shanen's Journal: The messes in Afghanistan and Iraq

[A comment from elsewhere in response to Obama's statement that we should shift to Afghanistan.]

Well, I agree Obama should have rejected the label "surge" and he should have emphasized the international aspects--but he was speaking the ugly truth. Unless there are more troops deployed in Afghanistan and unless the country is meaningfully rebuilt, it is going to go back to the way it was. I'd say it could wind up worse, but I'm not sure that's possible--though I'm sure it could cause much larger international problems in the future. There really is a broad international consensus that Afghanistan needs to be fixed, and agreement that it is possible but difficult. However the Taliban have very deep roots. Obama understands the mess.

I'm not defending the Taliban, but I actually think there was a time when it might have been possible to disentangle them from Al Qaeda and deal with the two problems separately. The Taliban was originally a local band of religious lunatics with basically local interests and aspirations, and there are plenty of local nuisances that the world manages to tolerate. However, now that they are completely linked to Al Qaeda, the international threat must be dealt with. The rest of the world is trying, but they just don't have that much force to try with.

Meanwhile, back in the incredible mess that the Dick Cheney has made of Iraq, our troops cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The rest of the world accepts that we've created a new little Iran. They don't particularly like that, but they didn't like Saddam much either, even before the puppet got uppity. The rest of the world accepts that Iran has won, but they've been able to deal with Iran in the past, and think that they can deal with Iraq in the future as a kind of junior Iran. Many countries would also be willing to accept the three-way division of the country, with the notable exception of Turkey. (By the way, I think that's the real reason the why many relatively rational Iranians want nuclear weapons. I still rate the Turks as militarily stronger than Iran, but Iranian nuclear weapons would at least help counteract that. Certainly a very strong deterrence against a Turkish invasion.)

I don't think America has any real influence in Iraq now, and it doesn't matter how many troops we keep there. We are just acting as an irritant while the various Iraqi factions squabble about how much autonomy they can have from Iran. Fortunately, there is agreement among most Iraqis that they also don't like Al Qaeda interference any more than they like American interference. It might be expensive to keep the Sunni's firmly against Al Qaeda--and we had better start paying those bribes more reliably--but we get the Shia hatred of Al Qaeda for free.

Actually,the only path to a greater loss in Iraq would be if we somehow pushed the Shia into supporting Al Qaeda, or even one of the major Shia factions. I want to believe that is fundamentally impossible, but George Dubya Bush has abundantly shown that you should never say any miserable failure is too impossible for him. Also, it is rather frightening that Al Qaeda understands the Shia much better than we do, so it is possible they could also change their pitch to them.