The way to avoid an Afghan quagmire is not to hold back on US military reinforcements or development aid but to assemble a national civil-military plan that integrates war-fighting with reconstruction and political reconciliation, said The Washington Post in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
For years, Democrats excoriated the Bush administration for not devoting sufficient resources to Afghanistan. But now that Barack Obama has taken office, some seem to be having second thoughts. “Our original goal was to go in there and take on Al-Qaeda. ... It was not to adopt the 51st state of the United States,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry pioneered the Democratic argument to send more troops during his own presidential campaign in 2004. Now he says “the parallels” to Vietnam “just really keep leaping out in so many different ways.”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates seconded that skepticism at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. “If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” he said, “because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest.” We’re happy to agree that Afghanistan should not become the 51st state, or Valhalla — but we’re not sure who or what Kerry and Gates have in mind. So far as we know, the American objective in Afghanistan since 2002 has been pretty much what Gates says it should be: “An Afghan people who do not provide a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, who reject the rule of the Taleban and support the legitimate government they have elected and in which they have a stake.” The problem, as Gates acknowledged, is that meeting that aim necessitates such tasks as stabilizing western Pakistan, rooting out the opium trade, vastly expanding the Afghan Army and constructing a workable legal system. That, in turn, will require more money, more troops, many more years of commitment — and higher American casualties.
