Understanding "the Good War" on a day of reflection
It's been 8 years now since the singular tragedy where for the first time since Pearl Harbor a foreign attacker killed thousands of Americans in a sneak attack. For the first time since the War of 1812 an external force both visited this kind of carnage on the U.S. mainland and succeeded in destroying iconic symbols of our nation. The combination of the targeting of civilians, the scale of the attack and the modern history of the U.S. where even "total war" never extended to the home front all combined to make the events of that day sui generis.
At the time it seemed that we had reached a point unmoored from any traditional construct of history, foreign policy, even domestic politics. The end of the Cold War had led to a unipolar world where the U.S. and U.S. led international institutions like NATO, the IMF and the World Bank would take the lead and gradually the entire world would abandon liberal democratic values, centrist trade policies and open, mixed economies. The U.S. would maintain its military for rising threats such as China, a resurgent Russia, etc., but diplomacy would steer the world through an era of indefinite peace, where the flash-points would be amenable to negotiation like the disputes between India and Pakistan or China and Taiwan. If rogue regimes acted out broad international consensus would develop to set the situation right, such as during the First Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait. By 2000, the apparent peace dividend was such that even conventional domestic policies were changing in new ways. While Republicans had, since Reagan, abandoned their mantle as deficit hawks, the point was to permit tax cuts, not to expand social entitlements. George W. Bush, however, ran in a climate that's hard to remember now, where "compassionate conservatism" was an idea that at least the press treated with some seriousness (and which was embodied in No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D.) The biggest political issues at the time were whether the Federal Government would fund embryonic stem-cell research as well as the Education and Medicare initiatives; Google was filing a patent for its search algorithm; in the developed world less than 60% of people had cell phones, a figure being rapidly approached by the entire world's population. For me personally, as a 24 year old, 9/11 currently marks about 2/3 of the way into my life, and about half of my life that I consciously remember occurred before and after.
Just to try to define the epoch-making quality of the events of that day, consider the following: by a fluke of luck, an explosive laden van parked in a fortuitously strong point in the structure of the WTC parking garage, one of the towers destroyed on 9/11 escaped annihilation less than a decade before a different method would be successful in destroying it. The death toll from the first WTC attack was tiny in comparison to 9/11, but make no mistake, it was the placement, not the lack of energy in that bomb that made that event only a minor tragedy. In the interim between the attacks on the WTC, American government institutions were attacked in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen with at least a dozen American fatalities in each instance and in the U.S. In the pre-9/11 world direct attacks on U.S. institutions abroad--a troop barracks, two of our embassies and a warship--that killed nearly one hundred Americans and hundreds more citizens of other countries made less of an impression on the average citizen than an Islamist attack aimed at Australian vacationers at a nightclub in Bali that killed 4 Australians, 1 Japanese and 15 Indonesians.
Pearl Harbor is often thought of an analogue to 9/11, and in a very important sense that's true: a surprise attack killing thousands of Americans forced America into a struggle which it had thus far stayed out of. On the other hand the analogy is significantly flawed; World War II was a global military conflict and Washington was involved in providing the British materiel and was far from neutral, unknowing or unaffected before being drawn into the war; whether or not isolationism was a good policy was a subject of impassioned debate. People were arguing against going to war after one country had conquered or pacified virtually all of Continental Europe. On 9/11 the American people had little idea--unlike their attackers--of the geopolitical conflict that had been swirling for (depending who you ask) years, decades, or centuries of which the 9/11 attacks were a piece. Americans were vaguely aware of a history of assassinations and coups in the Islamic world, of the wars and negotiations between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution and subsequent hostage crisis, Iran-Contra and perhaps the Iran-Iraq War, the First Gulf War and perhaps our military presence in Saudi Arabia, but few had an intuitive feeling that these historical events were tied up in some arc, much less some over-arching struggle. Whether such a struggle exists is questionable, but on 9/11 it is clear that our attackers and their sympathizers who cheered in the streets of Arab cities were aware of it very acutely, whereas Americans generally were entirely oblivious.
These facts raise some pertinent questions about the two wars that we have embarked upon since the attacks. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable; while the hijackers were Arabs all but two were from the Arabian Peninsula proper, Al Qaeda has a return address in the incredibly extremist Taliban, the de facto government of Afghanistan at the time. Visiting military action upon the Taliban after it failed to hand over Bin Laden and continued to provide a haven for Al Qaeda was both justified and a political inevitability. However, conditions in Afghanistan at the time obscured the difficulty in imposing sustained military-imposed regime change (especially when a "democracy" must be installed) and this temporary appearance of success prevented us from asking hard questions about what we hoped to achieve by invading Afghanistan. On the surface, this might seem obvious: dismantle Al Qaeda by capturing or killing as many of its leaders and foot-soldiers as possible, and deny it a safe haven in Afghanistan by exterminating the Taliban.
This seemed plausibly easy; when we went in and invaded Afghanistan we did so by allying ourselves with an embattled alliance of ethnic majorities in a small redoubt in Northern Afghanistan--the Northern Alliance--and forging to the southeast. These warriors were in dire straits on 9/11: Less than a week before, Al Qaeda had succeeded in a long-term goal of assassinating their brilliant military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in a suicide bombing, and the coincidence in timing perhaps saved the alliance, as it was disintegrating in the wake of the assassination, rapidly decreasing territorial control, and a worsening military position. For them, the reaction of America was a god-send, and the initial reason why the war seemed such a success was due in large part to their help. Their soldiers, comprised mostly of Afghan ethnic minorities like Tajiks and Uzbeks, put an Afghan face on the initial and apparent destruction of the Taliban, reducing Western casualties, and creating less tension with local civilian population.
Being released from such a tyrannical regime also provided a backdrop of euphoria and optimism upon which the initial impressions of the Afghan campaign as "the good war" were built.
Almost all the benefits afforded us in Afghanistan were completely the opposite in Iraq. Instead of having a ready, indigenous force to do most of the fighting, the "shock and awe" and Humvees rolling up Highway 1 had the appearance of an invasion, not a liberation. While Saddam had been a monster, his wrath had been exercised in full on only a minority of the population. The regime was mainly secular and interested in political enemies, not infidels, and its intrusion into daily life, while evil and tyrannical, was far from the atavistic public executions of the Taliban. While the Shi'a and Kurds were in general probably genuinely glad to be freed from Saddam, the Sunnis probably were not, and even amongst those who disliked Saddam, the unknown of a U.S. military occupation was fraught with risk and must have seemed a grim prospect. While in Afghanistan only a handful of extremely religious Pashtuns presented a hard corps of Taliban "dead-enders," in Iraq a chaotic mix of Baathist holdouts, Sunni hard-liners soon to become allied with international jihadists, and Shi'a militias all provided ready candidates for insurgency and insurrection. Given these starting points, it's almost impossible to understand how 8 years on from the invasion of Afghanistan and 6 and a half years from the invasion of Iraq that soldiers in Afghanistan are now more than 10 times likely to be a combat casualty. Whatever our goal was in invading Iraq--the big lie of their regime posing some imminent threat to the U.S. having been exposed and their having no relation to 9/11--it seems at least plausible that we might extricate ourselves from that country in a situation where security will remain a major concern, but not immersed in civil war, and with a relatively stable regime (for the experiment of a Federalist system in a tribal, multi-factional Arab country.)
The fact that the war-like Pashtuns in the "tiger park" of the Hindu Kush are proving even more difficult to pacify is no surprise to any student of history. Where the British failed twice and the Soviets failed we seek success. But what is that success? Killing Osama Bin Laden? Dismantling the Al Qaeda? The Taliban?
The unfortunate fact is that while in Iraq we are fighting Arabs whose nationals did not attack us, in Afghanistan we are not attacking Arabs, unless they are foreign jihadists, at all. Bin Laden is a Saudi of Yemeni heritage, and the connections of radical Islam spread throughout the Islamic world. Bin Laden's previous patron was the half-Arab half-black-African nation of Sudan, and the Taliban--while made up of Pashtuns itself-- was in large part the creation of a radical faction of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, a body mostly made up of Punjabis who happen to be Muslms. These radical Islamists feel that (like most of Pakistan's army, probably) Pakistans interests are served by an anti-India neighbor in Afghanistan, a state of affairs ensured if they are radical Islamists like the Taliban.
What am I getting at? For all those who say that there is no battle with Islam, that is true, but unlike in World War II we are not fighting a single clique or political entity. Al Qaeda is more like a franchise--radical jihadist terrorism against the West--than it is a single group of individuals. There can be no equivalent to VE day when Bin Laden is killed or captured and the resistance melts away. So we must ask ourselves: what do we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan and Pakistan? I would argue that we are serving our strategic goal of protecting our country by continually disrupting Al Qaeda's ability to organize, organize people and money, because they're too busy scuttling from safehouse to safehouse. This open-ended conflict against a self-renewing, ideological opponent might seem like it parallels Vietnam. But there's a crucial difference: Vietnam, in hindsight, didn't matter. The domino theory was sort of correct... Laos and Cambodia became Communist, but those countries were of little strategic import and eventually doctrinaire Communism failed there and world-wide anyways.
Islamism is not going away and the Al Qaeda brand, given a home, will metastasize and give those who would slaughter each and every one of us a haven from which to plot that slaughter. The initial campaign in Afghanistan may have seemed like it was too easy, in retrospect, and now we are seeing what happens when a group of people who have been at war for damn near 40 years in a row now do when they feel the oppressive jackboot of an invading army--any invading army--and ideology plays a strong role in this too. Whether we like it or not we will face the threat of attack from those who do see history as a narrative where the West in general and America and Israel in particular are villains that have conspired to oppress and destroy Islam, and who in turn must be murdered. We can start rolling up the carpet in Iraq and Afghanistan, but before we do, we must understand this, and be ready to deal with the consequences of those decisions.
However, while we
At the time it seemed that we had reached a point unmoored from any traditional construct of history, foreign policy, even domestic politics. The end of the Cold War had led to a unipolar world where the U.S. and U.S. led international institutions like NATO, the IMF and the World Bank would take the lead and gradually the entire world would abandon liberal democratic values, centrist trade policies and open, mixed economies. The U.S. would maintain its military for rising threats such as China, a resurgent Russia, etc., but diplomacy would steer the world through an era of indefinite peace, where the flash-points would be amenable to negotiation like the disputes between India and Pakistan or China and Taiwan. If rogue regimes acted out broad international consensus would develop to set the situation right, such as during the First Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait. By 2000, the apparent peace dividend was such that even conventional domestic policies were changing in new ways. While Republicans had, since Reagan, abandoned their mantle as deficit hawks, the point was to permit tax cuts, not to expand social entitlements. George W. Bush, however, ran in a climate that's hard to remember now, where "compassionate conservatism" was an idea that at least the press treated with some seriousness (and which was embodied in No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D.) The biggest political issues at the time were whether the Federal Government would fund embryonic stem-cell research as well as the Education and Medicare initiatives; Google was filing a patent for its search algorithm; in the developed world less than 60% of people had cell phones, a figure being rapidly approached by the entire world's population. For me personally, as a 24 year old, 9/11 currently marks about 2/3 of the way into my life, and about half of my life that I consciously remember occurred before and after.
Just to try to define the epoch-making quality of the events of that day, consider the following: by a fluke of luck, an explosive laden van parked in a fortuitously strong point in the structure of the WTC parking garage, one of the towers destroyed on 9/11 escaped annihilation less than a decade before a different method would be successful in destroying it. The death toll from the first WTC attack was tiny in comparison to 9/11, but make no mistake, it was the placement, not the lack of energy in that bomb that made that event only a minor tragedy. In the interim between the attacks on the WTC, American government institutions were attacked in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen with at least a dozen American fatalities in each instance and in the U.S. In the pre-9/11 world direct attacks on U.S. institutions abroad--a troop barracks, two of our embassies and a warship--that killed nearly one hundred Americans and hundreds more citizens of other countries made less of an impression on the average citizen than an Islamist attack aimed at Australian vacationers at a nightclub in Bali that killed 4 Australians, 1 Japanese and 15 Indonesians.
Pearl Harbor is often thought of an analogue to 9/11, and in a very important sense that's true: a surprise attack killing thousands of Americans forced America into a struggle which it had thus far stayed out of. On the other hand the analogy is significantly flawed; World War II was a global military conflict and Washington was involved in providing the British materiel and was far from neutral, unknowing or unaffected before being drawn into the war; whether or not isolationism was a good policy was a subject of impassioned debate. People were arguing against going to war after one country had conquered or pacified virtually all of Continental Europe. On 9/11 the American people had little idea--unlike their attackers--of the geopolitical conflict that had been swirling for (depending who you ask) years, decades, or centuries of which the 9/11 attacks were a piece. Americans were vaguely aware of a history of assassinations and coups in the Islamic world, of the wars and negotiations between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution and subsequent hostage crisis, Iran-Contra and perhaps the Iran-Iraq War, the First Gulf War and perhaps our military presence in Saudi Arabia, but few had an intuitive feeling that these historical events were tied up in some arc, much less some over-arching struggle. Whether such a struggle exists is questionable, but on 9/11 it is clear that our attackers and their sympathizers who cheered in the streets of Arab cities were aware of it very acutely, whereas Americans generally were entirely oblivious.
These facts raise some pertinent questions about the two wars that we have embarked upon since the attacks. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable; while the hijackers were Arabs all but two were from the Arabian Peninsula proper, Al Qaeda has a return address in the incredibly extremist Taliban, the de facto government of Afghanistan at the time. Visiting military action upon the Taliban after it failed to hand over Bin Laden and continued to provide a haven for Al Qaeda was both justified and a political inevitability. However, conditions in Afghanistan at the time obscured the difficulty in imposing sustained military-imposed regime change (especially when a "democracy" must be installed) and this temporary appearance of success prevented us from asking hard questions about what we hoped to achieve by invading Afghanistan. On the surface, this might seem obvious: dismantle Al Qaeda by capturing or killing as many of its leaders and foot-soldiers as possible, and deny it a safe haven in Afghanistan by exterminating the Taliban.
This seemed plausibly easy; when we went in and invaded Afghanistan we did so by allying ourselves with an embattled alliance of ethnic majorities in a small redoubt in Northern Afghanistan--the Northern Alliance--and forging to the southeast. These warriors were in dire straits on 9/11: Less than a week before, Al Qaeda had succeeded in a long-term goal of assassinating their brilliant military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in a suicide bombing, and the coincidence in timing perhaps saved the alliance, as it was disintegrating in the wake of the assassination, rapidly decreasing territorial control, and a worsening military position. For them, the reaction of America was a god-send, and the initial reason why the war seemed such a success was due in large part to their help. Their soldiers, comprised mostly of Afghan ethnic minorities like Tajiks and Uzbeks, put an Afghan face on the initial and apparent destruction of the Taliban, reducing Western casualties, and creating less tension with local civilian population.
Being released from such a tyrannical regime also provided a backdrop of euphoria and optimism upon which the initial impressions of the Afghan campaign as "the good war" were built.
Almost all the benefits afforded us in Afghanistan were completely the opposite in Iraq. Instead of having a ready, indigenous force to do most of the fighting, the "shock and awe" and Humvees rolling up Highway 1 had the appearance of an invasion, not a liberation. While Saddam had been a monster, his wrath had been exercised in full on only a minority of the population. The regime was mainly secular and interested in political enemies, not infidels, and its intrusion into daily life, while evil and tyrannical, was far from the atavistic public executions of the Taliban. While the Shi'a and Kurds were in general probably genuinely glad to be freed from Saddam, the Sunnis probably were not, and even amongst those who disliked Saddam, the unknown of a U.S. military occupation was fraught with risk and must have seemed a grim prospect. While in Afghanistan only a handful of extremely religious Pashtuns presented a hard corps of Taliban "dead-enders," in Iraq a chaotic mix of Baathist holdouts, Sunni hard-liners soon to become allied with international jihadists, and Shi'a militias all provided ready candidates for insurgency and insurrection. Given these starting points, it's almost impossible to understand how 8 years on from the invasion of Afghanistan and 6 and a half years from the invasion of Iraq that soldiers in Afghanistan are now more than 10 times likely to be a combat casualty. Whatever our goal was in invading Iraq--the big lie of their regime posing some imminent threat to the U.S. having been exposed and their having no relation to 9/11--it seems at least plausible that we might extricate ourselves from that country in a situation where security will remain a major concern, but not immersed in civil war, and with a relatively stable regime (for the experiment of a Federalist system in a tribal, multi-factional Arab country.)
The fact that the war-like Pashtuns in the "tiger park" of the Hindu Kush are proving even more difficult to pacify is no surprise to any student of history. Where the British failed twice and the Soviets failed we seek success. But what is that success? Killing Osama Bin Laden? Dismantling the Al Qaeda? The Taliban?
The unfortunate fact is that while in Iraq we are fighting Arabs whose nationals did not attack us, in Afghanistan we are not attacking Arabs, unless they are foreign jihadists, at all. Bin Laden is a Saudi of Yemeni heritage, and the connections of radical Islam spread throughout the Islamic world. Bin Laden's previous patron was the half-Arab half-black-African nation of Sudan, and the Taliban--while made up of Pashtuns itself-- was in large part the creation of a radical faction of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, a body mostly made up of Punjabis who happen to be Muslms. These radical Islamists feel that (like most of Pakistan's army, probably) Pakistans interests are served by an anti-India neighbor in Afghanistan, a state of affairs ensured if they are radical Islamists like the Taliban.
What am I getting at? For all those who say that there is no battle with Islam, that is true, but unlike in World War II we are not fighting a single clique or political entity. Al Qaeda is more like a franchise--radical jihadist terrorism against the West--than it is a single group of individuals. There can be no equivalent to VE day when Bin Laden is killed or captured and the resistance melts away. So we must ask ourselves: what do we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan and Pakistan? I would argue that we are serving our strategic goal of protecting our country by continually disrupting Al Qaeda's ability to organize, organize people and money, because they're too busy scuttling from safehouse to safehouse. This open-ended conflict against a self-renewing, ideological opponent might seem like it parallels Vietnam. But there's a crucial difference: Vietnam, in hindsight, didn't matter. The domino theory was sort of correct... Laos and Cambodia became Communist, but those countries were of little strategic import and eventually doctrinaire Communism failed there and world-wide anyways.
Islamism is not going away and the Al Qaeda brand, given a home, will metastasize and give those who would slaughter each and every one of us a haven from which to plot that slaughter. The initial campaign in Afghanistan may have seemed like it was too easy, in retrospect, and now we are seeing what happens when a group of people who have been at war for damn near 40 years in a row now do when they feel the oppressive jackboot of an invading army--any invading army--and ideology plays a strong role in this too. Whether we like it or not we will face the threat of attack from those who do see history as a narrative where the West in general and America and Israel in particular are villains that have conspired to oppress and destroy Islam, and who in turn must be murdered. We can start rolling up the carpet in Iraq and Afghanistan, but before we do, we must understand this, and be ready to deal with the consequences of those decisions.
However, while we
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