Short Memory

Bin Laden is more than a punchline in a turban or a insane terrorist who produced the biggest horrorshow in history. He has goals.

Our failure to understand the lessons learned by the Soviets in Afghanistan may doom us to repeat them. The complexity of the situation, along with our missteps, mean we need to take a broader appraisal of the region and our alliances. – by Peter Mehit

We are sending 98,000 troops to Afghanistan.  A little less than what the Soviet Army had at the peak of their adventure. While we have superior technology and we can deploy it with some degree of accuracy, the reality is that geography and topography null out our modern weapons, the tall peaks defeating nearly all our long range killing gadgets, leaving us fighting face to face in tunnels and caves.

With scant options, the U.S. is forced down the path the Soviets followed; muzzle to muzzle fire fights where the Afghan knowledge of the terrain is an enormous advantage.  The mountains, and their extensive network of caves, provide the perfect environment for hit and fade guerilla tactics. The exact tactics used against the Soviets with great success.

Of course we know all this. We funded Bin Laden and his brothers, the Mujahideen.  We provided them weapons, strategy and tactics. We provided them intelligence, secret intelligence, which they used to defeat the Soviets. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?

Afghanistan was the final defeat for the Soviet Union. Troops came home to find they had no jobs, no treatment for their physical and psychological injuries. Gangland crime flourished in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Army started walking away from their jobs because they weren’t being paid. It was disillusionment and economic collapse brought on by an unnecessary war, as much as Ronald Reagan’s tough talk and arms races, that brought down the Soviets.

Bin Laden has said that Afghanistan would be the graveyard of America. His belief is based on his earlier victory over a superpower using ordinary small arms, improvised explosives and a theater that reduces technological advantage dramatically. So far, it appears that we have followed his script exactly after missing the one chance we had to neutralize him at Tora Bora.  We are now pursuing him into his neighborhood, where he has support, superior knowledge of the area and the local God at his disposal.

Bin Laden is more than a punchline in a turban or a insane terrorist who produced the biggest horrorshow in history. He has goals. He isn’t killing Americans because he hates our freedom. He’s killing us because we are the Hessians of the House of Saud. His real beef isn’t with us in particular, but he does need us out of the way.  His real goal is to reestablish the Caliphate, the first form of Islamic government that ranged from Spain to Iran at it’s height around the time of Muhammad until it’s final demise in the 1920s. Burying America in Afghanistan is the next step in realizing that vision.

If America is forced to retreat from Afghanistan, either by attrition or the home front loosing heart as more and more of it’s sons come home damaged, it will not be able to return for a generation. With America sidelined, Bin Laden now has the legitimacy he craves. Now he can stand before the Arab world and say, ‘I have defeated the Soviets, I have defeated the Americans and now it is time to drive the Kings and Sultans that have sold your birthright from your lands forever’.

That rallying cry will move not only those in the region, but others in Indonesia, Europe and elsewhere. It is conceivable that Muslims by the millions would pour into the region, just as tens of thousand poured into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. The House of Saud and its contemporaries would fall. The Caliphate could rise again.

While Bin Laden’s objectives are clear, ours remain murky and uncertain. What does victory look like in Afghanistan? Do we plant a flag and declare it? Are we there to remake the country into a shiny new democracy, ignoring that we need to bring it’s participants to at least the eighteenth century, where ours was born, from the twelfth, where they are living now? Afghanistan is a failed state. Saying any government can control it is like saying you have control of your neighborhood because nobody’s committing crime in your living room.

Ironically, our new best friend, with whom we have more in common than not, will be Iran. Iran will broker any and all deals to maintain it’s national sovereignty, even with Israel, if it perceives it’s survival is at stake. It is likely that it would need to be nuclear to counter balance Pakistan’s warheads should they come under the Califate’s control. Reestablishment of some kind of balance of power in the region is key. New strategies and tactics, with partners inconceivable a few years ago may be needed to stabilize the region and place Islamic militancy in check.

These potentialities are not factored into the current discussion. While hurricane force blowback from decades of prior meddling and miscalculation now shred our foreign policy efforts, we stay the course with the same thinking that got us here. Worse, our inability to execute in the War on Terror, our diversion in Iraq, our lack of good faith and our justification for war based on lies has transformed Al Queda from a transnational terror group into an ideology framed around the destruction of any Western interests as an absolute good. The Fort Hood shooting is the prototype of the terrorist acts we’re likely to see for a decade.

So we plug along, down the same goat path the Kremlin followed all those years ago. We wax nostalgic for the time we watched our enemies fall, blind to fact we created even stronger ones to replace them. It is unclear what, if any, strategy or set of tactics could be followed other than the Cold War fall back of containment. What is clear is that we have a short memory. Failing to learn from a catastrophe we engineered may have much larger consequences that we ever imagined.