Book of Lamentations
Andrew Sullivan kindly links to a response to my post from a couple of days ago about Afghanistan.
As Danny Kaye said to Angela Lansbury in “The Court Jester”: with your permission, I’d like to go ‘round again.
I don’t know that my original post was intended to lament that there was _nothing_we could have done better in Afghanistan, but I suppose I was lamenting the fact that actually achieving our war aims looks likely to have been very hard no matter what we did.
As I recall, Joe Biden was one of the more prominent Democratic critics of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war in Afghanistan from fairly early on, and at one point he cornered Condoleeza Rice to accuse her of basically letting Afghanistan go back to rampant warlordism. “But that’s what the country’s always been like” she said, or something to that effect. Which is basically right. Afghanistan has never had a strong central authority. So saying that, in retrospect, we should have made nation-building our principal war aim doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Yes, succeeding at nation-building would have been a good way to keep the Taliban from coming back to power. But how often have we pulled that trick off? In places like Afghanistan? How often has anyone?
The Bush Administration policy in Afghanistan was anything but “banging away as hard as you can” – that was the policy in Iraq to some extent, but quite the opposite of our approach in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Bush Administration was, with some sense, trying to avoid having to eat soup with a knife, precisely by empowering the kinds of unsavory local actors who were most likely to be able to fend off the Taliban, provided they were willing to do so. And we were willing to pay to make them willing.
A nation-building approach, by contrast, would have required confronting returning warlordism – making more enemies, creating more potential allies for the Taliban when and if they had the opportunity to regroup. Which is some of what we’re seeing now.
So why, precisely, should we have preferred a COIN approach from the beginning? Granted that a sensibly designed counterinsurgency plan is far preferable to “banging away as hard as you can”, given the nonetheless notably poor track record of even well-designed counternisurgency plans, why should we have defined our war aims from the beginning as requiring nation-building in Afghanistan?
Let me resort again to a hypothetical. Suppose we’d caught bin Laden, Zawahiri and Omar at Tora Bora. Decapitated al Qaeda and the Taliban. Then suppose we installed Karzai, spent a few months mopping up, and gave a stern warning to Pakistan that if they helped an al Qaeda ally come back to power in Afghanistan there would be extraordinarily serious consequences. Afghanistan would have reverted to being a failed state. But our minimal war aims would have been achieved. And why would nation-building in Afghanistan have been a key war aim, in that case?
I think the case for nation-building in Afghanistan in this hypothetical scenario would resemble a little too closely for comfort our war aims in Iraq: “draining the swamp,” “changing the culture,” and so forth. It was not enough to defeat the individual terrorists who planned the attacks; it was necessary to change the world so that such attacks could not plausibly happen again. That’s a laudable aim, but its laudability neither proves that nation-building in Afghanistan was the way to achieve it, nor that it was achievable by any practical means.
The main reason we wouldn’t have simply packed up and left after (hypothetically) taking Osama bin Laden’s scalp is not that nation-building in Afghanistan was vital to defeating al Qaeda or ending the threat of terrorism, but that, our vulnerability have been demonstrated so dramatically, our response had to be grander than that. These guys had punched a hole in the greatest city in the world, and bombed the command center for our military decisionmaking. Whether a huge military response had any plausible war aims at all, we had to have one, somewhere.
That’s why I describe the situation as a tragedy. Prudence is usually our watchword. An army is a blunt instrument; war can be ruinously expensive and leads to unpredictable consequences. But in the aftermath of 9-11, that was not adequate. But in the aftermath of 9-11, prudence really wasn’t the watchword – and couldn’t have been. We were obliged to define our aims maximally, not minimally. Which is to say: we were obliged to court failure. Anything less would have been inadequate.
Counter-factual:
On 9/14/01 the US announces that on 9/17/01 Riyadh will be destroyed in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks.
On 9/17/01 SAC turns Riyadh into a sheet of glass.
Discus.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 11, 04:22 PM · #
Yeah, my buddy and I talked like that back then as well. That’s pretty much how everybody felt in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. I still feel that way some days. You think you can pull off a stunt like this? You have no idea who you’re messing with. You think your god will protect you if we come for vengeance? Watch while we make Mecca uninhabitable for a century – see how you like it when 100 years from now there are no living hadji anymore, and nowhere to make a pilgrimage to even if one were so inclined.
That’s exactly why I say prudence couldn’t be our watchword: we couldn’t simply say, “you know, this was a massive screw-up on our part that this ever happened at all. With a few simple tweaks of airline security, visa rules, and lines of communication between the intelligence community and law enforcement, and between ourselves and intelligence agencies in Russia, France, Iran, etc., we could prevent any similar recurrence. Let’s focus on wiping out this one terrorist group, lean hard on Pakistan, etc.” – the minimalist, targeted, prudential response. You just couldn’t do that even if you could prove it would work, and that a more substantial response was going to backfire. It would just have been totally inadequate, and perceived as such by everyone, domestically but also internationally.
— Noah Millman · Sep 11, 04:38 PM · #
Noah,
I think you’ve outlined one case, maybe the best of all weak cases, for invading Iraq. Only doing too much is enough, even when too much is way too much.
— Matt Frost · Sep 11, 04:45 PM · #
Matt: I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps I made the case why, practically speaking, we were pretty inevitably going to do something dumb and overreaching. Didn’t have to be invading Iraq. We could have followed Doug Feith’s advice and bombed Paraguay.
— Noah Millman · Sep 11, 04:47 PM · #
“You just couldn’t do that even if you could prove it would work, and that a more substantial response was going to backfire.”
Given what our actual response was, (how many have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 8 years?) I would (half) argue that B-52 as Murano artisan would have been a “minimalist, targeted, prudential response.”
— Tony Comstock · Sep 11, 04:50 PM · #
Right. I think I’m too ambiguous about “inevitability” versus “advisability” in my comment above.
Tragic situations end poorly, even for the prudent. That’s not a license for imprudence.
— Matt Frost · Sep 11, 04:58 PM · #
“Tragic situations end poorly, even for the prudent. That’s not a license for imprudence.”
I don’t think Noah is arguing for license. He might be making a case for acceptance, or (less ambitiously,) understanding.
I still think going “Hamas Rules” on Riyadh would have had a lower body count, at least in the middle term. And if there’s some special abhorrence of nukes, we could have accomplished the same result with high explosives. Remember this picture?
— Tony Comstock · Sep 11, 05:19 PM · #
Invasion of Afghanistan: inevitable after 9/11. I don’t think that, realistically, we could have done anything else.
The idea that ‘it was necessary to change the world so that such attacks could not plausibly happen again’: Dumb. Crazy. It’s a ‘laudable aim’ only if you have an extremely hubristic view of American power and naive ideas about human nature and unintended consequences.
The idea that, in addition to invading Afghanistan, Iraq (or something like it was inevitable), even if we had caught bin Laden, et al. at Tora Bora: Our leaders had a choice whether or not to invade Iraq. They chose to spend months talking up the case for war and cherry-picking evidence for WMDs. A major motivation for invading Iraq was the same sort of ‘change the world’ craziness mentioned earlier.
As for wanting to bomb Mecca or Riyadh in response to 9/11: Congratulations — now you know how a terrorist thinks and feels.
— Ratufa · Sep 11, 05:53 PM · #
It’s Hama rules, after the massacre in the Syrian city of that name, not Hamas after the Palestinean terrorist organization.
Anyway, what would the price of oil have been in the aftermath of a bombing of Riyadh (not to mention Mecca)? If the US wanted to send a message, it would probably have been better to lever Kabul. William S. Lind has been arguing that that would have been the right response for a long time.
Regardless, the point would have been to find some response that answered to Americans’ legitimate desire for revenge while not bogging America down in a quagmire. I would think a devestating bombing campaign, as well as a hunt for bin Laden by special forces, would have accomplished that. I don’t see why a tragic scenario was inevitable. It could have been avoided if the US, while supporting the Northern alliance and decimating the Taliban from the air, made crystal clear that it would not try to run Afghanistan, and would take no responsibility for its future. One can, of course, argue that that would have been politically impossible, but it’s difficult to imagine a president with a wider latitude than Bush in September and October 2001.
— Magnus · Sep 11, 05:55 PM · #
“As for wanting to bomb Mecca or Riyadh in response to 9/11: Congratulations — now you know how a terrorist thinks and feels.”
Genius fucking insight into the working of my mind, Ratufa. I guess I can skip my couch session this week. You could charge for this shit. Thanks. Seriously.
And yeah, Hama, not Hamas, like level, not lever Kabul. I’m pretty clear on the takeaway of a 20mt airburst over Riyahd. Now please explain to me what message would have been sent to whom by “levering” Kabul, cause I’m not seeing it.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 11, 06:09 PM · #
Hey, sorry man – I was not trying to put you down for the spelling part (God, and now the American Scene too, knows I can’t write a paragraph without at least two spelling errors), I was just pointing out the origin of the phrase (Martin van Creveld’s if I remember correctly), since pulling Hamas into might be confusing to someone who didn’t know the phrase. So, my apologies if I seemed rude.
Anyway, levelling (or levering) Kabul would have sent a message saying “if you f*** with the US, this is what you get”. A levelling of Riyadh would probably have sent the same message, but would have been seen as illegitimate by most of the world, given that the government in Saudi Arabia had nothing (at least directly) to do with 9/11 and has indeed been allied with the US since at least 1990.
— Magnus · Sep 11, 06:29 PM · #
My apologies for being testy.
By my reckoning, doing Kabul would have been kicking the punk’s dog instead of punching the punk in the face.
Anyway, if you want to talk about “inevitability” our fate was sealed when Ronnie took the solar panels off the roof of the Whitehouse. Yeah, felt good at the time, but stupid in the long run.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 11, 06:38 PM · #
The problem is that there really aren’t a lot of satisfying targets in Afghanistan. Our desire for revenge wasn’t going to be satisfied by leveling a 3rd world backwater made of crumbling concrete and adobe. I don’t think Americans would have been content to exchange a grubby city like Kabul for the twin towers. At the end of World War II, at least one could take some solace that Dresden, Berlin and Nagasaki made up for Pearl Harbor and the London Blitz.
— BrianF · Sep 11, 06:50 PM · #
It was rather clever of Bush and co. to start 2 wars without enough troops for either, dont you think?And without a draft the americam public could buy their made in china flag pins and never miss an episode of american Idol while our troops were put through the grinder.
You think Bush and co really didnt know afganistan is where empires go to die?
— Jean Power · Sep 12, 05:33 PM · #
Under your pardon. You must note beside
That we have tried the utmost of our friends,
Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe:
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. — Brutus, Julius Caesar
— Bo · Sep 13, 04:15 AM · #