Fareed Zakaria has opened up some old wounds with his recent column on 9/11, asserting that we over-reacted to the events of that awful day. Go to the link if you wish to read his take. James Joyner makes the proper reply that at this point we can’t really know what role our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq actually played in producing Al Qaeda’s current reduced operational status.
I find the inevitable ensuing discussions dreary and unproductive. I made the point I wanted to back in the comments of the post and won’t return to the snakepit I’m sure it will become.
However, there was one thing about the comments that I wanted to point out. Why do people confuse justification with prudence? The arguments about Iraq these days mostly center on after the fact assessments in flat contradiction of what sincere, intelligent people of good will not only the United States but also in France, England, Russia, and China believed about Iraq in the years leading up to our invasion of Iraq.
What I find fascinating is that people on both sides of the argument—those who continue to support our invasion of Iraq and those who opposed (or have come to oppose it)—appear to hold a similar view, namely that if the invasion could be justified then it was the right thing to do. Some who now oppose the invasion certainly appear to me to be arguing the appeal to consequences fallacy, i.e. they’re denying it could have been justified because they don’t believe it was the right thing to do (rather than the other way around).
In my view whether the invasion was justified is largely moot. More important is whether it could have been brought to a successful conclusion in a timeframe and at a cost acceptable to the American people. If not (as I believed then and feel perfectly vindicated in having believed), then all the justification in the world wouldn’t have made it prudent.
Whether the war in Iraq will be deemed to have been successful from our point of view remains to be seen. If Iraq is a functioning liberal democracy in ten years, it might well be deemed successful. I think the odds are pretty long.
“In my view whether the invasion was justified is largely moot. More important is whether it could have been brought to a successful conclusion in a timeframe and at a cost acceptable to the American people. If not (as I believed then and feel perfectly vindicated in having believed), then all the justification in the world wouldn’t have made it prudent.”
I think that you are probably correct. The only counterargument might be the Zinni wargames which predicted a better outcome using something over 300,000 troops, but that might have been an initial cost that was deemed not acceptable. If we had done that, not disbanded the Iraqi army, not taken apart the governing structure of the country and at the same time made a successful attempt at some resolution with Iran, it might have been an acceptable cost.
Too many ifs. Better to never have invaded. I know that you also disagreed with invading Afghanistan, but I would also add in the opportunity cost of losing Afghanistan. While the opponents of the current plan worry about the signaling of drawdowns, maybe, in 2011, what stronger signal could we have given than ignoring the place after our first 6months there? They know we will leave.
Steve
Regardless of the fantasies of those who believe that a Desert Storm-style force could have resolved the problems in Afghanistan quickly, such a force could never have been supplied and would have been prohibitively expensive. As I’ve documented amply before supplying a soldier in Afghanistan costs three times what supplying the same soldier in Iraq costs. The force required would have been more than three times the size of the largest force we had in Iraq. Consequently, the cost per year would have been around ten times the cost of the force in Iraq for a year.
In my view the U. S. military, to my surprise and delight, hit upon a plan for conquering Afghanistan that would work: a small force acting as a force multiplier for indigenous insurgents. A larger force wouldn’t have improved on that. It would have rendered it ineffectual.
The problem in Afghanistan is as it always has been. So, you conquer Afghanistan. What then? Pacifying it remains beyond our abilities.
I’ve thought of a new way of describing what I think our optimal strategy is for Afghanistan. Rather than fighting a counter-insurgency to enable the corrupt and incompetent Karzai government to establish control over the whole country fight an insurgency to get into the Taliban’s OODA loop and prevent them from establishing control over the country.
Methinks we need the cover of some form of legitimacy to remain in Afghanistan. I think the advantage of your plan is that it would take a lot fewer people. Would we be willing to do what it takes to conduct an insurgency? How would me move around undetected? Might be workable.
Steve
OT- The comments at OTB have been worse than usual lately. I hope they improve.
Steve
You’ve noticed, too? There’s been some backchannel discussion of it among the associate bloggers there (largely instigated by me). The content of the comments is bad enough but the tone is worse. I also find it nettling when people make outlandish statements about facts, refuse to back up their assertions, and insist that you write a book in response to their tossed-off quips.
I think the technical aspects of the site overhaul reduced people’s willingness to inbed links, and frankly, I’m not sure you can inbed links anymore. And whether one needs to inbed links that often, I suspect it changes the tone of the site, particularly for new people. One of my earliest posts at OTB was a disagreements with which I was essentially told to show my work, and I did. I expected that I would have to do so if I wanted to be treated seriously.
The only counterargument might be the Zinni wargames which predicted a better outcome using something over 300,000 troops, but that might have been an initial cost that was deemed not acceptable. If we had done that, not disbanded the Iraqi army, not taken apart the governing structure of the country and at the same time made a successful attempt at some resolution with Iran, it might have been an acceptable cost.
Success or failure in Iraq has been largely determined by choice of strategic goals. Saddam Hussien had stuck his thumb in the eye of the internatioal community for too long by 2002 (including long-term efforts to co-opt Security Council members) to be ignored. Containment was no longer working. The question was what to do about it.
We chose to invade, conquer and nation-build. That automatically meant a commitment of not less than a decade in order to achieve the goals – and probably much longer. Such long-term planning isn’t exactly a strong suit of a nation that changes foreign policy about once every five years, on average.
OTOH, if he had decided to go in, kill everyone that needed killing (Saddam and his inner-most circle) and then installed a puppet government, we could have been in and out in a couple of years or so. We had already wrecked Iraq’s (already suspect) economy with 12 years of sanctions while allowing Saddam to remain in power – hard to imagine a puppet dictatorship being much worse.
And all of this happened in the shadow of a much larger strategic problem – what to do about Iran? Iran is why we left Saddam in power, and Iran was part of the reason to establish a friendly government in Iraq. But having already made the decision to turn Afghanistan into something at least partially resembling a 19th century European nation-state (if not a 20th century version), the Bush Administration choose to follow the same idea in Iraq. (Insert a quip HERE about consistency to satsify one’s own political leanings.)
Seven years later we still have the problem of what to do about Iran. We don’t have any good options, and we haven’t had any since the Shah was overthrown. There can’t be any reproachment with the current government (and I don’t mean Ahmandinijad, or however the hell it’s spelled), and there never will be. I doubt if the rebellious forces of last year’s Presidential election would have been any more hospitable to our interests – nationalism runs strong, and we’ve got a reasonably bad history of pissing around in their affairs. Besides, last year’s efforts seemed at least as much a complaint about incompetent government (one sympathizes) as a cry for freedom.
I think our only real option with Iran is to keep muddling through with policies designed to check their influence as best we can. There are natural barriers to any Iranian expansionist dreams anyway, and those should be exploited.
And short of bombing their facilities I don’t see any way to stop them from getting what used to be simply called The Bomb. Look at it from Iran’s point of view – they have one, two, three, four, five nuclear powers in their vicinity, and that doesn’t count a rather large foreign power from half-way around the globe that has recently occupied two nations on their borders. Any sane government in Iran (and most of the non-sane ones too) will want nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them as insurance against all these other nations.
Some of the documents of “Desert Crossing”, as the exercise was called have been de-classified and made public. The strategy called for 400,000 troops, many of whom would be used for post-invasion security. Even assuming a very low casualty rate, the number killed would certainly have exceeded those actually killed by a wide margin and Americans already balked at that number. Additionally, following the cuts and reorganizations of the 1990s it’s not really clear whether such a force could have been deployed.