Another voice for caution on the right

Neo-Conning Us Again

A remarkably frank and realistic assessment of the war in Afghanistan.

The right war in the right place?

Pshaw.

Jed Babbin rejects neocon moonshine in favor of a much more pessimistic view of Islamism, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.

But he seems to think the invasion made sense as a punitive expedition – though I may be misreading him.

As for me, I thought the aerial attack in the earliest days that killed many al-Qaeda and destroyed their camps as well as many Taliban and their camps made sense as a purely punitive move.

But everything after that was an advance straight into an impossible quagmire.

Yes, that means even the extra time and effort spent finding and killing OBL, though emotionally satisfying and usefully exemplary, was more than the thing was worth and perhaps hit the hornets’ nests too many times.

JB writes,

Afghanistan is much the same now as it was when the British were driven out after their defeat in 1842, as it was when the Soviets were driven out in 1989.

And it will be much the same, and probably worse, after we leave . . . . 

We can stay in Afghanistan for another year or another century. 

But nothing in the nation-building-cum-counterinsurgency strategy will change the facts that dominate Afghanistan and its neighbors Pakistan and Iran. 

And no matter how long we stay, no matter how many American lives are sacrificed while they tinker with the flavor of their secret sauce for counterinsurgency, it will end as it is ending now, in failure.

Obama is right in pulling our forces out of Afghanistan. 

The slow pace of withdrawal is timed politically, to delay the public consequences beyond 2016, but in that calculation he may not succeed. 

We have accomplished nothing that will last much past our withdrawal, whether it comes next year or some time later. 

The only question is what we do afterward?

One hopes, but I am not certain, that JB realizes a global war to destroy Islamism, Muslim terrorism, Jihad, or even only al-Qaeda once and for all is as doomed to fail as any war to destroy them once and for all in Afghanistan.

One hopes, too, that president Obama understands not only that same point about Afghanistan but also the broader one.

Probably, US anti-Jihad activities, though in lesser measure and with less grandiose ambitions, should continue.

Probably, the legal state of war should continue, too, to enable more effective measures with less awkwardness about the legalities and as a deterrent.

Perhaps all of this will have to go on, at varying levels of intensity, for the foreseeable future.

But all of that, carried out at a sensible level, is compatible with a global decline in US meddling and a US withdrawal of forces from everywhere to Hawaii and the Western Hemisphere, north of the equator.

And it is compatible with gradually ending US aid to Israel, in particular, of all kinds, including military.

After all, once upon a time, though it seemed impossible, the US managed to drop Taiwan (“Nationalist China”) when our foreign policy establishment decided not to let our previously sacred relationship with them ruin a thaw between us and (“red”) China.

The country did not shed a tear or even bat an eye.

It will turn out to be just as possible to drop Israel once our ruling class and foreign policy establishment decide on it.

They can turn us around 180 degrees on a dime with shocking ease.

If you think Orwell was only writing about Russian Communism, English Socialism, or some negative Utopia nothing like us you are badly mistaken.

“Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”

You bet.