In days and weeks to come, readers will be encountering this material in a million different formats, cross-indexed by degree of stupidity or brutality or absurdity; there's bound to be an iPhone app before long. The documents will infiltrate the way Americans, and of course the Dutch and everyone else, think about the war. People who view the conflict as a form of neocolonial gangsterism will probably find enough material to vindicate their bias, but a more honest reading will show that the terrible things that have happened are largely the consequence of a war fought against a brutal and deeply entrenched insurgency in a country inured to violence. Indeed, one reason why "we learn nothing new" from the documents is that, unlike in Vietnam, senior military and civilian officials have been open about the failures, even when minimizing their scope. The war that emerges from the documents doesn't look evil, but it does look almost impossible.
I recently had a conversation about counterinsurgency theory with Andrew Exum, the former Army officer turned counterinsurgency expert and advocate (whose own view of the documents is very different from mine). Exum pointed out to me that one of the leading texts on the subject, a 1964 tract by French officer David Galula called Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, argues that the ideal setting for a COIN effort is an island, where counterinsurgents can control the battle space like scientists in a laboratory. "The worst place," Exum said, "is a landlocked country surrounded by bad neighbors." Afghanistan, of course, is that place. No matter how successful you are, you can never control the battle space. An intelligence service on the other side of the border can keep undermining your best efforts, stoking and protecting the insurgency. The WikiLeaks documents offer raw proof for this general proposition.
So should we leave? Should we shift to a more modest counterterrorism strategy with fewer troops and lower expectations of nurturing a stable government in Kabul? Even before WikiLeaks, this was rapidly becoming the new default position; jumping off the COIN bandwagon has itself become the new bandwagon. Maybe it's sheer contrariness that keeps me from accepting this view. I hope not; I think it's rather the sense that allowing the Taliban to occupy and move freely around much of Afghanistan would have very bad consequences for U.S. national security. But American policymakers have less time than they had before to show success, and they have yet more public skepticism to overcome. Just as Obama must persuade Afghan President Hamid Karzai to open up political space, move against corruption, and decentralize power, so he must persuade Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan's recently reappointed chief of army staff, to end the ISI's double game. Maybe he can't do either one. Then he should accept reality, and stop trying to do what can't be done.
SUBJECTS:
(13)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE