In half an hour if you're on Eastern Time, Bill Moyers Journal will air on PBS. Tonight's edition will focus on Afghanistan, with Moyers interviewing former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey and historian Marilyn B. Young.
Sprey, who came to the Pentagon when Lyndon Johnson was President and Bob McNamara was Secretary of Defense, was deeply involved in the design of the F-16 and the A-10 attack aircraft. He left his post in 1986 when "it became increasingly obvious that the atmosphere at the Pentagon was such that it would be impossible to build another honest aircraft." In an interview with military correspondent Thomas Ricks at the Washington Post in 2006, he said the Iraq war "is an enormously unjust war, not fought for any of the reasons put forth. Very simply, I don't think we should be going to war for oil companies."
Harvard-educated historian Marilyn B. Young, author of Iraq and The Lessons of Vietnam: or, How Not to learn from the Past, is a professor of foreign relations at New York University. At a roundtable discussion by historians in April 2003, just a month after the war in Iraq began, she said: "If Vietnam was Korea in slow motion, then Operation Iraqi Freedom is Vietnam on crack cocaine. In less then two weeks a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds."
Tonight they will discuss with Moyers what they think the United States should be doing, and not doing, in Afghanistan. Whatever the exchange these three have, the discussion of Afghanistan policy is one the entire nation needs to join, as people at Get Afghanistan Right have been urging the past several weeks.
While foreign policy has, of late, taken a back seat to wrangling over the economy, the war in Afghanistan should also be front and center. Recently, an additional 3,000 U.S. troops have arrived in Logar and Wardak provinces, in central east Afghanistan, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has announced that another 11,000-12,000 could arrive by mid-summer. Between now and June 2010, 30,000 more U.S. troops could be deployed to Afghanistan, bringing the U.S. total to 66,000, and the overall total of troops under NATO command to more than 93,000.
Some people, including many progressives, are no doubt saying: about time! Afghanistan has long been considered "the good war," a righteous payback to those who attacked on 9/11 that was truncated by the Cheney-Bush's diversion of resources and troops to carry out the NeoCon vision in Iraq. But as Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told David Ignatius Friday:
"I don't have enough troops in the United States military to make the difference that needs to be made" in Afghanistan, Mullen warned. "Afghans have got to lead this. It has got to have an Afghan face."
But while the Obama administration has often said that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, and spoken about the need for more attention to improving governance, reconstruction and economic development, the emphasis so far seems heavy on the military end of things.
Indeed, the President has just chosen Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, who was formerly one of the top military commanders in Afghanistan, to be the U.S. ambassador to Kabul.
If he is confirmed, that means four of the most influential voices on Afghanistan policy will be active or retired generals. One could view that optimistically since officers like Mullen and others seem to know that there's no military answer. But, as one critic has pointed out, when diplomatic approaches keyed to the needs of Afghanistan's beleaguered civil society are so desperately needed, it gives pause that America's military leaders will have so much sway over U.S. policy there.
As Young tells Moyers tonight:
"The problem is [that] the focus remains a military solution to what all the other information I have says is a political problem. I don’t care how you slice the military tactic. So long as your notion is that you can actually deal with this in a military way, you’re just going to march deeper and deeper into what Pete Seeger called ‘The Big Muddy' ... The point is, if you can’t figure out a political way to deal in Afghanistan then you can only compound the compound mess."
And Sprey says:
"What happens on the ground is for every one of those impacts you get five or ten times as many recruits for the Taliban as you've eliminated. The people that we’re trying to convince to become adherents to our cause have become rigidly hostile to our cause in part because of bombing and in part because of other killing of civilians from ground forces. We’re dealing with a society that’s based on honor... They have to resist being invaded, occupied, bombed and killed. It’s a matter of honor, and they’re willing to die in unbelievable numbers to do that."
Afghanistan today is not so unlike Iraq in March 2003. There is no definition of victory. For that reason, there is no exit plan. Generals like David Petraeus speak of years-long, open-ended commitments that consume tens of billions of dollars annually.
What are the goals? Find and capture Osama bin Laden (or confirm that he is already dead)? Finish off the remnants of Al Qaidah? Crush the Taliban once and for all to ensure that no terrorist attacks are ever launched from Afghanistan again (or from Pakistan)? Stabilize the central government and bring warlordism to heel? Build democracy? Improve the lives of women, oppressed under the Taliban, but also long before the Taliban existed, much less ruled? End the illicit opium trade? A combination of some or all of the above? None of the above?
Until we have straightforward answers, ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan seems improbable. But until we have answers, what possible purpose can be served by escalating the conflict with another 30,000 troops?
Discussions like those Moyers has undertaken is a start toward building support for an exit plan for Afghanistan. We will need many, many more. And as additional troops have already begun pouring in, there's no time to say other matters take priority.