For Wars Before Being Against Them

I'm not always a fan of Robert Kagan, but he's right about this:

There is a new doctrine out there that seems to enjoy enormous cache among the smart foreign policy set: fight wars until they get hard, then quit. Vice President Biden seems to be a leading proponent of this approach. While a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden backed the Iraq War and spent the first few years after 2003 rightly calling on the Bush administration to send more troops. But when Bush finally wriggled himself free from the disastrous strategies of Donald Rumsfeld, Biden declared the situation hopeless and called instead for breaking up Iraq into three pieces. He then proceeded to oppose the very troop increase he had so long, and so courageously, fought for. And, of course, in opposing the surge, he had the whole foreign policy establishment on his side, epitomized by the wise people of the Baker-Hamilton commission.

Congress is brilliant at never taking responsibility. Its members always voted for the war before they voted against it -- in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The foreign policy establishment and intellectual world are much the same. They fully supported intervention in Vietnam, mostly supported intervention in Iraq and fully supported the war in Afghanistan -- until the wars got hard, or embarrassing and difficult to defend in polite company. Then they bailed, desperately trying to cover their tracks along the way, and offering reassuring images of what losing would look like.

People who oppose interventions on principle, I can stand. People who love war, and continue to support it when the war is going poorly, I can stand. People like Biden--I'd love to play poker with them. They're the types who check till the river then fold.

Afghanistan is a tricky case. Obviously, you have to invade. This is, after all, the good war. But I'm not convinced by these arguments that the focus on Iraq destroyed the war effort. The timing isn't quite right; Afghanistan seems to have gotten worse around 2005ish due to several factors, many of them domestic. The country continued to enjoy a steady supply of US aid. A counterfactual in which it received a lot more in the way of help may have been better; but the extent to which the US "bailed out" has been exaggerated.

How would a Biden who didn't invade Iraq deal with Afghanistan? Invade, set up shop, watch the place burn down, and then leave? Suppose you went back and told this guy the inevitable failure of this strategy. Well, he would still have to invade Afghanistan. And the war effort would still probably have failed, due to forces outside Biden's control.

I don't think either Party is seriously engaging this issue. The Democrats believe that it was good to invade Afghanistan; the US should have set up a government there; but Bush's faults can explain all of the problems. I don't think they've thought through the implications of what you do about a war that's both necessary and highly likely to fail. The Republicans want to surge everything.

Someday, we'll get into another conflict. This will enjoy broad support from all Americans. Then it will get hard, and people will bail. This is a crappy way to run a foreign policy. Go all in or go home.

We should just get Putin to run our foreign policy. Can you believe this guy? He's running a second-tier power, at best, yet runs circles around everyone else. He's always a couple of steps ahead. Can you imagine what he'd do with American-style power?

If Only Afghanistan Were Vietnam

From Obama's Afghanistan speech:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we're better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now -- and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance -- would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

Yet it would be great if Afghanistan were another Vietnam. In the popular imagination, there is a straight line from the Tet Offensive to US withdrawal from Saigon. Yet seven years separated those two events. In between, American and Vietnamese forces virtually eradicated the Viet Cong resistance within South Vietnam. There's really no dispute about this point.

The so-called "revisionists" think that South Vietnam could still have held after that point had US support continued against North Vietnamese (backed by the Soviet bloc) attacks. Whatever you think of this view, it's undoubtedly true that what ultimately ended the Vietnam war was the invasion of another sovereign country. The insurgency--while potent--was ended through exactly the sort of counter-insurgency tactics rediscovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obviously, this need not imply that those same tactics work in Afghanistan. But that's exactly my point. It would be great if Afghanistan were more like Vietnam, where counter-insurgency worked. It's the fact that it isn't like Vietnam that's causing all the trouble.

The Maginot Line

Here's super-investor Bill Gross on what it feels like to hold cash:

My point is to recognize, and to hope that you recognize, that an effective zero percent interest rate, as a price for hiding in a foxhole, is prohibitive. Like the American doughboys near France’s Maginot line in WWII – slumping day after day in a muddy, rat-infested pit – when the battalion commander finally blew his whistle to charge the enemy lines, it probably was accompanied by some sense of relief; anything, anything but this! Anything but .01%!

Leaving aside the WWI-WWII confusion, it's a very common perception to think that the Maginot line "didn't work", and the French deluded themselves by focusing on the past and hunkering down, while the Nazis sped forward through blitzkrieg.

It's true that the French battle plan didn't quite work out. But the Maginot line was actually a pretty good idea. Yes, the Germans could evade it by flanking and invading Belgium. But that was the whole point of the line. Instead of dealing with the Germans on home soil, you force them into Benelux, where the combined forces of the British, French, and million-odd Belgian and Dutch forces could bog the Germans down.

The initial German plan was forced by the Maginot line to play out exactly this way. Had that invasion happened, the Germans would have met vastly superior French armor and quite possibly would have dug in to another WWI-like stalemate. It was a phenomenal stroke of luck that resulted in the Germans switching to a plan that cut into the seemingly-impassable Ardennes to cut off the body of the Allied force in Belgium, more luck that the French failed to realize and respond to that, and yet more luck that French tanks didn't have enough gas.

But the Maginot Line itself worked exactly as intended, and could have won the war five years early had it not been for von Manstein and company.

Graveyard of Empires

One thing you hear all of the time is that "Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires". It's taken down everyone from Alexander the Great to the British to the Soviets, so America should probably stay away. Or else just go in all the way just to prove how America is so amazing.

Well, check out the history of Afghanistan on Wikipedia. You'll see that Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan (then Bactria) just fine, and Greeks ran empires in the region for hundreds of years. Other successful conquerors include the Persians, Scythians, Mongols, Arabs, Sikhs... the list really goes on. Historically, Afghanistan has been the stepping-stone of empire rather than its graveyard.

It's true, the British had some setbacks there. But ultimately both the British and Russians had victories in the region.

But none of this answers the question of whether Afghanistan can be "won" today or not. Iraq, for instance, has historically been very easy to conquer; and, yes, any country today with a sizable standing army probably would have found it reasonably easy to both conquer and pacify Iraq. India or China, if either had the logistics capacities and local defense bases, could probably have done a decent job at it. But it proved to be very difficult for America today nonetheless.

The Soviets, for instance, found Afghanistan tough going--even though the Russians enjoyed some success there over a hundred years ago. The past is very poor at predicting the outcome of insurgency today. Not even the Soviet example is a perfect indicator of how things may go in Afghanistan, as things are very different. There are no Stinger missiles or foreign countries supplying insurgents today, for instance.

Rather than misreading inapplicable historical examples, it would be nice if the media offered some more cost-benefit analysis on this sort of foreign adventure. Here, I'm genuinely agnostic: cutting and running would seriously hurt counter-terrorist operations, but even total success is not worth an infinite amount of money and lives. It seems silly to skimp and scrounge for every last penny on a health reform bill, but then say that because this particular war seems good in comparison to a pretty lousy one, it's worth throwing no end to money towards it.

It also seems odd to slam McChrystal for behaving as a neo-MacArthur in demanding more troops for the mission. Isn't that what Shinseki did before the Iraq War, before getting fired and then applauded for his willingness to speak up? It's probably true in both cases that generals shouldn't be the final determinants of troop levels (at least in wars of choice), because they aren't in a position to weigh the benefits of more troops with costs elsewhere. But really that's just a reason to stop engaging in wars of choice, so that these issues will stop rearing up.

The news already does a pretty poor job of covering international news; maybe if they finally do a poor enough job, no one will care, and these sorts of wars will stop happening.