WHY DID WE LOSE THE WARS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN? JED BABBIN
http://www.epictimes.com/londoncenter/2015/01/why-did-we-lose-the-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/
It was obvious that we’d lost the Vietnam War long before the last helicopter lifted off from a rooftop in Saigon. Though the rights and wrongs of the war had been at the top of the news for years, it wasn’t until our military faced up to the questions of why we lost that the most important debate began.
What went wrong, how did we lose and were we wrong to go to war in Vietnam were the questions to which politicians and the public were eager to debate only to assign blame. The recriminations lasted for more than a decade. And, as some would argue, their effects are still affect the minds of our military leaders.
It wasn’t until the military realized that it had the duty to answer the ugliest questions that those questions were faced, and then embraced, by the generals, admirals and those who succeeded them. On those debates were built the military we have today.
The obvious facts about Iraq and Afghanistan have simmered for a decade but few have spoken them openly. President Bush was wrong strategically and politically in trying to build democracies in Islamic nations for one principal reason that Bush’s strategy refused to recognize: fundamental individual freedoms are comprehensively incompatible with Islam’s ideology. That is a fact we knew from centuries of history, and decades of American involvement with nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iran the other powers of the Islamic world. We knew that Islamic nations were religiously-bound to reject democracy, yet Bush stuck us on a path that pretended nations such as those could be democratized from without.
Despite the efforts of a minority among Bush’s cabinet, he refused to understand the need to fight the Islamist ideology as we fought communism and Nazism before it. We haven’t undertaken that part of the war yet, President Obama compounding Bush’s mistakes with defense and diplomatic strategies that have preemptively surrendered the ideological war.
The question remains: what does it take to win this kind of war?
Now, most importantly among military leaders, we are hearing some of the old Vietnam questions being repeated out loud. We know we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite sacrificing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. What went wrong?
The glimmerings of an open debate have appeared. Army Lt. Gen. Dan Bolger’s book, “Why We Lost,” promised to tell us.
Bolger’s new book begins with the paragraph,
I am a United States Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry.
But the book doesn’t answer the question. The first 415 pages are a panegyric to the unquestionable heroism of our troops. The last nineteen are a defense of his peers’ intellectual efforts. Nowhere does he analyze or question the strategies that have failed to achieve two presidents’ goals.
The biggest figures in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns were the generals who commanded them — Casey, Petraeus, McChrystal and a few others – who acted on Bush’s and Obama’s orders. While history will hold Bush and Obama responsible, the generals who followed orders and who, like Petraeus, designed the “counterinsurgency” strategy that blinded itself to the ideological war are equally responsible.
Bolger was right in stating that our military leaders have an enormous problem because they were the authors and executors of the failed strategies. None refused to pursue those strategies even when it became obvious they weren’t working. None offered better ideas or resigned rather than continue.
Sometime soon congress will debate and pass some war authorization for President Obama’s war against ISIS. We should know, before it does so, the answer to the question Bolger poses. But we won’t because, unlike Bolger, neither the military leadership nor the politicians will admit, as he did, that the problem exists.
Congress can’t – and Obama won’t – admit the problem. Republicans, out of a misplaced loyalty to President Bush, haven’t brought themselves to admit that his nation-building and Gen. Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategies have failed. Those of us who have been writing – I since at least March 2006 – that nation-building was bound to fail, and that Islam’s ideology has to be defeated as communism and nazism were, have had our words fall on deaf ears. In truth, this debate can only succeed in changing how we fight if it is undertaken by our military leaders, scholars at the war colleges, and down through the ranks.
Though Bolger and, privately, others have begun to discuss the fact that we have lost the wars we’ve fought since 9-11, it will take years for the military to accept it, analyze it, and produce new and better strategies that can work. The best we can do is ask the right questions and spur the debate.
Those questions include challenges to the most basic assumptions of our failed strategies. A few examples suffice.
First, why does anyone believe that democracy can be imposed on Islamic societies when their religious ideology precludes basic freedoms such as freedom of speech and of the press? Next, the enemy is winning the global ideological war because we’ve never decided to fight it. The fact that we have to fight ideologically is obvious, but how do we need to do it?
In President Obama’s “war” against ISIS we are devoting about two to five percent of the Air Force and Navy’s combined airpower. ISIS hasn’t been driven from an inch of the ground they’ve conquered. What should we do in addition or instead? Is this even our war, or should we leave the Arab nations to fight it themselves?
America is standing on the threshold of another eighteen-month stretch of intense self-absorbtion when we ignore the world and focus entirely on the next presidential election. While we’re burying our heads in the electoral sands we can count on Islamists to continue terrorism, Iran to persist in pursuing nuclear weapons, Putin to continue his conquest of Ukraine and the rest of the world to continue to go to hell in a handbasket.
There’s nothing America is prepared to do to stop any of these things. Perhaps, at least, we can demand of our military leaders an admission that we’ve lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and begin the debate on how to prevent a continuation of failed strategies.
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