Paris, August 27, 2009 – The Nation magazine’s Robert Dreyfuss
has just published a fascinating account of Washington establishment
opinion about the war in Afghanistan.

The four speakers at a Brookings Institution discussion were Bruce
Riedel, advisor to the President (and believer in the catastrophic
international consequences of a loss of the war in Afghanistan);
Michael O’Hanlon, an adviser to General David Petraeus; Tony
Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and
Kim Kagan, head of the Institute for the Study of War.

The unanimous gloom expressed by these four speakers, and the
apparent absence of any sunlight shining from the attending (and
largely professional-political) audience, seems clear confirmation
that Barack Obama and his chosen advisors have wasted no time in
placing themselves and the country -- in a mere five months -- into
the same desperate situation that it took the combined Johnson and
Nixon administrations fifteen years to arrive at in the case of
Vietnam. This view would seem widely shared today -- without
influencing policy.

This is scarcely believable. Dreyfuss summarizes the
speakers’ shared views: 1. “Significant escalation” is
essential “to avoid utter defeat.” 2. If “tens of thousands” of new
troops were sent to Afghanistan, it would be impossible to know
whether this reinforcement changed anything until another eighteen
months had elapsed. 3. Even if the U.S. “turns the tide,” no American
troops could be withdrawn before at least another five years.


However the most dramatic unanimous opinion of the four experts was
this one: “there is no alternative to victory.”

Where have we heard that before? From Douglas MacArthur, speaking
to Congress on April 19, 1951, almost six months to a day after his
combined U.S., R.O.K. and UN army’s drive to the Yalu river was
defeated by China’s intervention in the Korean war. The Communists’
complete reconquest of North Korea followed.

Two months after MacArthur spoke, the United States renounced the
military objective of reunifying Korea and expressed interest in an
armistice roughly along the 38th parallel, the prewar border. That
was the alternative to American victory.

In Vietnam, the alternative to victory was the 1973 subterfuge of
“Vietnamization” of the war, with withdrawal of the last American
troops in March of that year. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975.

Why is there no alternative to American victory in what the
president calls “AfPak”?

When President Obama took office he might have said that the Bush
administration had made a dreadful mess of Afghanistan, but that he
was resolved to save America, NATO and Afghanistan itself, from this
Bush-era folly. He intended to put the U.S. on a new track towards
peace and reconciliation with the forty million Pashtuns of Central
Asia -- who provide the potential recruiting pool for the angry young
men of the Taliban.

He could also have said that it makes no real difference to the
United States whether the Taliban do or do not rule Afghanistan, or
whether Osama bin Laden is or is not in that country. Afghanistan is
on the other side of the world, surrounded by tough people who can
look after themselves. Terrorists do not need “safe havens” in
Afghanistan. The world is full of empty “safe havens.” The
terrorists are being defeated by policemen and security forces in all
of the western countries, while Osama bin Laden periodically releases
videos to Arab television.

The people of Afghanistan have themselves defended their country
against all foreign interference since the time of Alexander the
Great. It wasn’t the U.S. or NATO that defended them. They did it
themselves – as an energetic minority of them are doing now -- but,
unhappily, against U.S. and NATO interference in their country.

The Afghans have already experienced Taliban rule, from 1996 until
the U.S. invasion in 2001. A great many of them did not like it. If
they don’t want the Taliban, with their obscurantism, oppression of
women, and brutal interpretations of Islamic law, to come back again
and install their despotic rule, let the Afghan people defend
themselves. The U.S./NATO intervention simply gets in the way. As a
foreigners’ invasion, it is objectively a source of support for the
Taliban.

Instead of reading ecology and novels on his vacation, the
president should read Charles DeGaulle. He ended the dreadful
insurrection in Algeria that brought him back to power in France in
1958. And Algeria was legally a part of France itself, possessing
energy resources that could have made France energy self-sufficient,
and it had a large colonial population that wanted Algeria forever
French.

So did a part of the French army. A conspiracy of officers tried
to assassinate DeGaulle and overthrow his government. This wasn’t a
puerile problem of armed bullies shouting abuse at congressmen.

DeGaulle ordered peace negotiations, stopped the war, brought the
colonists and the army home, and turned to rebuilding France after
its generations of crisis.

Please, President Obama: take a lesson in success. Don’t kill tens,
or hundreds, of thousands more people in still another search for a
useless American victory that ends in defeat, and ruins your presidency.

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