Choose Your Words

In a recent post, a fellow blogger I know expressed concern about “defeatist” Democrats in Congress who favored a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. Personally, I don’t care for terminology like “victory” and “defeat” in the kinds of conflicts we find ourselves involved in today. Even “mission accomplished” has a bad sound now.

When it comes to Afghanistan, it seems to me there are two reasonable goals. The little one is whacking Osama bin Laden. I’ve heard all the arguments about how Al-Qaeda is a hydra-headed entity and that taking him out wouldn’t accomplish anything. I disagree. Such an act would have a tremendous symbolic impact around the world. Of course, it would have had a much greater impact if we’d done it in, say, 2002.

This can be done with relatively few operatives. When the Israelis want to track down international terrorists who have done bad things to them, they put teams together, send them into whatever countries their targets are living in, kidnap them or kill them, and apologize for it later (if they even bother).

The big goal in the region is keeping the terrorists away from the nukes in Pakistan, and the question is, how do you do that? Is it by nation-building in Afghanistan – or should we really be nation-building in Pakistan – or both?

So how many troops does it take to destroy the terrorist elements in those places and help stabilize the governments involved? I’m no military strategist, but based on what’s happened historically, the U.S. is not going to accomplish these ends with 10,000 or 20,000 more troops. This is a commitment that would seem to involve hundreds of thousands – a Vietnam-level commitment at least.

And as I’ve said before, if you really want to go to war, the whole country has to be involved – basically every American family – and that involves re-instituting the draft. It’s not fair to be sending the same people over for five our six tours. With a draft, if the President and Congress really wanted to fight a war, they’d have to bring the country with them.

I don’t envy the President having to make a decision about how to proceed. But instead of dealing with “victory” and “defeat” and all the emotional baggage packed into those terms, I hope he works with colder terms like “cost-benefit ratio.

In the end, “victory” means, to me at least, that we can answer yes to the question, “Are we safe now?”