Stardate 20020206.1010

(On Screen): Mark sent me this link yesterday and I've been plowing through it. It's a bit tough going; it's very wordy. (I should talk.) It amounts to an extended attempt to say, "We actually didn't win in Afghanistan after all." Mark says that it seems to be getting a lot of praise from anti-war sites. That's hardly surprising.

I'm not really ready to write a complete response yet, but a few comments: The main way in which it tries to show failure is by objecting to side effects of the war, and claiming that solving those should have been primary goals. In particular, it dwells on the fact that the attack was won so rapidly that the diplomatic work needed to set up a new government wasn't finished in time, so that the process of setting up a new government is now fraught with peril and may fail.

But the goal of the war was never to establish a good government in Afghanistan; it was to tear down a bad one.

There is also an unspoken assumption that "coalitions are a good thing" and based on that substantial criticism of the way that the US operated unilaterally. A priori, it assumes that failure to create a coalition is de facto a defeat. Indeed, several of the objections in here boil down to "That's not how things are supposed to be done!" He actually complains about the fact that the war was won rapidly and efficiently, and says that it should have been a slower campaign, planned more deliberate, prosecuted next spring, and involving substantial American ground forces.

That makes no sense. There's nothing in the rules that says that a victory doesn't count because it was easy (or because it looked easy) or because it was won in an unconventional way. And if we had done what he said than he and his fellows would be beating the "quagmire" drum now and warning of massive casualties to come.

He points out that there was a fair amount of winging it in the course of prosecuting this war. That is true, but that's a virtue, not a vice. Operational flexibility is the sign of a good military operation; it's important to recognize when you have an opportunity and to take advantage of it if you can. It's true that it was not originally expected to end as rapidly as it did. Originally the plan was for the bombing and special forces operations to weaken the Taliban over the course of months, and for there to be a Spring offensive to clean things up. But reports came back from the field which suggested that it could be won sooner, and our military commanders rightfully seized on that and decided to take the chance. The result was spectacular.

Oh, and it concludes that the war cost at least 4,000 civilian deaths. This is itemized as 1000-1300 civilian deaths due to aerial bombardment, and "a minimum of 3000 civilian deaths attributable to the impact of the bombing campaign and war on the nation's refugee and famine crises."

So while they don't subscribe to Herold's flawed calculation, they come up with the same number by a different route through the use of a death slush fund. I think I understand why: ideologically they need to prove that more Afghan civilians have died than civilians in New York. If they can't prove that 4,000 died in the bombing, then they will look for other ways to claim civilian deaths so that the sum is greater than the death toll from the September attack. That is "moral equivalence" in another guise showing through, and it tries to lay the ground work for "They hit us, so we've hit them back harder, so now let's just all stop, shall we?"

The most important argument it makes which I've seen so far is a claim that the operation in Afghanistan didn't finish the war. They demonstrate that it decreased al Qaeda's operational effectiveness but didn't nullify it, or the other ways in which we are still in peril. By so doing, I think they are trying to claim that if we couldn't win the war completely, rapidly, with a single operation then we shouldn't have tried at all. That is foolish.

Operation Torch was the landing in Africa by American forces in 1943. British and German forces had been fighting in the desert for years, and the American landing (which also included some British forces) was in the German rear. It sought to take Vichy French assets in Africa away from Germany, and to open up the possibility of attacking the Afrika Corps in the rear. It helped swing the tide of battle there, and eventually the German forces were ejected from Africa forever.

But it didn't win the war. It was the first of many operations that were required, but the later ones couldn't have happened without that one. It set the stage, but it was only the first act in a long play. And one of the most important things it did was to reintroduce American forces to combat, to get them live-fire training, and to teach them that they could win. That was a non-trivial benefit.

By the same token, our operation in Afghanistan is merely the first act in a long war. To try to judge it on the basis of whether it actually fully achieved the complete strategic goals set for the war is misguided. War isn't like that. Sometimes battles are fought to achieve incremental gains, and so it was here.

Despite what many would like to believe, the political and military situation for the US is far better now than it was in September. Our ene