Afghanistan Math - Part 3 (And a little more)

This is the last time we will discuss Afghanistan for a while. There are just too many other areas to discuss where the political class continues to waste away our tax dollars, our freedoms, and our credibility as a free nation. Today's post is based on an AP report from Brussels where NATO announced that some two dozen countries will send an estimated 7,000 additional troops to Afghanistan next year. As with the previous two posts, let's do some math:

• The 7,000 additional troops is a boost of about 18% over current troop levels from other nations. The U.S. increase is over 40% more than current levels.
• The 7,000 increase consists of 5,500 firm commitments and 1.500 possible commitments. If only 5,500 show up than the increase is only 14% above current levels.
• Britain, which suffered through fatal terrorism transit attacks several years ago has pledged to send an additional 500 troops. The United States has six times the population of Great Britain but is sending 60 times the number of additional troops.
• If 7,000 additional non-U.S. troops are sent to Afghanistan and they come from 24 countries as stated in the article, then on average each of our "allies" is sending less than 300 troops each. The word token seems appropriate here.
• No sign that our major economic competitors, Russia, India, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea, will be contributing anything to the fight.

The bottom line conclusion is the same as the past two posts: the United States is contributing far more in money and blood to this worldwide terrorism fight than our allies. As we bleed both money, resources, and our soldiers' blood, many of our allies, including those that have tasted terror attacks on their own soil, are just not stepping up. The image of Hillary Clinton and others almost begging for support from our allies is an indication of how far we have fallen in the eyes of the world. Two weeks ago President Obama went to China to beg for their cooperation in helping us get out of our own economic mess and now the administration fawns over allies that donate only 500 troops to the fight in Afghanistan. Very sad.

Thus, the urgent need for Step 30 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." We need to reassess and dramatically downsize our military footprint around the world. We no longer have the economic power, the political clout, or the track record for interfering in foreign affairs that have only minimal or only imaginary impact on our own citizens. From Vietnam to Somalia, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, we have accomplished very little at great expense from a military point of view. The world has changed but our military deployment and strategies have not.

A few observations about the new Obama administration Afghanistan strategy:

• There is no doubt he was not dealt a good hand from the Bush administration. Bush had Bin Laden and his thugs on the run in 2001-2002 and then used the terrorism umbrella to go after Hussein and Iraq, both of whom posed little danger to the United States. In the meantime, Bin Laden and his terror network were able to reestablish themselves, most likely in Pakistan, and this has led us to the morass we are in today.
• Nevertheless, I see a number of troubling facets of Obama's handling of Afghanistan in the past year, the most important of which was the foot dragging to finally make a decision. Rather than gong on Leno, Letterman, and filming TV commercials for George Lopez's show, maybe he should have been focused on getting a new strategy together sooner, it might have saved some lives.
• I think he made two major mistakes in his speech. First, he set a timetable for withdrawal. I think that Senator McCain spoke to the point best when he said that you do not usually win a military conflict with just guns, you usually win it by breaking the will of the enemy. By setting a semi-firm deadline for getting out, it will be tremendously more difficult to break the will of the enemy if they know you are leaving shortly. This deadline also gives the corrupt officials of the central government reasons not to worry too much about any corruption crackdown if they know it will all be over in 18 short months and they can continue their corrupt practices at that time. I believe that Obama set the deadline to pacify members of his own party, i.e. he set political priorities above military strategies. This will make our soldiers jobs more complicated since the enemy knows we are leaving. He also was thinking as a politician rather than a leader by setting this deadline since he probably wants the war to be a distant memory when he comes up for re-election. Again, politics trumps good strategy, wasting our resources and making our troops lives more difficult.
• His second mistake was the short shrift he gave to the Pakistan border areas. We can never militarily win this war unless we go into the havens in Pakistan to flush out the terrorists where they currently reside. Now, maybe he plans to do this and does not want to tip his hand on this cross border incursion. However, I doubt it. Without going after the enemy in hot pursuit wherever they go to hide there is no chance of a military victory.
• Although I will not go into it now, there are some excellent papers from the Cato Group and other organizations that have analyzed the situation and believe that not only should we not increase our troop strength, we should begin withdrawal immediately. These analyses go into details about the history and current status of Afghanistan and why the military options as it was defined by Bush and is currently defined by Obama, have no chance of succeeding. Their conclusions come up with some interesting alternative strategies based on logic and data, something that the political class seldom uses.
• My prediction: similar to Vietnam, the new strategy will devolve into finding any excuse to proclaim an empty victory and get out before the next Presidential election. It will waste tens of billions of dollars and many American lives. We will be no better off than in 2001 when the whole debacle began. Bush started the downfall of the mission and the current administration will finish the job.

I hope I am wrong and the President knows what he is doing based on information that I have no access to and should not have access to. But given that the government could not prevent unwanted guests from getting within arms reach of the President in the White House, I am doubtful that same government will be able to find thousands of terrorists hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, especially if our troops are not allowed to even look for them.

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