Eight years.
Many nations celebrate their defeats. The heroic but doomed resistance, the noble stand, the day the walls were breached.
Not the US. For a century it was the great distinction of the South that it was the only part of America to lose a war, and long after the rest of the nation had forgotten about it, the Confederacy was was its legend.
For the rest of the nation, wars were won and forgotten. The Homestead Act took place in 1864; the North didn’t even wait for the end of fighting. We mobilized the nation for the tail end of World War I and then demobilized so quickly we forgot to approve the League of Nations. We fought total war against the Germany and Japan for four years, wrapping it up with a crushing drive across Europe and atomic bombing of Japan; we were in such a rush to get back to business that it wasn’t worth punishing Hirohito, and simply let things drift until fighting in Korea got our attention.
Vietnam broke the mold. We not only didn’t win, we didn’t understand who we were fighting or why. We managed to spend billions of dollars, and more than fifty thousand lives, on a fight that even if we had won would have done us no good; as Ho Chi Minh wrote Lyndon Johnson in February 1967 (when most of those lives could have been spared):
Viet-Nam is situated thousands of miles from the United States. The Vietnamese people have never done any harm to the United States.
The wounds from Vietnam persisted for the better part of twenty years, until the combination of the Gulf War and the ascension to power of the Baby Boomers who fought the war signaled that it was safe to forget about the conflict. We forgot so completely that by the time of the 2004 Presidential election, a man who won a medal for combat on the Mekong somewhere within five hundred yards of the Cambodian border was successfully accused of cowardice by a fraternity brother of his who intermittently defended Texas from Mexican aerial attack.
The through-the-looking glass approach to reality has defined our foreign policy for the past eight years. September 11, 2001 was the greatest military defeat ever suffered by the United States. The British burning Washington, Chancellorsville, Pearl Harbor, Bataan/Corregedor…none were even on the same order of magnitude.
At 7:30am on September 11, 2001, the nineteen hijackers could have been defeated by a few local cops. Within two hours, they had killed three thousand Americans, and destroyed two of the nation’s largest buildings and hit its military headquarters. The failures along the chain of command were legion. To take only the three most glaring:
- By 8:20 air traffic control knew that flight 11 had been hijacked, yet by 8:46, when flight 11 hit the Trade Center, the F-15s from Falmouth still had not reached New York, despite being able to cover the distance in 10-12 minutes.
- Between 8:46am and 9:03 am, even though it should now be clear that this is not a traditional hijacking where the hijackers land and issue demands, there is no thought of either stationing the fighter planes over major cities or chasing down the planes that have turned off their IFF indicators;
- Forty five minutes after the initial impact with the World Trade Center, thirty minutes after the President was told of the impacts and continued reading The Pet Goat, the military is still so unprepared that not only has it not intercepted every missing plane, one of the missing planes actually manages to fly into the Pentagon.
The trillions of dollars spent on defense in our nation’s history, and we couldn’t stop four civilian aircraft with twenty to seventy minutes’ notice. How much warning were we expecting from the Soviets?
Our failure was so great that we decided not to talk about it. When the US fleet was caught unaware at Pearl Harbor, Husband Kimmel, then commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, was demoted within a week and change (MacArthur, whose failure in the Philippines the next day was worse for the advance warning, was spared to avoid admitting our entire military was incompetent). At least it made a pretense of command responsibility. That’s actually a minor sanction; in 1757, Admiral Byng was hanged from the Monarch in Portsmouth Harbor by the British navy for his failure at the Battle of Minorca.
Nothing of the sort happened after 9/11. Ralph Eberhart, commander of NORAD, was not hanged, or demoted, or given a sternly worded letter; indeed, he continued in his post for three more years. The control teams at Otis Air Force Base and the pilots involved were never punished; nor, for that matter, were any of the other air force bases that failed to make even that ineffectual response.
The lack of accountability bled into our combat afterwards. We very quickly ascertained that the attacks were ordered by Al Qaeda operating out of Afghanistan. Presumably if the Red Army had rolled across the Fulda Gap, we would have flown B-52s nonstop carpet-bombing everything in the Warsaw Pact while figuring out what to do on the ground. We would have recreated Dresden every night. But during the month of air-only offensive, we never approached the total war that, say, we visited upon Japan for attacking us. We bombed with limited, precision weapons, and left it at that.
Then, instead of massive military deployment of US soldiers with orders to capture Osama regardless the cost, we left the attack on Tora Bora to the Northern Alliance. For years the Northern Alliance had been hemmed into a few northern valleys, steadily losing ground to the Taliban, watching as the US refused to intervene on their behalf. Now, when it was convenient for the US, when Kabul had fallen and victory was theirs, they were supposed to charge the guns of Al Qaeda and die capturing someone who attacked thousands of miles away, something evidently so unimportant to the US that we would not risk our own men?
Osama is still on the loose. The failure in Afghanistan, coupled with Dubya and his advisers’ designs on the Middle East, led us to the sands; Dubya proved himself sufficiently stupid that even after witnessing General Franks’ incompetent performance in Afghanistan (among other failings, he decided to command from Tampa and did not even bother to adjust his time zone), he let him have another go at screwing up an invasion. An opportunity General Franks took full advantage.
So now we find ourselves stuck occupying two countries we have no interest in occupying. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding Iraq, money that could be well used at home, for seemingly no better reason than that we don’t want to see the country carved into thirds – even though the last time we fought a war in an ethnically divided country, the former Yugoslavia, it was precisely to break it up. There, the answer is simple: leave. Leave immediately. Apres nous le deluge.
In Afghanistan the situation is far more complicated. We have even less incentive in occupying the place; it has no oil or other interesting resource, is a fragmented, tribal society we will never understand, would like to be ruled by madmen, and has terrain that does not suit our military. It is next to Pakistan, which has all of Afghanistan’s problems and a fragile hold on its nuclear weapons. In fact, our continued need for some level of goodwill in Pakistan is what prevents us from a far more natural alliance with India, a large democracy run by a few families with great name recognition and the national origin of all of our H1B visa holders.
Problem is, since we so terribly mishandled the invasion and failed to capture the Al Qaeda leadership, how exactly do we leave? The Romans were hardly prepared to give up their quest to capture Hannibal, even though the map two centuries before Christ had many more blank spaces. At this point, the weight of the evidence seems to be that Osama is somewhere in Pakistan. I don’t know why he would still be in the hills of the tribal regions, vulnerable to a lucky Predator, when in eight years he could easily have moved into a modest house in Karachi with a couple of servants and keep the blinds drawn, but let’s assume it’s true. Absent a betrayal, which is ever less likely as the number of people who know his whereabouts is winnowed by death, the only way to capture him would be to establish a position to the east of him and drive him toward the Kush.
Unfortunately, if we were to land enough men in Pakistan to make that strategy viable, we would likely get a revolution within Pakistan as the military faced immense pressure to take action against a foreign army’s prolonged presence on its soil. That is hardly a great trade.
What we should be doing as quickly as possible is disengaging from the general Afghan population; in essence, we are doing in Iraq what we should be doing in Afghanistan. We have no interest in Afghanistan beyond the fact that it is/was Al Qaeda’s base; if Al Qaeda moved to Somalia or Congo, we would follow and leave Afghanistan. There is not only no reason to pursue “reconstruction” or “development” of Afghanistan, it is counterproductive; it exposes American soldiers and costs money. Rather than adopting a defensive posture of trying to police or occupy the country – in which case the Taliban and Al Qaeda can attack in the time, place, and manner of their choosing – we should withdraw to more defensible bases and from their lash out on our schedule.
The broader issue with our current military fiascoes is that conducting diplomacy through the barrel of a rifle is a prime example of playing to our weakness. We have a few major challenges with protracted conflicts:
- We value our soldiers. Not as much as we value our military contractors, which explains why we were working on missile defense instead of uparmored Humvees when men were dying of IEDs, but we are genuinely bothered by casualties. Since we do not want to take casualties, we spend a lot of money outfitting each soldier (both in terms of gear and the ratio of support to combat arms). It is not a good recipe for a protracted occupation.
- Our soldiers are dumber than their adversaries. If you are a brilliant and ambitious Afghan, you have been fighting since you could lift a rifle. If you are a brilliant American, you work for a global macro fund. Our guys carrying rifles are the guys who didn’t have those opportunities. Furthermore, if you are an unintelligent Afghan who is prone to getting into combat, you are dead; war has raged for a generation. Our soldiers are in combat for comparatively short periods of time, generally too short for serious learning, and before Dubya’s bout of invasions, it was possible to go a career between shots fired in anger; Colin Powell was a captain in Vietnam and the head of the joint chiefs the next time there was fighting. It is very difficult for us to evaluate who is a genuinely good commander.
- We are less ruthless. We consistently refuse to bring down the full weight of our arsenal upon our adversaries. Despite accounting for roughly forty percent of global defense spending, we struggle to close the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
- We have short attention spans. We are a selfish people, and so long as we have a volunteer army that insulates the bulk of the population – and an even larger majority of the decision-making population – from the consequences of war, we will forget about any situation that becomes static.
Knowing this about ourselves, we should be obsessed with avoiding military conflict until we can find the rare instance where we can overcome our difficulties. The war that is so essential to us that we are willing to take casualties in its name, the war that we must fight so badly that we will accept no limits on our actions and will deploy the tools we understand to annihilate our enemies. If we are not in this total war, then we should stay home and husband our resources. In fact, let the world know this. We have no desire to occupy foreign lands, holy or not; we do not want to be a colonial power. Let the world know that we will not interfere in its various conflicts as long as those conflicts do not involve us, but if attacked we will respond ferociously.
Eight years is long enough for a flawed approach. We do our dead no favors by continuing the mistakes that led to their deaths. We need a smarter military – better able to act against terrorists, much quicker decision circle – and much smarter deployment of that military. Fight only when absolutely necessary, but in those cases, fight to win, not draw.
“Yes, yes,” answered Prince Andrew absently. “One thing I would do if I had the power,” he began again, “I would not take prisoners. Why take prisoners? It’s chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals.
