General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops is, of course, expected. Military commanders are always going to want more resources to utilize, regardless of whether they know how to use them or not (McChrystal’s insistence on a population-centric strategy in rural Afghanistan seems to make little sense).
As reported in today’s New York Times, President Barack Obama is “exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.” This is the chance for President Obama to decide why we remain in Afghanistan—is it to quell a Pashtun insurgency, to eliminate the chance of a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda, to build a liberal democratic society, or something else entirely.
The problem is that we’ve already been there for eight years. Frankly, those eight years were mismanaged from the very beginning, and largely ever since. Afghans have recognized that very little has been done that has bettered their living conditions under eight years of foreign occupation. Of course, the Taliban were a noxious, barbaric regime—but how much has changed? Villagers are still afraid of cooperation with ISAF because the West has done a spectacularly bad job of eliminating the Taliban—when it had a chance to do so—as an effective social force.
It isn’t possible to make up for lost time in foreign occupations. Those eight years, and all the chances and opportunities we had during them, are gone. We can’t build a liberal, democratic government (let alone society) that respects women’s rights and minority rights, or, for that matter, runs elections fairly, anymore. (The Karzai regime, our great big hope, is clearly a failure in that last regard.) More troops in the interim may help push back against the losses in territory we’ve incurred over the last five years. But it won’t change the reality we face in Afghanistan—we lost over the last eight years.
Of course, if we were willing to raise huge amounts of taxes to pay for the war, triple the military forces we have in Afghanistan today, and curtail all domestic political programs, we might have a shot at stabilizing the country. Then, after stationing hundreds of thousands of troops for at least a few decades in order to oversee the generational changes required to build a liberal society, then we’d have a fighting chance. But we aren’t willing to do so, and shouldn’t be, either.
