Bloodthirsty Liberal

We have a decision. In his long, hard study sessions on what to do in Afghanistan—surge with more troops, or pull way back—who can be surprised to learn that President Obama has opted for… both!

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

But military planners are also pressing for enough troops to safeguard major agricultural areas, like the hotly contested Helmand River valley, as well as regional highways essential to the economy — tasks that would require significantly more reinforcements beyond the 21,000 deployed by Mr. Obama this year…

[The new] strategy would be open to complaints that American and allied forces were in effect giving insurgents free rein across large parts of the nation, allowing the Taliban to establish ministates with training camps that could be used by Al Qaeda…

Military officers said that they would maintain pressure on insurgents in remote regions by using surveillance drones and reports from people in the field to find pockets of Taliban fighters and to guide attacks, in particular by Special Operations forces.

One of my gurus, Ralph Peters, will probably find this half-assed approach, twice what is required:

AFGHANISTAN isn’t completely hopeless, just useless. It’s a strategic joke with a bloody punch line.

Even if everything went perfectly in Afghanistan — which it won’t — the results would be virtually meaningless: Our mortal enemies (above all, al Qaeda) have dug in elsewhere, from Pakistan to Somalia.

Now we are warned that, unless we send another 40,000 US troops to convince Afghans we’re their friends, unspecified woes will fall upon us like biblical plagues.

Apart from the curious notion that sending more Infantrymen is the way to win hearts and minds, the hearts and minds of Afghans not only can’t be won, but aren’t worth winning.

Our soldiers are dying for a fad, not for a strategy. Our vaunted counterinsurgency doctrine is the military equivalent of hula hoops, pet rocks and Beanie Babies: an oddity that caught the Zeitgeist.

The embrace of this suicidal fad by ambitious senior generals has created the most profound rift between frontline soldiers on one side and top generals on the other that I’ve encountered in 22 years of military service and another 11 years covering our troops.

There have always been disgruntled privates, but the sheer disgust was never this intense. And the top generals seem oblivious. (You can’t just fly in, say, “How’s it going, lieutenant?” and fly back to headquarters.)

…

The generals refuse to recognize that, from the local viewpoint, the Taliban are the patriots. We’re the Redcoats. Our counterinsurgency (COIN) theory — hatched by military pseudo-intellectuals and opportunists — has no serious historical basis. It ignores the uncomfortable lessons of 3,000 years of fighting insurgencies and terrorists. Its authors claim Vietnam and Algeria as success stories.

…

So our troops hold their fire and die to protect Afghan villagers who back the Taliban and to protect an Afghan government the people despise. How, exactly, does this advance our national security?

Boxers and briefs. Paper and plastic. While Obama’s suggested strategy meets the letter of Peters’ objection to trying to win the hearts and minds of Afghani peasants, I’m not sure it matches the spirit. As one correspondent to HotAir asked, who’s going to feed the American-controlled cities if the breadbasket (opium basket, to be more precise) is run by the Taliban? The “Kabul Airlift” just doesn’t have a historic ring to it.