years, 72% of the nation knows it.

Posted by Stuart Eugene Thiel | August 12, 2007 11:58 AM

If you're going to remove a wasp nest from the thicket of trees at the end of the road, hitting it with sticks and releasing a bunch of yellowjackets to take over isn't the ideal approach. But Americans weren't into the idea of a war that didn't involve lots of air bombardment and ground surrogates.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | August 12, 2007 12:24 PM

I belong to the camp of people who supported military action against Afghanistan but vehemently opposed war against Iraq. Despite viewing GWB with what I thought was the deepest possible distrust, I didn't know the half of it. Mea culpa.

I had two thoughts at the time. One of which proved to be wrong, the second of which I'm not so sure about.

First, I thought the Taliban, who had emerged as the victors after decades of bitter fighting, were very well entrenched in power and likely to be hard to dislodge. I worried that the Bush admin. was not deploying forces equal to the task. This turned out to be completely wrong. The Taliban regime was extremely weak. All it took was a shove to topple it.

Second, once it became clear just how easily the Taliban could be defeated, I worried that the Bush admin wasn't deploying enough forces to make it clear that this was a serious effort on our part and that the end of the Taliban was due to us, not to another faction in Afghanistan's interminable civil wars. (I think in my deluded way (cf. Hilzoy) I envisaged a serious effort at reconstruction, with GIs building schools and giving kids rides in jeeps and so on.) Recall that part played by US ground troops was minimal. We gave air support to the Northern alliance, sent in some special teams and gave heaps of money to the Taliban's opponents, whereupon the Taliban regime collapsed like a house of cards.

In retrospect I think there was a tendency to give Bush & co. credit for brilliant planning and a seriousness of purpose commensurate with the speed and completeness of the military success, when in truth it was a bit of luck--they were pushing at an open door. It was a shock to see resources and attn. being shifted away from Bin Laden and Afghanistan, but since then I've wondered whether Afghanistan and success in the war there ever figured largely in Bush's plans. I think it's a real possibility that, had things bogged down there, Bush would have shifted resources to Iraq anyway. It was always a low priority.

When one remembers the argument that toppling Saddam and building a model democracy in the heart of the Islamic world would set of a chain reaction of democratic transformations (bitter laughter), it seems strange that no serious effort was made to make Afghanistan, which is to be sure not Arabic and not in the middle east, a model. After all we were there for some pretty good reasons, our arrival had been welcome to a fair chunk of the population. Or strange only if one forgets who are leaders were and, alas, still are.

Posted by J | August 12, 2007 12:25 PM

Well, it's a really good thing that getting OBL was not one of our objectives in Afghanistan, because if it had been it would sure feel kind of weird and contradictory 'n' stuff to talk about achieving all of them. I do recall I had a dream once in which somebody said they wanted him "dead or alive," but that couldn't have happened in reality because that would be inconvenient. I'm glad that whole Tora Bora thing was a dream too, because it would really suck to think we had the guy holed up there and then for some reason just let him go. But nobody could have been that stupid or incompetent in reality thank god.

Posted by DrBB | August 12, 2007 12:35 PM

"Admitting that Afghanistan was totally alright in practice, is the same as admitting that Iraq was totally alright in theory, and that the only real problem with our involvement in Iraq is that we botched the job."

Bullshit. If one believes there is such thing as justified military action, it doesn't necessarily follow that all wars are justified unless they are "botched." It's perfectly possible to make a distinction between just and unjust wars and/or a distinction between prudent and imprudent wars. Iraq was certainly more questionable under both criteria than Afganistan.

Posted by Leo | August 12, 2007 1:09 PM

I think the fact that no serious reconstruction effort was tried in Afghanistan really highlights the vapidness of the Adminstration's arguments about bringing democracy/liberty/freedom to the downtrodden masses. The conditions for rebuilding Afghanistan seemed more favorable than Iraq: something of a federal system already (i.e. warlords), exhaustion from 20 years of civil war, relatively isolated, Karzai, etc. Instead of Iraq, what might a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan have meant for the people there and the West's relationship with Islam?

Even with all the Administrations' screwups in Afghanistan, I still think the invasion was on the balance positive (barely). Osama wringing his hands menacingly from a cave in rural Pakistan communicating by tin cans on strings is much less dangerous than Osama living comfortably in Afghanistan as basically Mullah Omar's top general. Afghanistan was more or less a terroist-sponsored state, making Osama far more dangerous than he is now. Reducing Al Qaeda from a group acting at an international scale to a group acting at a regional scale (occasionally 'franchising' out to homegrown groups) counts as a victory in my book.

There's also value to establishing precedent that the US will not allow terrorist-run states or state-run terrorism to go unpunished. If a regime knowingly aids and abets an attack on the US by group X, that will be treated equivalent to being attacked by the regime itself and all the consequences that entails. Note that this is not the same as the argument from the moral cretins at the National Review that we should arbitrarily and without justification bash a small country against the wall, just to show them that we can. This is establishing rules for the relationship between state and non-state actors.

By the way, there was some handwringing in the media prior to Iraq about the "legality" of pre-emptive wars. Now that the Iraq invasion was shown to not even meet the criterion of pre-emptive, either I've missed the discussion, but there seems to be very little discussion in the media about the legal grounds for our initial invasion and continued presence there. The media is clearly obsessed with 'moving forward' and 'finding solutions', hence the ridiculous focus on THE SURGE and "good golly, what will Gen. Patreaus say in September? He's going to tell, he's going to tell, he's going to tell..." But wouldn't it be prudent to at least understand how and why we got there in the first in order to figure out now how the hell we get out of there?

Posted by TheF79 | August 12, 2007 1:40 PM

George W. Bush,

Remarks at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia>/a>
April 17th, 2002

We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations. Peace--peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls which works.

We're working hard in Afghanistan. We're clearing minefields. We're rebuilding roads. We're improving medical care. And we will work to help Afghanistan to develop an economy that can feed its people without feeding the world's demand for drugs.

And we help the Afghan people recover from the Taliban rule. And as we do so, we find mounting horror--evidence of horror. In the Hazarajat region, the Red Cross has found signs of massacres committed by the Taliban last year, victims who lie in mass graves. This is the legacy of the first regime to fall in the war against terror. These mass graves are a reminder of the kind of enemy we have fought and have defeated. And they are the kind of evil we continue to fight.

By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best traditions of George Marshall. Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings.

Nope, no promise of nation building there. Phew. I was afraid I'd missed something.

Posted by DrBB | August 12, 2007 1:41 PM

Really, I wasn't aware at the time of the Afghanistan invasion that Bush Jr. was an incompetent buffoon. Iraq was not on my radar at the time, either. Guess I was naive, and listening to the wrong sources.

Congratulations--recognition of error is the first requirement for true reform.

Posted by DrBB | August 12, 2007 1:46 PM

One additional minor detail: there's been plenty of exploration of how Bush & Co conflated Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda, but not much of how they successfully conflated the Taliban with Al Qaeda. Do we care that the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan? I don't see why we should, at least until the Taliban attacks us outside of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was never made up of Afghanis, and it's based in Pakistan now.

Posted by Antid Oto | August 12, 2007 1:53 PM

It's fair point Antid. They did have a symbiotic relationship, however, and generally the conflation is a kind of simplification of the idea that Afghanistan falling into failed-state condition, hence into the hands of Islamic extremists like the Taliban, was a precondition to allowing AQ to fester there. So allowing that situation to redevelop is not a good sign. But it's a fair point.

I think the larger argument still stands: that if we had in fact defeated AQ and OBL instead of letting them slink over the border into Pakistan, and then went on to keep our promise (which we did in fact make) of resurrecting Afghanistan from its failed-state status (which was plenty enough to take on without blundering off into Iraq like some ADD-addled adolescent with control of the world's most bloated military in his hands and no brains or judgment to speak of) that we might actually be in a position to count ourselves as having "won" the GWOT at this point, insofar as that concept even makes sense, and Bush would be riding out as one of the greats. Having blown all that would, you'd think, even bug some of the 28%ers from time to time, but I guess not.

Posted by DrBB | August 12, 2007 2:40 PM

From the Congressional Record, September 14, 2001 (some people just don't pay attention in class apparently):

Ms. [Barbara] LEE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank our ranking member and my friend for yielding time. Mr. Speaker, I rise today really with a very heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most callous would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world. This unspeakable act on the United States has forced me, however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction. September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter. This resolution will pass, although we all know that the President can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let us step back for a moment. Let us just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it today and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, ``As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.''

Yeah, y'know, think about it a second. Do you blow apart the whole country or do you go after the terrorist group first and then think about addressing the larger problem? Hmmm.

That's some quality thinking they're paying you for, Matt.

Posted by darrelplant | August 12, 2007 4:04 PM

"Admitting that Afghanistan was totally alright in practice, is the same as admitting that Iraq was totally alright in theory, and that the only real problem with our involvement in Iraq is that we botched the job."

Bullshit. If one believes there is such thing as justified military action, it doesn't necessarily follow that all wars are justified unless they are "botched." It's perfectly possible to make a distinction between just and unjust wars and/or a distinction between prudent and imprudent wars. Iraq was certainly more questionable under both criteria than Afganistan.

I disagree here. I think that it is a real stretch to suggest that the reluctance of the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden represented a de facto act of war. The case for invading Afghanistan is not more clear cut than the case for invading Iraq was (especially at the time). Saddam Hussein's WMD posturing was at least as bad, and all those Republicans suddenly and mysteriously in love with the UN and its penchant for resolutions did have a point. So, as far as initial justifications for war, I don't see how the Afghanistan decision is demonstrably more rational than the Iraq decision. It some ways it seems like it was less rational-it was a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, premised on the notion that if someone wasn't made to pay for what happened, we'd look weak.

As for the matter of prudence, while it is clear in hindsight that Iraq was going to be a tougher nut to crack than Afghanistan, leading up to the war there were reasons to think that wouldn't necessarily be the case. We had a track record of success in Iraq a la the Gulf War, and we did mop up Saddam's forces with relative ease. And the fact that Iraq was composed mostly of three distinct ethnic divisions was not itself evidence that the fall of the regime would straightforwardly lead to internecine warfare. Some people guessed that would be the outcome, however, to their credit. But it was still just a guess.

Besides, we're not done in Afghanistan. The reason we have a better "track record" there boils down to the fact that no one ever had high hopes for a united democratic government to begin with. In real terms, the only thing that's better about Afghanistan is that there has been far less violence, in part, one suspects, because there are far fewer US troops. As far as achieving lasting political stability there, we aren't much closer than we are in Iraq.

Finally, the point of my original post was in regards to wars justified for humanitarian reasons. If you are in the camp that thinks knocking over the Taliban to wipe out some terrorist training camps was justification enough, then your reasons for going to war there aren't going to be comparable to your reasons (if you entertain them) for invading Iraq. However, there is a certain swathe of individuals whose primary interest in these wars is to make life better for the inhabitants of the countries we invade. When those people point to Afghanistan as a model for future interventions, they leave themselves little room to argue against occupations like Iraq.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 12, 2007 4:18 PM

Attacking Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban was a no-brainer. They not only harbored AQ, refused to turn them over after a combat attack on America with significant casualties - they also were allied with AQ and used that group for liquidating villages of Haziri Shiites, Uzbecks of the Northern Alliance.
In the war, the US was wacking "mixed elements" of AQ and Taliban forces. They were inseperable - until a JDAM landed in their midst.

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The lesson apears to be that we can help a nation that is fairly advanced towards modernity become democratic, but we cannot leapfrog centuries of internal national development and transform 4th World shitholes into a modern democratic nation by force of American will.

We knew from 5 attempts to get Haiti on a democratic path how messed up that nations people and culture are, same with other past failures like Angola. We failed partially in Iraq because we saw surface modernity and an educated people - and missed the tribal barbarism and corruption underneath..

Posted by Chris Ford | August 12, 2007 6:07 PM

We failed partially in Iraq because we saw surface modernity and an educated people - and missed the tribal barbarism and corruption underneath..

Excuse me, but who are you referring to when you say "we"?

Posted by Tyro | August 12, 2007 11:34 PM

The best possible justification for invading IRAQ
is that it takes our national attention off
of the failures in Afghanistan. The US empire would be shown to be pathetically weak in trying to reform puny, helpless, Afghanistan, rather than
difficult, challenging IRAQ - but will fail in either case.
NO western invader since Alexander has succeeded there, so failure
to modernize is inevitable, and will eventually be ugly - ask the Russians.

Mind you, that is not a sufficient justification for invading IRAQ, but it is better than all the others.

Posted by catclub | August 13, 2007 1:30 PM

Another perspective: Don't believe the naysayers. Afghanistan is doing as well as anyone has a right to expect.

Posted by Fred | August 13, 2007 3:36 PM