A problem with criticism of the Afghanistan War:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to make of the US intervention in Afghanistan. Some targets of legitimiate criticism are such things like use of UAVs that end up missing targets and killing innocent people, things like eschewing an offer to co-operate with the Islamic Republic of Iran on an issue (which in hindsight takes on an uglier edge than it did at the time) and to a very real extent bailing out of this war to go fight Iraq a second time. Another reality is that he's risking either war or much greater involvement of Pakistan, and if we go to war with Pakistan it magnifies every disastrous consequence of a war with Iran sixfold or more.

One area that I neither understand nor consider legitimate is to attack the current President over how he's handling things like the (complete lack of leadership on the part of) the government run by Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan's been in one or another war since Leonid Brezhnev approved the Soviet Armed Forces' invasion of it. This was a long and bloody conflict, and once the Soviets withdrew there was a civil war that the Taliban proved the most formidable faction in until we came in. Either way, this will be in December 30 years of war in Afghanistan.

Thirty years of war in Germany were sufficient to level the place and critically weaken it. Germany didn't recover for a matter of centuries. 27 years of war in what is now the People's Republic of China arguably contributed a great deal to why the PRC is what is today. Long periods of war tend to malform societies affected by them, and they tend also to encourage corruption, graft, and to weaken over time desire to participate in or to even bother with the infrastructure of society. Afghanistan's already seen the results of one superpower fighting in it, and in October the USA will have spent eight years there. And if we still have significant number of troops there in October 2011 then we will have been at war there as long as the Soviets were.

President Obama is an average leader. He's capable of more than even his supporters sometimes profess that he is, but he's also capable of seeing through at least enough of a military victory to suppress the Taliban. President Obama has inherited a crisis 30 years in the making, and IMHO, while as noted there are many legitimate criticisms of his war effort there to make, I feel that the President should be given some leg room to fight the war as he wishes, by both his supporters and his critics, to shape up what's not working and to improve what is. Because to expect an average leader to improve on a legacy that started with Premier Brezhnev is frankly to expect him to work miracles. The President is just a man, and he does make mistakes.

I suppose if I were to sum this up in a sentence or two it would be that Afghanistan's been in chaos for 30 years. President Obama as an average leader has more promise to work through the legacy of 30 years of war than his predecessors. Yet it is not fair to blame him for all the mistakes dating back to President Carter and the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev.

Comments

[frenchpresser.livejournal.com]

Yes. Except that Osama Bin Laden is an enemy combatant, not a civilian bystander.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Well he's certainly not a bystander, but he didn't qualify for combatant status at the time we invaded. Mass murder outside of an active warzone didn't under the definition of the time make you an enemy combatant. Since al Qaeda engaged in military action once we were there and there's been a lot of legal tapdancing since to try and declare all bad people forever enemy combatants anyway he certainly qualifies now, but ex po facto legal action runs so counter the legal operation of the country and the principles it was founded on by that point we might as well just start making shit up.

Yeah, American military action is meant to theoretically have all these guiding rules that keep the country from being like any randomly evil psychopath like bin Laden is, even if the practice has never been quite there, but those restrictions have been very openly breaking down. If you can justify military action against a civilian criminal by making up a legal status by which military action against him is okay a couple years after, you can justify anything you feel like. The feds fucked up what could have been a totally legitimate and justified action completely and that's having real consequences.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Terrorism is a subset of warfare wherein one side recognizes it'd lose a straight up battle and so limits itself to assymetric means. One can wage a war against terrorists though one either goes for winning hearts and minds (which is a near-impossible sell in a democracy) or playing for keeps (the usual tactics of a despotism).

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Individuals can't wage war, silly, that's the prerogative of states. You can murder a lot of people for some dumb reason, become an international outlaw, and get blown up by a cruise missile when you step outside your safehouse to take a leak, but criminal acts by nonstate actors are no more warfare in a legal sense than your house is the sovereign embassy of Under Lankonia. All that bullshit about declaring war on/being warred on by individuals, ideas, and wildlife you hear all the fucking time now is just meaningless noise that sounds real hot and dramatic on TV.

If the 'side' behind the terror attacks was the state of Afghanistan that would have been one thing, but al Qaeda is a stateless entity that was never under their control. If they had been the war would be a whole lot simpler and over by now; we fought a few like that as one of our first acts as a nation, on the shores of Tripoli.

This isn't just a legalistic distinction. Large-scale conventional warfare against an enemy that is not hierarchical, bound to one location, clearly delineated, and structured more or less as international convention demands a country be does not work. Even CI warfare is a toolkit developed exclusively for longterm colonial domination of regional guerrillas following a specific configuration, it does nothing to stop a global stateless entity that can just send its vulnerable components to go chill out a hundred miles over any border you choose no problem. Whose keeps, exactly, do you think you're playing for? Whose hearts and minds are being won? Al Qaeda doesn't have to stick around and play power-struggle on first-world-nation terms in Karbala, the entire Islamic world is their oyster, they don't need to be based somewhere to hit us there, and we can't invade everywhere trying to keep them out.

[frenchpresser.livejournal.com]

I'll concede on the use of "combatant" then - poor choice of words on my part, but what I simply meant is that he attacked us and was harbored in a country which refused to extradite him.

Though what you said in the last paragraph interests me - what exactly do you mean when it could've been a legitimate and justified action, as opposed to what it is now?

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Well, it'd have been hard to legally justify an outright war there. I should've been clearer, we could certainly have got Osama legally, maybe even ousted the Taliban. The Taliban was not internationally recognized as a legitimate government, after all, under those circumstances it's accepted as completely okay to do stuff like assassinate international criminals taking refuge in the country without having to turn it into some broad nation-building policy. We kill more powerful and better-defended druglords all the time in actual real countries, after all, buying thugs and state compliance with giant piles of money is pretty much the one thing the CIA is good for.

In fact the bulk of the (claimed, anyway) successes we've had with damaging al Qaeda have been through targeted assassinations well outside the designated warzones, primarily (http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/08/al_qaeda_and_taliban.php) via Predators (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5484941.ece) and cruise missiles (http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236&page=2), and before the war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_missile_strikes_on_Afghanistan_and_Sudan_%28August_1998%29) we were dusting (claimed, anyway) training camps the same way. We've always been pretty terrible at foreign intelligence and black bag operations, but at worst an attempt to get Osama and destroy al Qaeda permanently that way could only have had the same success rate as the giant spreading ground occupation has. And it would have set far fewer ugly precedents, being about as legal as killin' folk comes and absolutely business as usual in foreign policy.

Personally I think we could have got him without having to murder anybody at all. All the 'refused to extradite' song and dance sounds like to me is George Bush never set foot in a pawnshop or kebab stand in his life. The Taliban had been putting Osama up on the auction block off an on ever since he first entered the country, right up 'till the end. Those assholes weren't ideologically dedicated to his cause, they wanted to get rid of him before he ever became Public Enemy #1 and the second the first bombs hit they were screaming on the phone to take him, take him; they were just dumb enough to try and bargain hard for a high figure when they should've been pushing him into America's hands and ushering us out the door before we went apeshit and broke everything. We could've got the whole mob for less than the cost of the airplanes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coalition_aircraft_losses_in_Afghanistan) we've spent in this invasion alone, would've been as legal as church on Sunday and spared us most of the past nine years. Paying off guys like the Taliban would have seriously not felt good after 9/11, but it would've been the smart move, and having bin Laden and his goons to put on trial would have done a lot to heal the pain.