Hot Button #3: On Afghanistan

I didn't like our last President. In fact for the last 8 years I devoted pretty much my entire political life to railing against his policies to anyone who would hear. Needless to say my wife, who was not interested in politics until recently, was irritated constantly.

I hated his policies on economics, cutting taxes while increasing spending. I loathed the Patriot Act, as it took many rights away from private citizens that are the price one has to bear to live in a free society. I despised his prescription drug plan, The "No Child Left Behind" bill, and numerous other insane policies that seemed bent on rupturing our country at its seams.

But what I had the biggest problem with was his administrations defense policies.

For a full disclosure, I admit I was all for the war in Afghanistan. The government of that country was harboring an organization that directly attacked us and caused massive, directed civilian casualties. In order to prevent another such event from taking place, our military might needed to be brought entirely to bear on the place. Our CIA needed to dig through the financial records to find out who financed it, no matter how inconvenient the answers that came up might have been. We needed to destroy utterly any threat to the continued peace of our civilization. We still do.

But even on the outset of this war, one I consider to be just, the policies of the Bush administration seemed designed to fail in a most spectacular fashion. We instituted the "Rumsfeld Doctrine", wherein it was believed that a small, technologically superior force could systematically destroy any enemy. That simply with small, mobile forces on the ground, air back-up and superior weapons we could win against an enemy entrenched on home ground, one that does not so much have a political problem with our nation as an ideological one. They do not believe we can be a friend or an ally. They wish us and our entire way of life destroyed.

But wars are not won on the cheap, they are won on the battlefield.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine took the place of two sensible, historically accurate one: The Powell Doctrine, which determines when force can be used successfully, and the doctrine of Overwhelming Force. Powell understood, through a lifetime of military and combat service and a dedication to the art and realities of armed conflict that the way to win efficiently and quickly was through not only superior technology, but through brutal, overwhelming, crushing force with the hearts and wills of the nation firmly behind the troops. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Move into a hostile area in overwhelming numbers, root out the people trying to kill you, secure the area with a base of operations, and move the rest of the forces not concerned with security to the next hostile area. Hold and move, hold and move.

But what the Bush Administration did was not only unconscionable from a humanitarian standpoint (abandoning people to a hostile force those who may or may not have helped you, the enemy doesn't know but is VERY interested in finding out, is frowned upon) but from a purely military one as well. What kind of strategy allows an enemy to constantly outmaneuver it's forces? To flank it, harry it, set traps both behind and ahead since nobody is minding the shop?

Then they simply moved on to another ENTIRELY UNRELATED country. I was no fan of Saddam, but we really needed someone in the halls of power to stop thinking with their testicles and spend some time in their brain. Saddam was the only leader on an Islamic country that didn't have some form of Sharia Law. He constantly waged an ideological campaign against the very types of radical Islam that had attacked our people. And yet, it seems, we had nothing more pressing going on than kicking over his little anthill. As dangerous as he was, or seemed to be, apparently nobody in the last administration had heard the adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".

Once again we did it on the (relatively) cheap. The only reason there was any success of any kind was that they already had basic western systems in place. We didn't, and still don't, have that in Afghanistan. It is essentially a beautifully barren landscape of warring Islamic factions. And the only thing in common to all of them is a single unifying idea: If you aren't from around here, and have a gun, we will kill you. They have proven their mettle against some of the most aggressive and powerful armies in the world, throughout all of history. Sure, they are taking us on, but remember before us were the Russians. And before that the Persians were given a black eye. Before that the mighty Mongol Hordes were harassed, attacked, and eventually assimilated. These are not people to be taken lightly.

And yet the mistakes of the past administration (which the new President can't seem to tell people enough about) Has compounded the errors of the last. The general in charge of the theater requested 80,000 additional troops. President Obama decided to send 34,000. The necessary number by my (entirely amateur) estimation? 500,000 to 1,000,000 troops. And here is why.

There are about 28 million people in Afghanistan, spread over an area of 252,000 square miles with pretty sparse population density except in urban areas. In order to secure the urban areas (where about 70% of the population is) would require a pretty minimal force, say 100,000 people whose sole job would be keeping the area secure and letting life go on in a nominally normal fashion. That leaves 400,000 (at the lower end) to cover the rest of the territory, set up listening posts, map out caves, root out the enemy and destroy them.

That's around 2 people for every 3 miles by my count. The ability to force the enemy to abandon their positions would be absolute. The certainty of finding another hiding place in the face of such a force would dwindle to nothing pretty quickly. And with nowhere to run to, no place to hide, and no way to flank, the militants would be destroyed utterly. In the meantime, those security forces and administrative staff in the population centers could start to affecting the necessary changes which would prevent 9/11 from repeating itself.

Imagine the effect that would have on the global Jihadi movement. It would be a clear communication of national will, of the lengths we are willing to go to in order to preserve our way of life. Mess with us, and we will crush you. None will remember you but the sand.

There are those who say overwhelming force will not work against an army that refuses to meet massive troops head-on. This is true if the troops are kept massed and waiting for the opposition, but in a guerrilla war as this one has become forming smaller battalions that outnumber the enemy 50 to 1 would be a decisive advantage. Sun Tzu never said a smaller force always has the upper hand, just that it had options.

We applied all the military might we could muster in the World Wars, and the result was incontrovertible. Now, as then, we a re fighting an enemy who seeks to destroy our way of life. There was no quarter that could be drawn in the fight against the ideology we opposed in those wars and there is not here either. You cannot fight an idea with a gun, but you can make the outcome of supporting it so certain that none will dare try to harm you.

War is, indeed, Hell. But in some cases the alternative is far worse. The challenge for any free society is to see the difference between war's desolation and that which the desolation seeks to protect us from, then to commit to the course which is least damaging. It is not, as John Kennedy once said of Vietnam, like taking a drink, the effect wears off and you have to have another. War must be waged as an absolute; if the people of the nation that a war is protecting cannot find it within themselves to prosecute that war to it's final conclusion, then they must ask themselves if their own lives are worth living.

A conservative believes that war is a protective force, protecting our borders, our security, our way of life. War should never be taken on lightly, never preemptively, and never, never done in half measures.

War is the ultimate, naked force of the State- government in it's purest form. And as such it must be used judiciously and sparingly. But when it is used, it must, in order to be successful, bring to bear the collective might of the entire nation upon it's enemies. To do less is to invite at best a slow, painful destruction of all we hold dear.