Diana West wrote a great article last April about the cost of war in Afghanistan in blood and treasure. Below is an excerpt from that article in which she asked MG Paul E. Vallely US Army (ret) for his thoughts. I include this as a prelude to the article written and posted yesterday at Human Events by Robert Spencer about recent shootings of US personnel at installations in Afghanistan.
“Basically, let it go,” Vallely said.
Let Afghanistan go—music to my ears, particularly given the source is no Hate-America-First professor or Moveon-dot-org-nik, but a lifelong patriotic conservative warrior. “There’s nothing to win there,” he explained, engaging in an all-too-exotic display of common sense. “What do you get for it? What’s the return? Well, the return’s all negative for the United States.”
The general continued: “This doesn’t mean giving up battle. What it means is you transition to a more realistic, affordable strategy that keeps them (the jihadist enemy) from spreading.”
Such a strategy, Vallely explained, relies on “the maximum use of unconventional forces,” such as Navy SEALS and other special forces, who can be deployed as needed from what are known in military parlance as “lily pads” – outposts or jumping-off points in friendly countries (Israel, Northern Kurdistan, India, Philippines, Italy, Djibouti … ) and from U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups. Such strike groups generally include eight to 10 vessels “with more fire power,” the general noted, “than most nations.” These lily pads become “bases we can launch from any time we want to,” eliminating the need for massive land bases such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, by now a small city of 20,000 American personnel who continuously need to be supplied and secured at enormous expense.
“There’s no permanent force,” the general said. “That’s the beauty of it.” We watch, we wait and when U.S. interests are threatened, “we basically use our strike forces to take them out, target by target.” This would work whether the threat came from Al Qaeda, Pakistani nukes or anything else.
He continued: “This idea that we’re going to go in and bring democracy to these tribal cultures isn’t going to work. If we have a problem with terrorist countries, like Iran, it’s a lot cheaper to go in and hit them and get back out.”
In other words, don’t give up the battle; just give up the nation-building. “It’s up to somebody else to build nations,” the general said. “Not us.”
He went on: That old myth that (Colin) Powell had – if you break it you own it – that’s a myth. You break it, you decide whether you own it. You don’t have to go in and own it.”
And especially not when it is Islamic land that doesn’t belong in the West.
Further, read the following comment from a friend; John Bernard:
The vast majority of our Warriors have an innate sense that dying for their country and our people is honorable, if that is what it comes to. Of course they also rightfully expect their leadership to be competent and focused on United States national security issues and not attempt to improve someone else’s lot in life through the blood of our Patriots.
Largely, people only do better when they demonstrate the character to lift themselves out of their circumstances. No matter how much the American people might buy into the idea that it is worth helping those ‘in need’, it still remains to be proven the Afghan’s and the Iraqi’s perceive they have a need and I am equally certain the vast majority of Americans are not prepared to sacrifice their children for this cause.
No politician and no military leader has any constitutional right or power to sacrifice the children of this, our nation, to improve the lot in life of people who hate us – on any level.
With these thoughts in mind, please read the Spencer article below:
Friend of U.S. Troops, Shoots U.S. Troops
By Robert Spencer
Last Friday an Afghan interpreter shot dead two of his employers, American soldiers serving in Afghanistan. He was able to gain access to them, of course, and to be in their presence, because he had won their trust with his translation work and they let their guard down.
Their trust was misplaced; and they were not the first American soldiers to die in this way and – tragically – likely won’t be the last. This episode yet again illustrates a key but almost completely overlooked difficulty that hamstrings our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq as well: there is no reliable way to distinguish a peaceful Muslim from a potentially violent jihadist short of elaborate behavioral profiling such as the Israelis do on air travelers.
The U.S. military denies that he was a jihadist at all, saying that he was a “disgruntled employee” angry about pay and treatment. Our military is so awash in political correctness that they – to paraphrase the words of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey – would think it more tragic if their commitment to “diversity” were damaged than if another massacre such as the Fort Hood murders occurred.
The denial that the Afghanistan bomber wasn’t a jihadi doesn’t ring true, any more than did the official denials that the Fort Hood jihad massacre had anything to do with jihad. I myself once had a job in which I was disgruntled about pay and treatment; perhaps not so oddly, I never opened fire. There is obviously more to this story than is being revealed, and most likely, here again what is being left out has to do with Islamic jihad, and with the impossibility of distinguishing a “moderate” from a “radical” Muslim.
Given the almost universal acceptance of the iron dogma that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists, this impossibility may come as a surprise. But in reality, there is no mainstream sect of Islam or school of Islamic jurisprudence whose authorities have renounced and rejected violent jihad and Islamic supremacism, and declared that anyone who holds to the idea that Muslims have a collective responsibility to wage war against Infidels and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law is a heretic.
If there were such a sect or school in Afghanistan or elsewhere where there is an American military presence, one could rely on the peaceful group and shun the group that taught violence. But there is no such group. Contrary to popular belief, not only is the principle of jihad warfare against unbelievers not the province of a “tiny minority of extremists,” but it is taught by every mainstream sect and school of Islam.
The U.S. government, of course, denies this fact and bases numerous policies upon the assumption that the vast majority of Muslims share universally accepted notions of human rights, and abhor jihad terrorism. The deaths of these two soldiers are the fruit of that false assumption – and just as they were not the first casualties caused by this mistaken idea, they will not be the last.
This is not to say, of course, that nothing at all can be done with the locals in Afghanistan. The problem in Afghanistan is not unique to that country: the locals can be paid off to fight, but even then their loyalty is not guaranteed. And once the money flow stops, they will fight for the next paymaster – and when no paymaster is there, they will fight each other. This is a weak reed on which to build a reliable alliance, and has already been shown to have been a spectacular failure in Pakistan, where the U.S. government has showered billions over the years upon the Pakistanis in order to induce them to fight against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, only to see a good amount of that money funneled to those very groups by jihadist ideologues within the Pakistani government. Yet the Pelosi Congress’s solution to this problem was to triple aid to the Pakistanis, without devising any improved mechanism for accountability.
Ultimately, the Obama Administration is going to have to make some hard decisions about the level of access that Muslim employees and collaborators of all kinds are given to U.S. personnel in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But this will require Administration officials to take off their politically correct blinders and face some hard and inconvenient truths. If they do so, these two soldiers who died in Afghanistan will not have died in vain.
