What Are We Waiting For?
Let's get this ground war off the ground.
opinionjournal.com
The last time the U.S. fought with one hand idle, it lost. That was in Vietnam.
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Tuesday, October 30, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
I return this week to the ground war in Afghanistan. But this time I want to ask blunt questions: When will it begin in earnest? And what are we waiting for?
The American military campaign appears as if it is stalling at present. No, the U.S. is not losing the war, as has been suggested by Frank Rich on the op-ed page of the New York Times and, in her own ditzy way, by Maureen Dowd on the same page. What the U.S. isn't doing is winning it as expeditiously as we had hoped, or even as fleetly as we were told we would, in the early days of the military campaign, by our own talking heads.
What worries me about the Afghan war isn't how long it is taking, but the apparent absence, first, of clearly defined political objectives, and second, of any flexibility in our military strategy. Our campaign is sputtering for lack of imagination.
The second point first. The obsessive focus on air strikes is born in part of a syndrome that dictates that if you bristle with expensive technology, you will, inevitably, come to be overreliant on it. The inflexibility not only is slowing us down but, perversely, is hardening the resolve of those we're fighting against. Equally perversely, it appears not to be helping the Northern Alliance--our allies--in their bid to oust the Taliban from ever-increasing swaths of the Afghan countryside. If anything, the hardened resolve of the Taliban has put into perspective the tenuous position of the Northern Alliance, which is ill-armed and poorly led, its morale now sagging as early visions of hefty American assistance slowly recede.
Our reluctance to commit troops to ground combat has not only handicapped the Northern Alliance, it has also fed a belief among our enemies that the U.S.--the West--does not have the appetite for a ground war. In part, they may be right; a decade or more of the Powell doctrine has entrenched such a disinclination for anything but long-range warfare that each insertion of troops--actual troops!--into theaters of combat requires overcoming the belief that this would constitute strategic blasphemy.
Which brings me to the question of political objectives. At the very least, our objective must be to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Even those who abhor "nation building"--how I hate that phrase!--have accepted this as a bare minimum, while parting company with the "nation builders" over what happens after the Taliban are removed. And for those, like me, who would expect the U.S. to play a role in the reconstruction of Afghan civil society, American troops must rapidly become active, visible participants in the capture or liquidation of the Taliban leadership.
This would be of incalculable political value in a post-Taliban order, as it would enable Washington to mediate between factions in a most effective way. Let us not denigrate such an exercise, or say that it is not our business. What happens in Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban is not of import only to Afghans. In making Afghanistan safe, we secure it not just for the Afghan people, but also for ourselves. We have, here, an intimate national security interest in "nation building." This isn't, and won't ever be, some detached act of charity, or imperialism, or neocolonialism. We're doing this for ourselves, so let's go in with gusto.
Our ability to rebuild Afghanistan--or, if you prefer, to render it as safe and unthreatening as possible for the future--depends on a swift resort to ground troops. But in showing undue deference to the Pakistanis, who have no interest in ridding the world of the scourge of terrorism, only a desire to ensure that there is a pro-Pakistan regime in Kabul, the U.S. is tying one hand behind its back. The last time the U.S. fought with one hand idle, it lost. That was in Vietnam. I'm not suggesting for a moment that the U.S. will lose here. But we won't win in the way that we want to, and need to, and have to in order to vanquish for good the evil of Islamist terror.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays. |
