« Afghanistan Briefing - 04 August 2009 - New Rules of Engagement | Main | Obama Declares Defeat In War on Terror »
August 8, 2009
The "One-War Only" Fallacy
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen had this to say yesterday:
The top U.S. uniformed military officer Wednesday offered a bleak assessment of the war in Afghanistan, saying that years of neglect before the Obama administration had starved the U.S.-led effort of funds and diplomatic heft - a condition he called "a culture of poverty."Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times that nearly eight years after the war began, the U.S. military is still digging its way "out of a hole" and has not reached "year zero" in the campaign to turn back Taliban advances and gain the trust of the Afghan people....
He said a strategy devised since President Obama took office is intended to reverse these negative trends and hinted that another assessment to be completed late this month or in September might assign more military and civilian personnel to the war and to Afghan development.
Three points here
One, it is true that we did not send enough troops and material to Afghanistan when Bush was president, and I am glad that Obama has reversed this. We should have paid more attention to what was going on there and done whatever it took financially to provide more resources. As part of this I am glad that President Obama rejected a minimalist approach and last March announced that he was sending more resources to our commanders.
Two, let's still be clear that this is an insurgency in one of the poorest nations on the planet and not World War II. I've written the how and why about this a zillion times here on this blog, and go here for details, but if you're hoping for a quick victory in any insurgency you're going to be disappointed. They've long by their very nature, and for various reasons the one in Afghanistan will probably be on the long end of long insurgencies.
Three, let's get over this ridiculous notion that we cannot fight two wars at the same time.
During WWII we fought two high-intensity wars on opposite sides of the world at the same time. We took on Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy (ok we could have beat them with a brigade of Boy Scouts) and the Empire of Japan all at once. It was hard and took everything we had, but we produced hundreds of warships, thousands of transport and merchant ships, and put twelve million men in uniform. And we did it with a far smaller population and coming out of the Great Depression.
Our strategy during the Cold War was to fight two and a half wars at the same time. The idea was that if the balloon went up we'd fight one in Europe against the Soviets, one in the Pacific against the Soviets and China, and a half war somewhere else like Central America or against Cuba. The details of this changed over time, and some argued that it was beyond our reach, but at least we tried to provide resources for it.
Since 2003 we have been told by some that we can't even to fight two low-intensity wars that are very near each other simultaneously. One of the primary arguments against Iraq was that it we couldn't fight it and Afghanistan simultaneously.
Now, as I said earlier, it's legitimate to argue that Bush took his eye off of Afghanistan while concentrating on Iraq. But the conclusion I take from that is that he should have been able to fight both. It is silly to say that we can only concentrate on one at a time.
If we could fight World War II and the Cold War on multiple fronts, we can certainly fight two insurgencies at once.
Posted by Tom at August 8, 2009 8:15 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.theredhunter.com/mt/refer.cgi/1417
