Sharing a number of links with you for the weekend.
I am pretty convinced that there is no military solution to this conflict, and that we will have to engage the Taliban; as distasteful as it is, we must distinguish between al Qaeda and the Taliban's ambitions. But more than matters of morality and even issues of legacy, there are two deeper national security questions at work: We are not the global power some neocons thought (or think) we are. We cannot sustain this war, financially or politically, without massive infusions from allied forces, and those will not be forthcoming, which is the lead-in to the second question: Why fight a war that could destroy NATO, when the chances of "winning" are so slim?
Some people ask how it is a power declines and another power rises. It's because of bad decisions at extremely crucial moments. There are transitional periods in world history, and often time those transitional moments are made still more crucial because one power made a very bad choice and found itself paying the consequences of that choice for years down the road, while the other power(s) made smarter choices. (Note: Intention doesn't have to count.) You cannot always go back and change a choice, and pretend nothing happened. When we embarked on our two most recent wars in the last eight years, we were not given a clear strategy, nor did we bother to realize that we are no longer in the colonial era. As we went on into two wars that, although they did not cost the number of lives Vietnam did, ended up costing us probably $1 trillion, future competitors of the United States were putting massive sums of money into more relevant causes.
The Chinese for example invested massively in infrastructure, education and now green energy. We're sparing far less than Gulf States for green energy stimulus. We find ourselves bankrupted, and dragged down by a minority of local-minded and vocal-throated Republicans who do not seem to understand how economies are formed and made competitive, how the world is functioning, and how reduced our footprint is and must be. The fact that we cannot force Iran to the negotiating table says something about how different global calculations actually are from the kind of language and rhetoric we continue to hear from far too many politicians. Language must eventually catch up to reality. While we were busy fighting wars that had no clear goals, and that were poorly conceived and even more poorly executed, other countries are making the investments that will cause them to jump forward in the near future. If not right now.
As an example. In the eight years since we moved into Iraq and Afghanistan (and I'm treating them as one war because people in the Bush White House treated them as one war), Turkey's total economic output practically doubled. China went from a rising power to a major world player second to only us (for now). The Persian Gulf region now controls hundreds of billions of dollars in assets that will survive the depletion of oil and keep them massively influential global players for decades to come, a fact that arrogant foreign policy analysts continue to forget. We made a series of bad decisions that cost us enormously, and there is no easy way out of them. There is no reversing them, nor the reality of a much more diverse foreign-policy world. We simply must accept this, and accept that there are certain wars we cannot fight and certain wars we cannot win. Cut losses, think farther ahead, think of where we need to be. Think beyond Bush's policy mistakes.
The analogies with Vietnam must end. This is not Vietnam. This is a lot more important than that. Between West Africa and Central Asia lie a massive population, tremendous resources and a huge potential stimulus to the economy of any great power that has the wisdom, foresight and humility to take advantage of it. This could be China or India. Considering how we are viewed in the region, it is unlikely to be us who are so asked. And that is tremendously to our detriment. As my recent post noted, nearly 1 out of 4 people in the world are Muslim, and Muslims tend to be younger than other populations. For the short term at least that means that there is a huge potential for labor resources. We should consider whether fighting a war that has no clear goal but only alienates us from regions of the world that other countries are already moving into and economically benefiting from serves any long-term national security purposes.
I have not yet heard anyone from the administration articulate this, in part because we are afraid to admit that the Muslim world might become an economic partner -- and so we could solve disputes through mutual interest -- as opposed to an ideological opponent, a childish force afraid of modernity and in need of advice, whether through hectoring, lecturing or laser-guided nudges. But how do we erase all the mistrust, the resentment and the anger, in order to get there from here? Partnership presupposes mutual respect, and too often we still assume the Muslim world exists only to meet our interests, satisfy our objectives, and is otherwise only partly human. How do we get beyond this? That is a far more important question for American security and prosperity. Who's asking it?
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