Sunday, October 18, 2009

A Tale of Two Kerries

I was about to congratulate Senator John Kerry for encouraging Obama to weigh his decisions carefully before sending another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan.

Speaking from Kabul, Kerry said,

"Look, it would be entirely irresponsible for the president of the United States to commit more troops to this country, when we don't even have an election finished and know who the president is and what kind of government we're working in."

But it's hard to be really pumped about John Kerry for any significant amount of time. I next read a CNN article titled, "This is not Vietnam, Kerry says of Afghanistan." Speaking to John King, Kerry explained,

"We are here in Afghanistan because people attacked us here in the most significant attack against the United States since Pearl Harbor. We are here because there are still people at large who are plotting against the United States of America. And we are here because the stability of this region is a critical strategic interest to the United States. So the basic assumptions here are very, very different from what we experienced years ago in Vietnam."

It's hard to know where to begin dissecting this blather. First, the nation of Afghanistan did not attack us on 9/11. It was small band of Al Qaeda operatives who are not in Afghanistan at all according to General Petraeus, and have not been for several years, according to President Karzai. If there are Al Qaeda operatives in the region, rather than, say, Yemen or Somalia, they are in Pakistan. As for the strategic importance of the region- Afghanistan is strategic for the same reason Vietnam allegedly was- a fear of a domino effect.

For someone to say Afghanistan and Vietnam are not similar is to misunderstand Vietnam or Afghanistan. In Kerry's case, I'll assume it's the latter. In both conflicts, we were supporting an unpopular, corrupt government, fighting insurgents who could easily blend in with the local population, who were also being aided by a foreign government- in this case Pakistan's ISI. The Taliban are not as militarily powerful as the Viet Cong, and while the VC were more popular among the local population, they certainly benefitted over the years from an anti-occuption, nationalist sentiment.

Finally, Kerry, who had been talked about as a supporter of the Biden plan, came out strong for the McChrystal escalation plan:

"I do not believe that a counterterrorism strategy all by itself without a sufficient level of counterinsurgency will work, because if you don’t have a presence on the ground that’s effective it’s almost impossible to collect the kind of intelligence that you need to be equally effective in your counterterrorism."

This might actually be true, though if we conduct our operations from Pakistan, I imagine we would have the Pakistani military to support our operations on the ground. Kerry is ultimately hanging his hat on the idea of a successful counter insurgency in partnership with some Jeffersonian reformer. Since it looks like in reality our partner will still be Karzai, he's going to have to abandon his idealist philosophy and explain how he can ask a man to be the last man in Afghanistan to die for a mistake.

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