Fight to win or get out of Afghanistan

With great fanfare, President Obama is looking for a strategy for U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. The implication is that the United States doesn’t have a strategy now, or that, whatever the strategy is, it isn’t working.

Meanwhile, more aggressive U.S. military operations in Afghanistan have caused a sharp increase in casualties among American troops, and the top general on the scene is reported to have asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to be sent.

Pacifying Afghanistan would require those additional soldiers and many more, plus an oppressive occupation lasting generations to change the country’s backward culture, an occupation that would only intensify resistance.

So the strategic question about Afghanistan isn’t how many more soldiers to send but rather, simply: What’s the point?

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Yes, some of the plotters of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States found refuge in Afghanistan, if Afghanistan can be considered a refuge. But those attacks were successful not because of any resources drawn from Afghanistan itself but because of the failure of U.S. border and airport security. Border security remains a failure and the country is still full of illegal aliens.

And yes, a native regime in Afghanistan, replacing the regime sustained by the United States, could destabilize its neighbors, including Pakistan, a nuclear power. But Pakistan is already unstable, and a native regime in Afghanistan just as likely might want to behave itself to prevent more foreign intervention.

In any case, the public does not support the war in Afghanistan because it does not see that the United States is much threatened from that country, and there is neither the public support nor the resources necessary for winning the war there. That makes the whole expedition a disgrace, the betrayal of the soldiers sent to fight what is not meant to be won or held.

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In regard to Afghanistan, Obama may fear being perceived as weak — just as Lyndon Johnson feared being perceived as weak in regard to his own mistaken war, the war in Vietnam. So Johnson chose to act tough and escalated U.S. intervention and succeeded only in destroying a pitiful country, dividing and bankrupting his own, and ruining himself politically. That is what awaits Obama in Afghanistan, except that the United States is already bankrupt and living on the credit of increasingly testy foreigners.

If Obama wants a strategy, let the United States admit mistakes, not perpetuate them and make them self-justifying, and let it go to war only when it is ready to commit its every resource to a clearly defined victory, and only with a declaration of war that makes the whole of the people’s representatives accountable.

Since the United States is not prepared to win in Afghanistan and since winning is plainly not worth the cost, we should get out.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.