The Washington Post’s oped page is a safe haven for hawks. Today we have Michael O’Hanlon and Richard Cohen fighting for the war in Afghanistan.
O’Hanlon is for generals respecting the president’s policy decisions, except when he isn’t — cases where the general is obviously right, in that he agrees with O’Hanlon. (To me, this McChrystal incident shows the robustness of civilian control. McChrystal spoke too freely and got rebuked. The Republic seems OK. So does the Army.)
O’Hanlon’s other goal is to attack those who want to limit the objectives in Afghanistan to counter-terrorism. To do so, he imputes his nation-building goals to the less ambitious strategy. He says we tried the narrow mission under Bush and it failed.
A. Not really. Does this, for example, sound like counter-terrorism?
B. It only failed to achieve the counterinsurgency strategy’s (maybe impossible) objectives of a stable, centralized state in Afghanistan. A counter-terrorism (or go small) strategy sacrifices some probability of heightened stability for less cost in blood and dollars. We have been doing fine at counter-terrorism all along, largely because al Qaeda is overrated. Afghanistan is not a terrorist haven anymore.
O’Hanlon also says that we won’t collect as much intelligence without a full-scale counterinsurgency. Again, this is true, but insufficient. A smaller footprint provides benefits (less radicalization, less cost) that we exchange, in a sense, for lost intelligence-gathering opportunities. In any case, intelligence needed to target airstrikes can come from allies on the ground, intercepts, and overhead surveillance, as in Pakistan. Progress in surveillance and strike capability and the will to use it means that a rerun of the 1990s, where al Qaeda was safe in Afghan camps, is a phony nightmare. O’Hanlon also claims that absent a large U.S. ground force, we would have to offshore all UAV bases that range western Pakistan. This is a pessimistic assessment; we could defend most of our airfields with a limited force in Afghanistan, and we have at least one UAV base in Pakistan.