Reading about another catastrophically maimed casualty of the “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, I was struck by a biographical note. This young American, now a triple amputee after stepping on an improvised explosive device while on foot patrol, was only 11 years old when the war in Afghanistan began.
Come October, this war will have lasted a decade. Last month, the Iraq War passed the eight-year-mark. During the Vietnam War, the question was whether there was any “light at the end of the tunnel.”
In these wars, we have to wonder whether there is any tunnel. If so, no one seems to be in any hurry to get out.
Why? Why is it that we have come to accept war without end – not to mention, I would (and do) argue, war without benefit? And why does it seem that our leaders actually want it this way?
There are reasons and they are shocking.
Watching Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in Iraq recently where he practically begged to leave U.S. forces in place after the scheduled pullout in December 2011, Examiner contributor Jed Babbin, I think, nailed it.
Writing in the American Spectator, Babbin guessed that President Obama just doesn’t want Iraq to fall apart, at least not on the eve of the 2012 election. Ditto Afghanistan.
And falling apart — I call it reverting to type – is the inevitable result of U.S. withdrawal. “Who lost Iraq and Afghanistan?” is not a question Obama wants to answer during the election.
Thus, Obama will slog on with counterinsurgency in stalemate, maintaining his weirdly logical wartime alliance with the neoconservative, democracy-project Right. On Obama’s part, this is a political calculation, pure and simple. On the Right, something else is going on.
As long as we are still in Iraq, still in Afghanistan, the policy born of neoconservatism’s lights, embraced by nation-building Bushies, promulgated by Gen. David Petraeus, still has a theoretical chance of working.
A constant refrain from these camps is that prematurely withdrawing from either country would jeopardize what Petraeus has dubbed for four years “fragile and reversible” security gains.
To them, staying forever is leaving too soon. It isn’t so much that in withdrawal lies defeat; it’s that in withdrawal lies confirmation of the defeat of their prized counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. In the strategy’s defeat lies the abyss.
And so they must keep reality at bay. And they do that by keeping Iraq and Afghanistan works in progress. As such, it is up to our troops to try harder to win “hearts and minds,” walk more IED-strewn patrols, distribute more cash to buy loyalty. In this way, the COINdinistas are hamster-footing it to keep the ride from stopping at any cost.
That’s their prerogative, but only until someone fires them. That won’t happen until people connect the human toll of these wars – combat deaths, IED casualties, “ally” murders – with the dead-end COIN strategy.
It’s no secret. Reporting on new military medical statistics that reveal a horrific spike in multiple amputations and genital injuries because of IEDs in Afghanistan, the Los Angeles Times noted:
“Troops are increasingly vulnerable to injuries from such makeshift bombs as they mount foot patrols in an effort to win support from Afghan villagers, a key strategy in the counterinsurgency campaign.”
What next? More of the same. “I don’t think you win this war,” Petraeus is quoted as saying in Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s War.” “This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”
This “kind of fight” – COIN — needs to stop, if only for the 11-year-olds.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
