Er, Good News: Support for bin Laden down to 34% from 50% in Pakistan

Fred Kaplan has a blunt article on the Afghanistan-Pakistan puzzle in Slate:

In short, we can send Pakistanis money, arms, handbooks, and the like. But we can't make them do what they say they're going to do or even effectively monitor whether they're doing it. Bush sent $10 billion to then-President Pervez Musharraf, who pledged that he would use the aid to go after the terrorists. For the most part, he didn't.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military has little desire to improve its counterinsurgency skills. Many officers are more loyal to the Taliban than to the central government. And though the army is beginning to crack down on Taliban fighters in the Swat and Buner districts, it is still the case that 80 percent or 90 percent of Pakistani troops are stationed on the border with India, which most officers still see as the country's greatest threat. This perception is no mere idiosyncrasy; it is integral to the Pakistani worldview, dating back to the founding of the nation and the partition from India in 1947. It has been reinforced by three wars between the two nations, in '47, '65, and '71, as well as a war or two that nearly broke out in the past decade, and has been hammered home further by the fact that both counties have nuclear weapons.

Maybe this time the Pakistani military is really getting serious. Certainly the population is less enamored of Islamist terrorists than it used to be. Those who say they support suicide bombing under certain circumstances has plummeted from 40 percent in 2004 to just 5 percent in 2008, according to a Pew survey released this past March. (Then again, 34 percent of Pakistanis still say they have confidence in Osama bin Laden, down from 50 percent.)

I like how Kaplan throws out the bin Laden poll way down in the article. 34% is no tiny minority of extremists. The Taliban are much more popular than the Americans. There's no way to change it, but the Americans keep playing pretend and sending money. It's impossible that this will end well. Impossible.

Another Foreign Intervention Friday

Public opinion, and even the Obama administration itself are facing up to the fact that Afghanistan is an unwinnable situation. They are going to attempt a "surge" with more troops but admit that ultimately they want to train and hand it over to the Afghan army and get the hell out of there. The "surge" is to mow the lawn, and use the weed-whacker on those hard to get places. Make this effort one more time and get out while there is still order.

What about the people still serving over there? No doubt, people will lose their lives. Why? For a stalling tactic before inevitable withdrawal? Hardly a noble cause. Fred Kaplan in Slate Magazine gave his report on the situation.

Unlike those who got us into Vietnam, today's top officials—including President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates—at least see the specter. Both have emphasized that their goals in Afghanistan are limited; daydreams of turning the place into a democratic republic—"some central Asian Valhalla," as Gates snorted in recent hearings—are over. Gates further stated at those hearings, before the Senate armed services committee, that he would endorse his commanders' request for three additional brigades—but that he'd be "deeply skeptical" of subsequent requests for more. The fighting needs to be done mainly by Afghan troops, he said, adding that if the Afghan people begin to see it as an American war, "we will go the way of other imperial occupiers."

Isn't this immoral? If they know it's a lost cause they should begin immediate withdrawal.

Richard Nixon hummed and hawed on a lost cause in Vietnam when he took office in 1969. He could have ended it quickly rightly saying it was not a war he started and popular opinion favours pulling out. Instead, it took him five years and almost 25,000 US troop deaths and billions of dollars before leaving the war to the South Vietnamese in 1973. The country ended up being lost within a little more than a year, with the famous helicopters on the roof of the US Embassy, panic evacuation in 1975. (I honestly think I remember this footage when I was five years old, but maybe I've seen too many documentaries.)

I cringe to think Obama intends to send an additional 30,000 troops and ramping up the effort in a lost cause. As Yogi Berra would say: It's deja vu all over again.

Fighting an Insurgency

I don't envy Obama in trying to figure out what's best for the Afghanistan campaign. (Among many other problems of course.) We've been dug in there for seven years. It's impossible to declare a clear victory. Fred Kaplan takes a look at some of the issues as it stands now in Slate magazine:

The biggest problem is that the country's fate ultimately lies outside its borders. As long as Pakistan's northwest territories remain a lawless free-for-all, with Taliban and al-Qaida fighters crossing the border at will, Afghanistan will never be stable. And as long as Pakistan faces a threat from India to the east, its leaders will never deploy enough troops to quash the insurgents in the northwest territories.

In short, we could do everything perfectly in Afghanistan, but it wouldn't matter unless the region-wide conflicts could be brought under some control.

Again, the good news is that all the relevant players—President-elect Obama, Adm. Mullen, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Gen. David Petraeus, and their top aides—understand this. But knowing the dimensions of a problem is only the first step to solving it. And each one of this problem's aspects—countering the insurgency in Afghanistan, stabilizing Pakistan, and calming tensions between Pakistan and India—is very difficult.

...

But three caveats are worth noting. First, as Dexter Filkins reports in his excellent book "The Forever War", Afghan militias are notorious opportunists; they switch sides at the slightest shift—in who's winning or who's paying more—or sometimes just at whim. They might be won over, but maybe not for long.

...

One possible way to short-circuit this cycle is to demonstrate a few quick and easy successes. For instance, rush a flood of troops to a town that is not under grave threat from the Taliban at the moment and provide it with lots of services—roads, electricity, food, whatever aid is needed. At the same time, rush another flood of troops to an area of marginal Taliban control and crush them. And do all this without killing any civilians.

Kaplan does a great job of describing that there are many intelligent solutions for fighting this battle, but the bottom line is that it might not be worth it. Read the last paragraph I cited from the article above. What a dog's breakfast. You spend most of your time doing a song and dance for the whimsical locals, hoping they will like you. You try not to kill civilians but you are fighting guerrillas who look like them.

Do I have a solution to offer? Pull out. You can try to make it look better, by slowly withdrawing or making flimsy "peace with honor" pledges, but that just prolongs the inevitable. Take a hit to the pride. As Marcellus Wallace says: "...that's pride fuckin' wit ya. Fuck pride! Pride only hurts, it never helps."

Sometimes you just have to admit that the situation is has run its course. Good old American know-how cannot prevail over every circumstance.

UPDATE: Putting lives on the line so every bigamist war lord can get their Viagra.