What Is Victory?

If defeating the Taliban is not our goal, what is?

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
October 20, 2009, 0:00 p.m.

Rarely has there been such a dramatic disconnect between rhetoric and reality. On Afghanistan, the national-security Right talks about “victory,” concerned Democrats talk about “success,” and Obama allies such as Sen. John Kerry talk about the “fulfillment of our mission.” They aren’t talking about the same thing. The somnolent press is content to court, rather than clarify, this confusion, but that’s no reason for the rest of us to go along for the ride.

What is “victory” or “success”? What is this “mission” of ours that must be fulfilled?

Staunch supporters of our military are seething as President Obama dithers over Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for an additional 40,000 troops. Their frustration would be justifiable if the main issue were Obama’s inconstancy. Months ago, the president endorsed the counterinsurgency strategy of McChrystal, his hand-picked commander. Now, he is balking. In what has become a habit for Obama, he changes the rationale for his temporizing almost daily: from the need to study further a situation he had purportedly studied plenty before backing McChrystal; to the notion that a counterterrorism strategy, rather than counterinsurgency, may be the way to go; to the latest excuse, floated this weekend by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, that the uncertainty hovering over Afghanistan’s fraud-ridden election makes a deployment decision premature.

Whatever the explanation on offer, the conservative reaction is always the same: “Isn’t this the war Obama said we had to win?” Nothing has changed, the national-security Right reasons: The Taliban are still our enemies; if they take over Afghanistan they will give safe haven to al-Qaeda, and we will be in grave danger of another 9/11. So why won’t Obama just give McChrystal what he needs to defeat the Taliban?

That would be enough for me, too, if General McChrystal’s plan were to defeat the Taliban. But it’s not.

The issue is not Obama’s inconstancy; it is the dubious nature of the mission. And I don’t mean the “mission” implied by the Right’s rhetoric; I’m talking about the mission as it is conceived by the theater commander. In a lengthy essay for the magazine section of last Sunday’s New York Times, Dexter Filkins, who was granted extraordinary access to General McChrystal, states the matter succinctly:

What McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge — a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystal’s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted.

Do you favor such a proposal? Is this what you thought American troops were being sent to Afghanistan for? Is this the mission we thought we were setting out to accomplish when American military force was unleashed after the September 11 attacks?

On the right, we like to pride ourselves on seeing things as they are. Abortion is the killing of the unborn, not the “right to choose.” Illegal aliens are illegal aliens, not “undocumented immigrants.” “Reform” is not a term we would ever use for a government grab of a sixth of the private economy — and if this “reform” of health care consists of rationing and death panels, we say, “Hey, this consists of rationing and death panels.” We don’t usually abide a situation in which Robert “We’re Gonna Let You Die” Reich is the only guy in the room calling a spade a spade.

So why are we pretending that the mission in Afghanistan is something it is not? McChrystal is not trying to defeat the Taliban. Indeed, McChrystal tells Filkins it would be useless to attempt that. “You can kill Taliban forever,” he says, “because they are not a finite number.”

And here is the not-so-secret dirty little secret: Islamic militancy, whether in the form of the Taliban or its many other varieties, is “not finite.” That is because neither its source nor its center of gravity is confined to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, we have chosen not to address the source, which is Islamist ideology, and we have chosen to fight only in Afghanistan, as opposed to the many places where the enemy rolls new fighters off the assembly line. We have made these choices because we lack the will for a broader fight.

Unwilling to admit that, we miniaturize the challenge. Thus, the war is said only to be in Afghanistan. The “challenge” is framed as isolating a relative handful of aberrant Takfiris — the Muslims who claim the right to declare other Muslims apostates and kill them — rather than confronting the fact that tens of millions of Muslims despise the West. And the mission is portrayed as high-minded nation-building, not anything so jingoistic as pursuing America’s national interests, vanquishing the militants who’ve taken up arms against our country, and demonstrating to jihadist sympathizers the dire consequences of joining the militant ranks.

Here’s Filkins again: “At the heart of McChrystal’s strategy are three principles: protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state, and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents. Killing the Taliban is now among the least important things that are expected of NATO soldiers.”

Listening only to the critique from the right, one could be forgiven for being under the misimpression that killing the Taliban is — besides killing al-Qaeda — the only important thing expected of NATO soldiers. Filkins, however, is right: Killing the Taliban is not a McChrystal priority. To his credit, the general is not hiding the ball. His written proposal elucidates what he believes he is in Afghanistan to do: build a nation. But if there had been any doubt, the game would have been given away by the slick-talking Emanuel.

The question, Obama’s top aide told the Sunday shows, is not “how many troops you send, but do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?” If we were in Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda, having “a credible Afghan partner” would be irrelevant — as it was in October 2001, when we first invaded. We only need a “partner” because our purpose is not victory. Our purpose is “this process” of ensuring Afghans’ security and government services — neither of which they have ever had; neither of which it ever ought to be thought our obligation to provide.

“This process” is the gargantuan burden of building, from scratch, an oxymoronic sharia-democracy in a backwards, corrupt, fundamentalist Islamic armpit. And as if we’d learned nothing from the ravages against us, the process absurdly assumes that Islam — rather than being a major part of the problem — is an asset that we can turn to our advantage. If such a process could work (it can’t), it would take decades, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and cause an unknowable number of American casualties.

But that is the McChrystal plan. The idea is not to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda but to build a modern nation-state that will eventually be both competent to fight and interested in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda on its own.

Here is the irony. Those who favor McChrystal’s proposal argue, with great force, that a counterterrorism strategy — i.e., attacking terror nests from remote bases — cannot work. For that conclusion, they cite no less an authority than General McChrystal, who is the nation’s leading expert on military counterterrorism. But if “cannot work” is our criterion, then why would anyone favor a democracy-building effort in Afghanistan?

The real dirty little secret is that there is only one way to win the war, and that is to attack our militant enemies and their abettors globally. This being the case, our unwillingness to do that necessarily means anything else we try “cannot work.” We have taken real victory off the table. What is left is a series of “cannot work” options, and our burden is to pick the least bad one.

So can we go back to what is best in us, forthrightness, and stop talking about “victory”? Those who favor the McChrystal plan should be prepared to tell us how many lives, years, and hundreds of billions they are prepared to sacrifice on an experiment in Afghan democracy building that will not defeat our global enemies — and, in fact, will discourage the pursuit of our global enemies since, under our new doctrine, we can’t unleash American might without making a similar sacrifice wherever we go.

The question is not whether counterterrorism can work. It cannot — any more than having a police station a hundred miles away could guarantee that the local bank would never be robbed. The question is why we should think nation-building — the equivalent of lavish government welfare programs to address the “root causes” of bank robbery — is a better solution.