How do we win? What is victory in Afghanistan? This question has never been answered. The reason is obvious to anyone with half a brain. There is no way to achieve anything we could list as a victory.
We can start a version of a Democracy in the cities. Sort of. But that democracy will not extend into the country. A lesson Mao realized on his deathbed. A lesson the Soviets learned, and the British before them in Afghanistan.
John McCain was criticized by both the left and right when he said that we would fight for a hundred years if that is what it took to win in Afghanistan. It was insane to think that any victory would take that long. But he was right, which is why I didn’t vote for him. I voted for Obama who said he was going to pull out of these endless wars.
It would take a century, at least. The reason? The villages outside the cities are still in the social equivalent of the Seventh Century. The village elders rule as they have for more than a thousand years. They have no desire to change. So it would take generations to educate the children to a more modern secular view. It can’t happen in a single generation. It would take fifty years to get them into the 19th Century, if we were lucky.
Dying for something doesn’t make that thing noble or right. People die fighting over neighborhoods to sell drugs in. That does not make the sale of drugs a noble endeavor. People died fighting for control of those same neighborhoods during prohibition. It did not make bootlegging a noble venture.
What is victory? The end of Islamic terror? Never going to happen. Not without a barbaric reincarnation of the crusades to a level never before seen in history. We can achieve that by launching a ton of nukes at the Islamic countries, and incinerating the potential terrorists in big flashes of light followed by mushroom clouds. Of course, that would make us the worst villains in history, but we could eliminate Islamic terror couldn’t we? As a plus, we would end Global Warming for a century or so because of the nuclear winters, and the subsequent deaths of people from starvation after crops fail for a decade or more.
How do we win? We aren’t winning now. We are not even fighting for a victory. We are fighting not to lose. We did that for a decade in Vietnam. Spending lives, and dollars like pocket change. We were told that if we lost in Vietnam that the domino effect would see the entire world taken over by Communists. It didn’t happen. The Communists are now a sad little minority, and their nations are failing with a regularity that is predictable.
We have become the Japanese of the late World War II. Convinced if we maintain our belief in our own superiority, we will be victorious despite it being patently impossible to win.
The more we fight, the worse off we are. Trillions of dollars later, and we are in no better shape in Afghanistan than we were a year after we entered the nation.
It is said that those who refuse to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. That is true. It is also true that those who learn the wrong lessons from History, are just doomed. We learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam, and from the failed occupations of Afghanistan by the British, and Russians. We told ourselves we would do it smarter, or the technology would give us an advantage. We would just win, somehow. We were Americans, and we were just awesome with Stealth Porta John’s. Stealth MAN. STEALTH.
Only, we haven’t won. Like Vietnam, we are learning the same lessons, and finding that we are just screwed. We build a base on top of a hill. This allows us to see all around, and see any approaching enemy. Only the enemy shoots at us from the valleys and hides among the rocks and caves. So we put the next base in the valley, denying this terrain to the enemy. Then they shoot at us from the hilltops.
The terrain is littered with mines left over from the Soviet Era, so we have to stay on the paths. The only safe places. On the paths, we are limited in how we respond.
The real problem, is the same one we had before World War II. We refuse to believe some damned brown, or yellow, or black people are smart enough to beat us. The most telling explanation about Pearl Harbor was this. We just didn’t think the little yellow bastards could do it. There are even arrogant racists today that claim that Nazi’s were the ones who designed the attack, and developed the weapons, for the Japanese.
We can enter an area, and kill some hostiles. Then we leave, and the folks left alive become hostile, or at least sympathetic to the enemy. It’s Vietnam all over again.
So I finish with the same question I started with. How do we win? What is victory? Because if you know, you’re one up on the Pentagon, who has wall to wall experts on military strategy. You’re ahead of the State Department who has wall to wall experts on political strategy. You’re up on every single think tank in the nation with experts galore. Because right now, nobody knows what victory is, or how the hell we achieve it. The only people who are still invested in this war are the pseudo patriots like yourself. The ones who beat their chest and scream that they love the troops.
The troops have dreams, hopes, and plans. None of those dreams, hopes, or plans, involve being maimed, or killed, because the nation is too stubborn to admit we can’t win in Afghanistan. They want life mates, partners, children, and a future that does not include bleeding out ten thousand miles from home.
