Most
Americans in 2003 thought that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were
complementary theaters in the wider war on radical Islamic terrorism
and the authoritarian Middle East regimes that aided and abetted it.
The anti-Iraq War left agreed that the two fronts were connected—but in
an antithetical, rather than a symbiotic, way. For them, the
illegitimate, unilateral war in Iraq came at the expense of the lawful
multilateral struggle in Afghanistan. Yet a brief review of the two
wars not only suggests that such a view is mistaken, but also that it
is disingenuous—especially the trope of damning the American effort in
Iraq by claiming that, in addition to its other moral and strategic
deficits, it caused us to “take our eye off” Afghanistan.
It is
worth remembering that when the United States invaded Afghanistan on
October 6, 2001, many on the left forecast immediate doom. The craggy
peaks of the Hindu Kush were too high. The weather was too icy. With
Ahmad Shah Massoud’s assassination by al-Qaeda, the Northern Alliance
would surely not fight effectively. The same fate that had defeated
both past British and Russian imperial occupiers lay in wait for us. New York Times
writer R. W. Apple summed up such liberal unease—shortly before the
rout of the Taliban—when he declared the first weeks of war in
Afghanistan had already produced a hopeless Vietnam-like debacle.
But
Afghanistan proved to be the quagmire that wasn’t. The unexpectedly
sudden defeat of the Taliban, coupled with the rapid establishment of
an elected Karzai government, quieted anti-war opposition for a
time—even as fleeing Islamic terrorists began regrouping with near
impunity across the border in Pakistan. In the autumn of 2002, about a
year after the Taliban’s fall, success in Afghanistan was an attractive
argument for more action, not more caution. Surprised by the quick
victory of American arms in Afghanistan—but continually worried about
being seen as soft on national security amid growing public support for
ending the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein—a majority of Democratic
congressmen and senators voted in October 2002, weeks before the
midterm elections, to authorize a second war in Iraq. Few on the left
wished to go on record opposing another successful military operation.
Indeed, given the success of the recent war against the Taliban, most
envisioned an even easier time against the once-beaten and weakened
Saddam Hussein.
At first, such hawkishness about the war against
Saddam seemed a smart political move. After the three-week spectacular
victory, more than 70 percent of Americans in April 2003 supported the
so-far successful Iraqi war. President Bush’s own approval ratings
soared—along with those of the politicians in Congress who had
supported him. By mid-2004, however, the Iraqi insurrection gained
critical mass. Terrorists began to kill hundreds of American soldiers.
Shiite-Sunni infighting soured Americans on an apparently ungrateful
and hopelessly savage Iraq, as what had once seemed a cakewalk turned
into a bloody stalemate. The public began to turn on the messy American
occupation, and especially its foremost proponent, President George W.
Bush.
In response, a number of prominent Democratic senators—Joe
Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Diane Feinstein, John Kerry, and
Harry Reid—who had once given ringing speeches about invading Iraq, now
about-faced. They abruptly claimed that they had earlier only
reluctantly authorized, not advocated, a war—one that had been
illegitimately hyped to them through doctored and misleading
intelligence.
As the 2006 elections neared, and Bush’s dismal
approval ratings continued to reflect public unhappiness with the
course of the war, most liberal congressional supporters of the Iraq
War had finished their reversions to type, and reinvented themselves as
principled and longstanding critics of the conflict. It was not
surprising that they should do so, as U.S. losses mounted and many
erstwhile pro-war pundits now assured the nation that the war was lost.
Anti-war had always remained their default option. Few remembered that
both the House and Senate had once authorized the invasion of Iraq on
twenty-three writs that ranged from violations of United
Nations-sanctioned no-fly zones, inspections, and 1991 armistice
accords, to oil-for-food skullduggery and genocide against the Iraqi
people. Even fewer cared that, while WMD arsenals had not been found,
the other original congressional premises for removing Saddam were
still as valid at election time in 2006 as when they had been ratified
in 2002.
A quandary arose:
how could liberal Democrats both retain their national security
credentials and yet at the same time cater to growing public
disillusionment with Iraq? In response to that dilemma, a useful new
narrative about the American occupation in Afghanistan emerged. As the
exiled Taliban regrouped and began waging attacks from their
sanctuaries in Pakistan, and the United States took greater losses in
Iraq, Afghanistan slowly transmogrified into the “good” but now
neglected war. Indeed, Afghanistan was to be contrasted with Iraq,
increasingly dismissed as the unnecessary and “bad” conflict, where we
were pinned down and diminished by Bush’s strategic incoherence,
Cheney’s shilling for Halliburton, and the neoconservatives’ stealthily
catering to Israel’s anti-Arab agendas. Newscasters grimly announced
daily American fatalities in Iraq, but rarely in Afghanistan, whose
violence remained on the back pages.
Where, liberal critics
lamented, was the Iraqi version of the Afghan statesman Hamid Karzai or
the legitimate NATO and United Nations presence in Iraq? And why—in the
most disingenuous chapter of the new narrative crafted to prove liberal
patriotic support for American military efforts abroad—were we in Iraq
creating terrorists ex nihilo, when we could have ended them
once and for all, had we gone all out and crushed a trapped Osama bin
Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001 in Afghanistan?
The liberal
mantra now declared that the unilateral, preemptive conflict in Iraq
was not only unnecessary and lost, but, worse still, had siphoned off
critical resources from the politically correct multilateral and
legally justified war against the Taliban, who had, after all, helped
to cause the September 11 terrorist attacks. Anti-war liberal Democrats
had discovered the magic bullet: they could retain their national
security credentials and avoid appearing soft on terrorism by lamenting
that by being bogged down in Iraq we had become too complacent in
Afghanistan. Or, as then presidential candidate Barack Obama framed the
issue in a debate with John McCain, “We took our eye off Afghanistan.
We took our eye off the folks who perpetrated 9/11.” The Democrats
strange and twisted journey from supporting the war effort in Iraq, to
wanting it immediately ended, while wishing for more fighting in
Afghanistan—a war some on the left had once declared impossible to win
in October 2001—was now complete.
Such an odyssey was again
reflected in self-described anti-war and then senatorial candidate
Barack Obama’s July 27, 2004, comment on Iraq: “There’s not that much
difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this
stage.” But later, on January 31, 2007, as a soon-to-be presidential
candidate, and with news from the front now far worse and George Bush’s
poll ratings diving, Obama scorned the surge, which he claimed had “not
worked,” and pledged that all U.S. combat forces should be out of Iraq
by March 31, 2008. He hammered that message throughout the summer and
autumn of 2007: “The best way to protect our security and to pressure
Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to
remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year—now.”
Such
a move would probably have led to an American defeat and Iraqi
genocide, as the country would have been effectively trisected into a
Kurdish breakaway republic at war with Turkey, an Iranian rump
protectorate of Shiites to the south, and a radical Sunni client state
of Saudi Arabia—all in perennial terrorist wars with one another,
fueled by religious hatred and Iraqi oil.
But anti-war candidate
Obama protected himself against charges that he was ignoring the danger
posed by Islamic terrorists by making even bolder promises that he
would send another 7,000 troops to Afghanistan and invade Pakistan, if
need be, in hot pursuit of al-Qaeda. It appeared that Obama, and others
who supported his new bellicose calls, was not really against the idea
of either surging troops or crossing national borders to hunt down
insurgents per se; they were just opposed to doing all that in the
politically incorrect Iraq theater, but for doing it in the properly
sanctioned Afghanistan war. So President Bush was to be condemned not
just for having been too warlike in Iraq, but now also for not being
warlike enough in Afghanistan.
In fact, there are a number of
historical and practical reasons to doubt both the sincerity and the
logic of the new liberal calls for escalation in Afghanistan—especially
since it uncharacteristically committed the left to a renewed and
difficult struggle against the Taliban that they may soon likewise
disown.
First, the
coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq was larger, both in
aggregate size and the number of nations involved, than the few allied
troops that initially joined us in Afghanistan. The United Nations
sanction to go into Afghanistan was similar to the logic of invading
Iraq to force compliance with UN resolutions that had been ignored by
Saddam Hussein, from the corrupt oil-for-food program to violations
concerning UN-sanctioned no-fly zones and inspections of Saddam’s
arsenals. U.S. allies like the British, Poles, and Australians who went
to Iraq were also about the only serious fighters who showed up in
Afghanistan, a war in which most NATO members, except for the
Canadians, merely voted present without ever fully engaging the enemy
on the battlefield. In the strict military sense, one might ask what
did it matter that the Germans and Belgians, whose military protocols
forbid real fighting against the Taliban, did not later join the United
States to engage either the ex-Baathists or the jihadists in Iraq?
Second,
the perpetrators of 9/11 were radical Muslim Arab terrorists. Although
the Taliban harbored those who had planned the attacks, no Afghan had
traveled to the United States to kill Americans. Saddam Hussein, while
not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, nevertheless had been in a de facto
war with the United States Air Force for twelve years in the no-fly
zones over Iraq. He had also sheltered an array of terrorists, both
secular killers from the 1980s such as Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, and
those with ties to radical Islamists and al-Qaeda, like Abdul Rahman
Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, who arrived in Iraq in summer 2002, and the
al-Qaeda–affiliated Ansar al-Islam (“Partisans of Islam”) terrorists
who were given apparent refuge by Saddam.
If the war on terror
were to be truly global and waged primarily against both radical Muslim
terrorists from the Arab Middle East who had a long history of killing
Americans, and anti-American dictators who had given them sanctuary and
support, then an argument could be made that Iraq was as much a
legitimate target as Afghanistan. There was also the additional
humanitarian consideration that the regime of Saddam Hussein had killed
far more innocents than had the Taliban, started far more foreign wars,
and had a far longer record of prior military conflict with the United
States.
Third, while many in the anti-war movement made a facile
distinction of Afghanistan as the necessary and correct war, and Iraq
as the incorrect and unnecessary fight, the enemy saw few such
differences. In a series of communiqués, both of al-Qaeda’s
self-appointed leaders, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, soon
boasted that Iraq had become the central front in their global war
against the United States. Bin Laden, for example, in 2004 warned:
The
most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this
Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the
Islamic nation. It is raging in the land of the two rivers. The world’s
millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate. The
whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries; the Islamic
nation, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the
other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation. The
nation today has a very rare opportunity to come out of the
subservience and enslavement to the West and to smash the chains with
which the Crusaders have fettered it.
A year later, Zawahiri, in his now infamous letter to al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, wrote:
I
want to be the first to congratulate you for what God has blessed you
with in terms of fighting battle in the heart of the Islamic world,
which was formerly the field for major battles in Islam’s history, and
what is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era.
Apparently,
al-Qaeda thought killing a few thousand American soldiers in Iraq and
causing the United States to flee in panic might weaken our resistance
in Afghanistan and indeed cause us to lose the war elsewhere. The only
mystery is why we, in turn, did not accept the reverse principle—that
killing several thousand terrorists in Iraq and creating a
constitutional state there harmed the cause of kindred jihadists
worldwide, and especially those like Zawahiri and bin Laden in hiding
along the Afghanistan border.
In short, almost no one—certainly
not anti-war American liberals who had become almost as obsessed with
“Bush’s war” in Iraq as they claimed Bush himself was—asked whether the
enemy was incorrect in thinking Iraq had become the central
battleground between the West and its enemies. Were international
jihadists not foregoing travel to Afghanistan instead to fight and die in Iraq? Was the global prestige of al-Qaeda not
on trial in Iraq? And were ripples from the American presence in
Iraq—whether the promise to surrender WMD arsenals offered us
spontaneously by Libyan strongman Muammar al-Gaddafi (December 2003),
the house arrest of Pakistan nuclear proliferator Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan
(February 2004), or the exit of Syria from Lebanon (April 2005)—not likely fallout from the American removal of the Hussein regime?
Nor
did many critics of the Iraq War ponder another nagging question: if
nuclear Pakistan, our reluctant ally, were to be considered off limits
for large American ground forces in tracking down Osama bin Laden and
attacking al- Qaeda jihadists in areas such as Waziristan, where else
were Western forces to fight and defeat global radical Islamists if not
in the free-fire zone of Iraq?
In addition, as radical Islamic
insurgents began losing fighters in Iraq, various Pew Global Attitudes
polls of Middle East popular sentiment revealed a drastic decline in
approval ratings for the tactic of suicide bombing (a fall ranging in
2007 from 25 to 40 points in various Middle East countries). Those
findings mirrored earlier declines in the popularity of Osama bin Laden
himself, whose approval ratings by 2005 were below 50 percent in almost
every country in the Middle East. Similarly, few in September 2001 had
believed that the United States homeland would have remained free from
another major terrorist attack emanating from the Middle East for the
next seven years—an unforeseen development, but one at least in part
likely attributable to the terrible losses suffered by radical
Islamists in Iraq. It would not be too much to conclude, therefore,
that rather than creating enemies there, we have been
engaging enemies that already existed and fighting them on a
battlefield of our choice rather than theirs.
Fourth, when had
the United States ever shied away from fighting two wars at once? We
fought Japan, Germany, and Italy simultaneously, even though there was
no evidence that Germany or Italy was responsible, or even knew in
advance, of the Pearl Harbor attacks, or that there was ever much
military cooperation between the racist German Nazi regime and the
Japanese racial and cultural imperialists. The United States blocked
the Red Army from entering Western Europe as it fought over two million
North Korean and Chinese communist ground troops on the Korean
peninsula. In fact, our forefathers not only assumed that a mobilized
America could wage multifarious global wars, but also learned that
victory in one theater could enhance efforts even in a far distant
other. Therefore, given such knowledge of U.S. military history, why
would anyone think the effort in Iraq necessarily came at the expense
of Afghanistan, rather than symbiotically enhancing our efforts there,
by killing transient jihadists and gaining valuable insight into the
art of counterinsurgency warfare?
Fifth, liberal braggadocio
about leaving Iraq to regroup assets for an escalation in Afghanistan
was also predicated on a misreading of the relative difficulty of the
two theaters. By 2005, when the new hard line narrative on Afghanistan
had gained credence among liberal politicians, anti-Iraq War critics
assumed Iraq was lost, but that the NATO effort in Afghanistan, in
contrast, was simply stalled and in need of a transference of manpower
and materiel from Iraq. But both assumptions to varying degrees were
flawed.
Iraq—with secular traditions, plentiful oil, rich, level
farmland, a far better educated populace, and an accessible port—was
always the less difficult challenge in fostering postbellum
constitutional government. The difficulty in Afghanistan, moreover, was
not necessarily the result of a shortage of U.S. troops due to the
focus on Iraq. Instead the challenge was the nearly insolvable problem
of bringing modern government to medieval warring factions, encouraging
economic development among a largely illiterate population, which had
traditionally earned cash by supplying most of the world’s raw heroin
and by doing so supported the growth of anti-Western warlords, and
stopping cross-border Taliban incursions by violating the sovereignty
of an unstable, authoritarian, Islamic, and nuclear “allied” Pakistan.
These were complex problems more likely helped than hindered by the
expertise and tactics learned in the war in Iraq.
Indeed, the
liberal braggadocio on Afghanistan—wholly untethered to any real,
concrete tactical plans or responsibility for its possible
consequences—has amounted to a kind of empty self-dramatization.
Senator Obama may have on occasion boasted about invading Pakistan—“If
we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and
President Musharraf won’t act, we will”—but in fact, the United States
already is hitting targets in Pakistan, albeit not to loud public
boasts about such risky actions. Our ability to shoot missiles at
terrorist enclaves in Pakistan from Predator drones—operations that
violate Pakistani airspace—is, in fact, predicated on our own promises
of discretion.
Sixth, such liberal chest-pounding about
Afghanistan was also predicated on the assumption that the war there
would remain static. Iraq was irretrievably lost, the liberals
believed, but Afghanistan was more or less deadlocked and therefore
capable of being positively affected by a little strategic tinkering.
But once conditions on the ground in Anbar Province radically changed,
and the “bad” Iraq quieted while the “good” Afghanistan began to heat
up, anti-war critics began to get a sense of the dilemma they now
faced—having to escalate, as promised, the Afghan war and win it rather
quickly once their largely rhetorical demand for a transference of the
manpower and financial resources improperly diverted to the
misadventure in Iraq had been met.
This
political dilemma again was not new. Liberal Democrats in the summer
and autumn of 2002 had sounded tough and aggressive about the looming
Iraq war, as long as the perception of quick and easy victory was
likely, and someone else (Commander-in-Chief George Bush) took the
major responsibility for the conduct of the war should it become
difficult and unpopular. Something similar was happening now with
Afghanistan.
“Taking our eye off the ball,” and supposedly
ignoring Afghanistan, were rather inexpensive ways of voicing partisan
attacks on George Bush’s Iraq War. But now the Iraq War has been
largely won (the number of U.S. soldiers who died in actual combat
operations in Iraq in October 2008 was seven; more than forty Americans
were murdered in Chicago each month on average in 2008). And after
January 20, 2009, Commander-in-Chief Obama will have the responsibility
for the costs and difficulties of the Afghan war he had been apparently
eager to take on during the campaign against Senator John McCain.
Consequently, we may well see president-elect Obama’s once promised
hawkishness dissipate. After all, many liberal hawks figured that they
could issue their war cries without ever being forced to hold the reins
of governance with commensurate responsibility, or, by that the time
they were given responsibility, the Afghan war would be over.
Vowing
to do what it takes in the good war by leaving Iraq—infusing more
troops into Afghanistan, and occasionally invading Pakistan—was for
candidate Obama always a rhetorical stance that proved both his
anti-Iraq War bona fides and his larger credibility on
matters of national security. But President Obama and his mercurial
supporters in Congress will soon face a rather embarrassing dilemma.
Without the responsibilities of a commander-in-chief, he once demanded
we should leave Iraq when leaving would have lost that war. But now, as
commander- in-chief he will soon learn that a few thousand more troops
will not guarantee lasting victory over the Taliban. And
changing strategy from stealthy attacks by aerial drones in Pakistan to
open ground incursions across the border risks widening rather than
solving the conflict.
“Taking our eye off the ball” was always a
dubious campaign talking point. Afghanistan was not the only “ball” in
the global war against terror; we never took our eye off it; and we
were always binocular. What we may well see instead is that those who
wished more of an American commitment to Afghanistan as cover for their
opposition to Iraq will now desert President Obama, as anti-war critics
take their eye off a receding Iraq and focus it instead on an
increasingly violent Afghanistan—especially given the sensational
terrorist acts associated with the near-rogue state of Pakistan. In
that case, President Obama may well have to revert to his earlier
manifestation of candidate Obama, who campaigned on the notion that a
surge of military forces into an apparent quagmire was little more than
an unsophisticated act of desperation—in a complex landscape that
required American forces to exit and to allow indigenous tribal folks
to sort out their own affairs.
Victor Davis
Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author,
most recently, of A War Like No Other: How the Spartans and Athenians
Fought the Peloponnesian War.
