Reply #31: Why would we try?

[jeff47]

"I have yet to see one democrat who supports this escalation actually make the case for the policy."

Well, that's mostly 'cause trying to rationally explain support for Obama's escalation in Afghanistan results in getting 'screamed' at. Apparently, we're terrible warmongers who hate the troops and just want people to die and secretly love the neocons and all sorts of other invective.

But here goes anyway.

For the first 7-1/2 years of the war in Afghanistan, we used the Donald Rumsfeld & Co. strategy. We bombed the shit out of people, and then sat there waiting for them to run into our open arms to thank us for bombing them. Stunned that we weren't greeted at liberators, we bombed the shit out of more people.

The folks who decided on that terrible strategy are gone. The new strategy involves what we should have done back in 2002: nation building. The typical build roads, schools, wells, etc. Which is why we need more troops there. Under the Rumsfeldian strategy, you don't have to bother guarding anything. You blow shit up and leave. With the new strategy and expansion of our nation building efforts over the next year, we have to guard the folks doing the construction.

There's some stories coming out of Afghanistan that indicates the new strategy may be having positive results. However, they're anecdotal at this point. It's going to be a while until the strategy has been in effect long enough for anecdotes to grow into data.

The speech itself was terrible. It was rambling, and lacked any coherent logic. If I was only evaluating Obama's plan from the basis of the speech, I'd say it was a bad plan. Obama needed to do a lot more to explain why his plan has a chance to succeed, and why this is different from past wars, such as Vietnam (short reason-the Vietnamese wanted communism. The Afghanis are tired of people blowing their shit up).

And before any neocon slurs fly, let me be clear that the Iraq war was the biggest foreign policy disaster in US history. And despite the conventional wisdom cheerleaders, the surge failed. It provided stability, which was the simpler of its 2 goals. The other goal was to use the stability to produce reconciliation, which has not happened. I am glad we're now pretty much confined to our bases there and are leaving as quickly as is prudent. And I feel sorry for the Iraqis who will have to live through the upcoming civil war.

When deciding what to do in Afghanistan, we've got to look at the possible outcomes. If we withdraw now, all possible outcomes are bad for us (They're worse for the Afghanis, but that's frankly their problem). If we continue nation building for a while, we might have a relatively good outcome, or we might have a bad outcome. Personally, I think we'll end up with a relatively decent non-Karzai/non-Taliban government ("Decent" meaning better from our perspective than many of the other governments in the region).

Finally, Obama's plan has a relatively short window. Escalations in Iraq (and Vietnam) were announced with no plan to leave. With this plan, if it turns out that those positive anecdotes are not growing into positive data, we're already working on our departure.

To sum up: The people running our war now actually possess a clue, and their plan includes what to do in case of failure.

I now look forward to the demands that I go over there and fight in the place of our soldiers, that my opinion would be different if it was my son/daughter over there, and that I'm really some sort of RW mole.