Wrong strategies lengthen wars

Three years and nine months: That's how long it took the United States and its allies to defeat the combined forces of Japan, Germany and Italy. That defeat was total and without doubt. Entire nations were laid waste. Military and civilian leaders were killed or brought to trial. Allied forces occupied the defeated countries and replaced the native leadership.

Ten years and counting: That's how long the Afghanistan war has raged. Eight years and counting: That's how long U.S. troops have been dying in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

What changed in 60 years to make our 21st century wars interminable, despite the enemy being a weak shadow of the power of Japan, Germany and Italy? The United States is fighting differently in Iraq and Afghanistan than it did in the 1940s. It's a different kind of war, an insurgency, and insurgencies are harder to suppress than massive armies and navies. It's a strategy that requires dividing the population between combatants and civilians — a distinction only perfunctorily attempted in World War II. In Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and Marines are not just "killing the bad guys," they are trying to build governmental and cultural institutions that will lead to democratic reforms and self-rule.

Imagine what World War II would have been like if the Allies had fought Japan, Germany and Italy the way they have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. GIs would have worked with the Japanese population to engender democratic institutions. American money would have poured into Germany to support political parties to oppose the National Socialists. Italian-speaking Americans would have slipped into Italy to gather intelligence and to build political opposition to Mussolini's Fascists. There would have been no firebombing of Cologne, no Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

And the grandsons of those "Greatest Generation" soldiers would still be fighting and dying in Europe and the Pacific.

This comparison is not meant to suggest that the United States should lay waste to Iraq the way it did to the Ruhr Valley or that it unleash nuclear devastation in Afghanistan as it did in Japan. My suggestion is that military forces are not designed for "nation building," and wars are not meant to alter institutions or to initiate grassroots democracy. War is meant to demolish institutions, destroy power and subjugate a population. Attempting to use military power to transition a Medieval tribal culture into a 21st century liberal democracy is like trying to use a howitzer to drive a nail.

After a decade of war and the loss of thousands of lives, Iraq is still a corrupt, totalitarian, brutal, sectarian, divided country little changed since the first millennium, and Afghanistan is still a corrupt, totalitarian, brutal, class-based, misogynist culture that wants nothing to do with the 18th century, much less the 21st.

Nation building, counter-insurgency and all the other tactics are failures.

A religion to kill for?

Nothing proves the moral and strategic bankruptcy of the Afghan insurgency like the murder of 10 medical aid workers last week in a remote part of Afghanistan. The Taliban bragged that its soldiers had killed the aid workers, whom the Taliban described as spies and proselytizers. The group of seven American medical professionals, one Briton and two Afghan interpreters had a long history of providing aid and relief to the neediest in Afghanistan. One leader of the medical team, Tom Little, an optometrist, had been providing free medical care to Afghans for more than 30 years, through all the turmoil of the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war.

The entire medical team was executed by gunmen who captured them after they had spent weeks providing desperately needed care in a tiny, remote village. One can only explain these murders as the acts of paranoid people who distrust and hate everyone unlike themselves, no matter how kind, helpful and loving the strangers might be. The many kindnesses and sacrifices of these strangers were rewarded with bullets, unquestioning and undistinguishing. It's little wonder that Americans are questioning the wisdom of a war amid a population so filled with irrational hatred.

Even if, as the Taliban claimed, the medical missionaries were preaching Christianity — a claim firmly denied by all associated with the mission and by friends and relatives of the victims — what does that say about the state of Islam? If Islam cannot survive a test of allegiances when alternative faiths are explained and can only be maintained by the threat of execution for apostates, what real chance does it have? The murderous Taliban, claiming to be defenders of Islam, are actually proclaiming the weakness of their faith. A religion that cannot be contested, doubted or questioned cannot survive in a modern world of ideas and intellectual rigor.

Long flight for a short stay

What does it mean that President Obama visited Afghanistan in the middle of the night and was gone before sunrise? It means the Secret Service and others responsible for the president's safety don't trust the security in Afghanistan, even in Kabul and on an American air base. That doesn't say much for American achievements in this costly and bloody war, nor does it say much for the government of Hamid Karzai.

But give Obama credit for going to see things for himself and, apparently, to bluntly warn Karzai about the rampant corruption and ineffectiveness of his government. That message has been delivered before by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and others, but either it hasn't sunk in or Karzai is not powerful enough to defeat the corruption and graft his government is famous for.

With a nominally successful election in Iraq and an agreement with Russia on nuclear arms, Afghanistan is Obama's biggest international worry. Unless the military approach gains success soon, Obama will be forced to rethink the entire strategy there.

Obama searches for another Afghan strategy

President Obama, who campaigned on the assertion that U.S. strategy had lost its way by invading Iraq in March 2003 and should have concentrated on Afghanistan instead, appears to be rethinking his commitment to Afghanistan, or at least to current U.S. policy. That policy is a fluid thing. Only weeks ago, Obama replaced the commanding general in Afghanistan with a new commander who is more attuned to counter-insurgency strategy, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Now, reports say the administration is delaying McChrystal's request for additional troops so that the entire strategy there can be reassessed.

As Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported recently, things are not going particularly well in Afghanistan. More Americans are dying. Casualties are also increasing among NATO troops. The Taliban insurgency is showing greater strength and sophistication, and last month's election made a farce of U.S. efforts to bring democracy to the splintered nation. None of this should be a surprise in a country nicknamed "the graveyard of empires." Ask the British and the Russians about how difficult it is to tame Afghanistan.

The United States had every reason to overthrow the Taliban, who had sheltered and supported the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked this country on Sept. 11, 2001. Overthrowing the Taliban was not all that difficult. The population was tired of the Taliban's ridiculous bans on any amusement or pleasure (movies and kite-flying were forbidden). The horrors of that regime are beautifully chronicled in Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns."

Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on earth, has a culture that makes it nearly ungovernable. Families, tribes and ethnic groups claim more loyalty than nationality, and corruption seems to be as deeply ingrained as the militant independence of various groups. America has already concluded that it cannot rule this disparate nation by force. McChrystal is trying to win the public's loyalty by protecting civilians from harsh Taliban reprisals, but this strategy is, at best, a slow process. The Taliban have shown a remarkable resilience and surprising military strength. The Taliban control large areas of the lightly populated country, and they are able to carry out military attacks even in supposedly secure cities such as Kabul.

President Obama would like to put the Afghan problem behind him, but he and others fear that Afghanistan could easily slip back under Taliban domination and again be a staging area for al-Qaida. Neighboring Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and the worst-case scenario is al-Qaida domination of both countries with nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.

America's best strategy might be some accommodation with the Taliban that would allow a theocratic government but prohibit terrorist activities or training. Right now, the Taliban have few reasons to negotiate. As Mullen has admitted, the Taliban have the upper hand.

This area was the death of Rome

On the same day that I listened to a "Great Courses" CD lecture about Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," coordinated bombings in Baghdad killed 95 people. The recorded lecture seemed poignant because Gibbon had attributed the fall of the greatest civilization in the ancient world in part to Rome's problems in the Middle East. Rome had spent untold riches and lives in fighting the Persians (present-day Iranians) on the edge of the empire.

The lecturer also pointed out that, like modern-day Americans, Romans of the second and third centuries could not imagine that their dominant position in the world — militarily, commercially and culturally — would ever end. And yet it did, because of a variety of factors, including the public's loss of confidence in and respect for its elected leaders and its spending on futile wars in a volatile region far from home.

Here's where you insert the Santayana quote about failing to learn from history.

The Iraqi government says it will reinstate security measures it had allowed to lag, but it will not bring American troops back into Baghdad to assist the apparently incompetent Iraqi security forces. Americans want out of Iraq, after spending more than $1 trillion and the lives of more than 4,000 Americans there in an ill-conceived effort to make this volatile and divided country into a model democracy.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, an election is being held today, but the Taliban is warning that it will kill anyone who votes in the election. The election is expected to reassert the authority of President Hamid Karzai, but his central government controls only small areas of the country, which has been called "the graveyard of empires." More U.S. troops are pouring into Afghanistan in hopes of salvaging that country from the warfare it has endured almost nonstop since the Soviet invasion in 1979. New commanders and new strategies are being tried there, but American voters are growing disenchanted with this latest foreign war. The Obama administration wants to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida, but that effort is showing little progress so far.

Bogged down in two countries of the deadly Middle East, the United States is risking its fortunes in a part of the world that Gibbon tells us was the death of Rome.