THE WAR IN Afghanistan is the revenge
of the Iraq war. It was amid
the great debate about Iraq that
there was born the myth of Afghanistan
as the good war of “necessity”—the September
11 war. We had erred, American
liberals insisted; we had opted for the
wrong war in Mesopotamia
when we should have stayed
the course in Afghanistan. An
operative of the Democratic
Party, the “strategist” of its defeats
in the presidential elections
of 2000 and 2004, Robert
Shrum, once gave a straightforward
account of the genesis
of this mindset: “I was part
of the 2004 Kerry campaign
which elevated the idea of Afghanistan
as the ‘right war’
to conventional Democratic
wisdom. is was accurate as
criticism of the Bush administration,
but it was also reflexive
and perhaps by now even
misleading as policy.”
In his campaign in 2008,
Barack Obama was keen to make it
known that he was no pacifist who opposed
all wars; he only opposed “stupid
wars,” he said, and Iraq was his
prime exhibit of stupid wars.
Thus, a man who was devastating in his assessment
of the war in Mesopotamia was
ready to do war in the Hindu Kush.
Some months into his presidency, in
August 2009, Obama was to take up the
matter of Afghanistan before the Veterans
of Foreign Wars. He wasn’t exactly
their idea of a commander-in-chief, and
they were not exactly his base, but the
president would now claim a military
campaign of his own: “e insurgency
in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight,
and we won’t defeat it overnight.
is will not be quick, nor easy. But we
must never forget: is is not a war of
choice. is is a war of necessity. ose
who attacked America on September 11
are plotting to do so again. If left
unchecked, the Taliban insurgency
will mean an even larger safe haven
from which Al Qaeda could plot to kill
more Americans.”
ere was a contradiction at the heart
of this summons to war: Obama fell back
on September 11 as a casus belli in Afghanistan,
even as he underplayed the
menace of radical Islamism. We were not
to speak of the “war on terror,” Obama’s
administration had it. His heart and his
priorities lay elsewhere—health care, financial
reform, climate change, the redrawing
of the balance between the state
and the private sector, the state of our
public schools. No wonder he took his
time finalizing an Afghan war policy of
his own. He did so on December 1, at
West Point, practically a full year into his
presidency. ere was something dutiful
and reluctant about the speech, which
seemed to treat the war as
a campaign promise to be
fulfilled, a damnable, thankless
fight that could neither
be won nor abandoned—
something of Lyndon Johnson’s
attitude toward the war
that wrecked his presidency.
On different occasions, LBJ
called Vietnam a “bitch of a
war”; said, “I just don’t think
it is worth fighting for, and I
don’t think we can get out—
it’s just the biggest damn
mess”; and declared, “I don’t
think the people of the country
know much about Vietnam,
and I think they care a
hell of a lot less.”
That knowledge, and the
laments, didn’t rescue LBJ. Perhaps we
are a less ideological nation now; perhaps
we can relegate Afghanistan to
the obscurity it so richly deserves with
greater ease than LBJ and his contem-poraries could do with Vietnam. e jihadist
menace is portable nowadays. Al
Qaeda has homes aplenty beyond Afghanistan—
Yemen and Somalia are
new bases from which terror could be
waged. Besides, the United States didn’t
know—and still doesn’t—the Afghan cultural
and political landscape. We have no
worthy strategic partner in place; there
are only warlords and bandit chieftains
thrilled that the chaos and breakdown of
their country has pulled a great, wealthy
power into their midst. A culture of dependency
on foreign handouts has taken
root among the Afghans. We say we are
there to rebuild the Afghan state. But, in
truth, the place has never had central authority
worth its name.
Since Obama has not conveyed much
enthusiasm for the war, it is little surprise
that he has been unable to sell the
war to his allies at home. ree-fi fths
of the Democratic caucus in the House
of Representatives recently voted for an
amendment that would have required
the president to present a plan by next
April for the “safe, orderly and expeditious
redeployment” of U.S. troops
from Afghanistan.
Yet, despite all of this, Obama has chosen
to stay in the country and pursue a
counterinsurgency strategy. In its barest
outline, counterinsurgency is a war
for the loyalty of the native population.
There are determined insurgents, and
those you destroy; there are “accidental
guerrillas” who drifted into the fi ght, and
those you rehabilitate and buy off ; there
is the great mass on the fence who wait to
see if the foreign power, and the dependent
native regime, have the means and
the will to prevail. The American military
planners prosecuting this Afghan
campaign are shrewd enough to recognize
the diff erences between Afghanistan
and Iraq, but the template of the Iraq
war hovers over the Afghan battle. e
“Anbar Awakening” broke the alliance between
the Sunnis of Iraq and the jihadists
who had converged on that country
from Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia
and Libya; now, the Americans need
a “Pashtun Awakening” that would break
with the Taliban. In Iraq, a vast militia of
some 100,000 recruits, the Sons of Iraq,
were peeled off from the insurgency. A
defection of a similar magnitude is the
goal of the American command.
Will it work? I bring to this American
venture in Afghanistan an ambivalence I
didn’t toward Iraq. But we can’t quit this
endeavor as of yet. In a perfect world, my
own preference would have been to avoid
deep entanglement in Afghanistan, but
we are beyond that point. We ought to
at least give the brilliant David Petraeus
a chance to fi nd out whether our strategy
can succeed, even as we recognize that—
thanks to the steep obstacles posed by
Afghanistan, the evident lack of enthusiasm
for this war from Obama, and the
outright hostility to the entire enterprise
from Washington’s governing party—we
may be asking more of the general than
he or any military commander can deliver.
Petraeus surely understands the diffi cult
situation in which he fi nds himself. Nearly
a quarter-century ago, in his Ph.D. dissertation,
“ e American Military and the
Lessons of Vietnam,” he wrote that, when
it comes to military interventions, “time
and patience are not American virtues in
abundant supply.” He quotes, poignantly,
the verse of a “disgruntled general” who
bristled at the burdens civilians throw at
military commanders:
I am not allowed to run the train
e whistle I can’t blow.
I am not allowed to say how fast
e railroad trains can go.
I am not allowed to shoot off steam
Nor even clang the bell.
But let it jump the goddam tracks
And see who catches hell!
Fouad Ajami teaches at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Stud-
ies.
