International Security

This incident may be a bad omen. The Taliban may be behind this awful shooting. The NYT reports that the soldiers had taken off their body armor and helmets

never thinking that they would be attacked by one of the men they lived and worked with, said a local provincial official.

The Times also noted a similar incident a month ago where 2 U.S. soldiers were killed by an Afghan policeman who

fired on American soldiers during a joint patrol in Wardak Province. [The incident] immediately intensified concerns about Taliban infiltration of the Afghan security forces, in particular the police, which are supposed to be preparing to take a broader role in combating the Taliban insurgency.

General McChrystal insists on pushing on and getting more troops. I have to say my take on this is that Andrew Bacevich is right — we should be doing a counter-terrorism operation, not a counter-insurgency. I fear the U.S. is getting sucked into a long dark hole with little advantage to our national security interests.

In an interview I did with him for International Affairs Forum, he said:

It seems to me that there are many people who assume that Afghanistan is a vital national security interest of the United States, that somehow we have to determine the fate of that country. And I question that assumption. I believe that our interests in Afghanistan are quite limited and indeed do not go much beyond simply ensuring that Afghanistan doesn’t become a sanctuary for Al Qaeda or other groups that are intent on trying to kill us. If that’s an accurate description of our interests there then I would say that protracted war that aims to pacify the country is completely unnecessary, not to mention probably completely unaffordable. So we have to ask ourselves if there are more cost-effective ways to accomplish our limited purposes and I think what’s now being called the counter-terrorism approach, or the Biden Plan, at least offers one possible alternative to what [General] McChrystal is giving us. What it says is basically that rather than occupying the place from now until the cows come home, we will maintain a comprehensive system of surveillance, we will do our darnedest to track Al-Qaida presence and activities and, to the extent that we can, come up with actionable intelligence then we will try to take out, dismantle, the Al-Qaida network, and therefore prevent Afghanistan from being the sanctuary that it was in September of 2001. I’m not saying that would be easy. I’m not saying it would provide a perfect fail-safe system. I am suggesting that it’s quite likely that that would be more effective than an open-ended counterinsurgency campaign and would also be much, much cheaper.

Cheaper financially. Less loss of life. It makes me think of the now-famous line John Kerry said during testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, after his tour in Viet Nam

how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?