Blogs For Victory

And as a former Marine, he’s worth listening to – from the Kansas City Star:

…A former Marine and former assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, West has little use for the strategy as applied in Afghanistan or for its key proponents: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus. In citing the strategy’s limitations, West offers vivid accounts of the war from ground level and an unsparing analysis of the chances for U.S. success.

While prosecuting this 10-year conflict, West argues, the U.S. has created a culture of dependency and entitlement among the Afghan civilians as the risk-averse Afghan military prefers to let the U.S. Marines and soldiers do the fighting – and the dying. It doesn’t help, West writes, when Gates gives yet another speech that seems to put a higher priority on “nation-building” than in confronting the enemy. Of one Gates speech, West says: “That was obfuscation, not guidance. No commander can carry out a mission that the secretary of defense cannot define.”

West is not opposed to counterinsurgency in all places, at all times. In fact, his earlier book, “The Village,” about Marines living with and fighting alongside Vietnamese villagers, is one of the seminal texts of counterinsurgency: It’s required reading for Marines bound for Afghanistan. But as West sees it, in Afghanistan, politicians and “political generals” have mated counterinsurgency with nation-building, with disastrous results…

While not the bloodiest type of fighting one can engage in, counter-insurgency is certainly the most morally difficult. It requires not just high courage and foresight, but also patience and a determination to stick it out over a very long term. Successful counter-insurgency campaigns always take years. Given this, I won’t subscribe to West’s apparent conviction that we’re not doing it right in Afghanistan – while West certainly knows his business, he is not placed where he can render absolute judgment on the effort. Only the commanders in the field can do that, and only absolute success or failure will demonstrate the wisdom or folly of their strategy.

That said, I am worried that the Obama Administration has set up a situation in which victory is impossible – much as Johnson did in Vietnam. Never fall for the idiocy of an unwinnable war – anyone who says a war is unwinnable is as much an idiot as someone who says a war can’t be lost. All wars are winnable and losable – whether you win or lose depends no your strength, your courage and your intellectual capacity. Our soldiers are certainly strong enough to win; and of courage there is no lack – but I do wonder if at the top of the leadership there is the intellectual capacity necessary.

Celerity of movement and suppleness in planning are the pre-requisites for any successful military strategy. You have to be able to move very fast and be able to swiftly adapt to fluid conditions. All too often in military campaigns the leaders commit the cardinal sin – “forming a picture”; that is, figuring the enemy will do a particular thing when he may, in fact, do something very much different. I am concerned that we got ourselves a plan in Afghanistan and we’re going to carry it out on a time line – looking to meet a mythical end date set by the political leadership – regardless of actual conditions on the ground. But the plan, even if was great when first implemented, is almost certainly to need major adjustments as time goes on – as the enemy reacts to our moves and tries to foil our plan with plans of his own.

I have absolute faith in the troops, and I hope the leadership – especially on the political side – is worthy of the sacrifices of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. While Afghanistan may be off our political radar, an American defeat in that country would be devastating to our position around the world. We simply must win, regardless of cost or how long it takes. But we can’t just keep banging away at it – we need to have a vision for victory and then allow the troops the resources and flexibility necessary to achieve it. Does Obama’s Administration provide that? Only time will tell.