In the comments section of Doug Mataconis’s post at Outside the Beltway on the WaPo’s “Afghanistan Papers” series, the commenters are refighting the war in Afghanistan.
Okay, I’ll play. What should we have done in Afghanistan?
In my view our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan exemplified a struggle between political and strategic interest. Politically, President Bush had to respond militarily. Thinking objectively and strategically about it, while a military response was politically necessary, its most persistent effect has been the deaths of more Americans. Nuking Afghanistan, as wanted by some, would have been widely condemned and might well have resulted in U. S. leaders becoming subject to war crimes charges.
Or, said another way, I think that practically everything we’ve done since September 12, 2001 has been wrong, counterproductive even. I said so at the time and I still think so. Political interest has triumphed over our strategic interest again and again.
IMO once we drove the Taliban from power we should have continued to pursue them and Al-Qaeda wherever they went in that corner of the world and compelled Pakistan to assist until they were ground into the dirt. And then left. Modern-day Roman punitive expedition. The next generation might forget what happened and want vengeance, but the survivors would have still been around to tell them ‘don’t piss off America! See what happened to us!’ Most ME cultures conflate mercy with weakness, restraint with softness, and act accordingly.
There was a logistical problem. We couldn’t supply our forces without Pakistan’s cooperation and retaining Pakistan’s cooperation required us not to follow the Taliban or Al Qaeda into Pakistan. Said another way your plan wasn’t a viable alternative.
The additional complication is that as soon as our forces set foot in Afghanistan and we had removed Afghanistan’s government we became the occupying power under conventions to which we are signatory and failing to conform to the obligations we assumed under those conventions would have been a war crime.
Total punitive war has its limitations in the nuclear age.
If I recall correctly OBL wanted us to do what we did, because of his experience with Russia. To some degree he was successful, bleeding our budget and our will.
“IMO once we drove the Taliban from power we should have continued to pursue them and Al-Qaeda wherever they went in that corner of the world and compelled Pakistan to assist until they were ground into the dirt.”
A good example of magical thinking regarding our military. If we made it our national priority and spent an ungodly amount of our GDP and were willing to lose lots of lives we could do this (probably) and overcome there logistical issues, but the follow on effects would have also been very costly. Not something you could do with a couple of battalions over a few months.
Steve