Eliminating the enemy, but not the enmity
by George Jonas
National Post
November 28, 2009
Gambling and warfare have this in common: If you don't quit while you're ahead, chances are you'll quit when you're behind. Not having quit while ahead, quitting while behind is what the American-led coalition is now doing in Iraq. It seems poised to do so in Afghanistan as well, President Barack Obama's intermittent rhetorical flourishes to the contrary notwithstanding.
In both of these wars victory was in the coalition's grasp. "Operation Enduring Freedom," launched against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in response to 9/11 in 2001, was a swift and complete military success. Tribal forces of the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan, after booting out the Taliban with the help of U.S. Army Special Forces, occupied Kabul. Once the Bonn Agreement had inaugurated Hamid Karzai as chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority in December 2001, the West's war aim of ending the terrorist Taliban/al-Qaeda partnership's rule in Afghanistan had been achieved. With Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden hiding in their caves, victory was a declaration away.
Would the Taliban have seeped back, had we declared victory and gone home? It couldn't have seeped back more than it did anyway.
The Iraq war came next. Saddam Hussein's forces were militarily defeated within six weeks in the spring of 2003. Saddam himself was pulled from his "spider hole" by December 13. On that date, the Anglo-American coalition's principal war aim, the removal of a hostile regime and its war-criminal leader from power, had been achieved.
From that moment, all boots on the ground were there to salvage Iraq, avert civil war, imbue democratic values and rebuild infrastructure. The coalition forces spent every minute, every dollar and every drop of blood in the defense of Iraqi rather than Western interests (except indirectly). Yet any suggestion that it might be time for the coalition to regard the mission as accomplished was dismissed out of hand.
Even though George W. Bush campaigned on a platform of "no nation-building" before his first term, nation-building became the centre-piece of his foreign policy during his second term. The seamless shift was justified by the ostensible duty of victorious parties to prevent chaos and civil war, plus the West's undoubted interest in establishing functioning democracies. The dogma was that we needed a stable, democratic Iraq and Afghanistan no less than the Iraqis and Afghans did, otherwise we'd have to fight the terrorists all over again.
In an important paper released this week by the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, Professor Anil Hira outlines how "...defeating regimes that harboured terrorists was not enough, but that states had to be rebuilt to reflect legitimate, sovereign and well-functioning states in order to close the harbours where terrorism was developing."
This was the prevailing view, all right, and it was mistaken. The error, as I've written before, was Bush the President not heeding Bush the Candidate. The bloody civil wars the coalition's troops stayed to prevent ensued anyway, with both population and coalition forces suffering losses far in excess of what they had suffered during the military campaign.
Western coalitions didn't prevent civil wars; they presided over them. This benefited native populations little, but harmed us a lot. The West's popularity, from its height on the day it dethroned Afghanistan's and Iraq's barbaric regimes, is now plummeting to a new low as the Taliban gradually reoccupies large tracts of countryside, while in Iraq Muslim factions continue to blow each other up with a regularity that's as tedious as it's horrifying.
Ironically, what's losing us wars that we've already won is our insistence on eliminating their root causes.
Our confusion stems from many sources, an important one being a misreading of the lessons of World War II. We've credited our post-war policies for the transformation of Germany and Japan from ultranationalistic dictatorships into pacific democracies too much, and the unique circumstances and history of the German and Japanese people not enough. We thought we had a formula, a recipe for turning nations into Western-style democracies at will, forgetting that the democratic nations of postwar Japan and Germany were forged by themselves, not by us. We only led the horse to water; we didn't make it drink.
Prof. Hira looks at what happens when Western goals of "removing the immediate threat" of rogue or terrorist states and weapons "[morph] into the push to create stable regimes that will not only behave more responsibly but govern more democratically." The Simon Fraser University scholar's impressive paper -- The Strategic Quagmire: Why Nation Building In Afghanistan Is Failing -- concludes that "[u]sing Afghanistan as an example we see that the only logical road to success in nation-building, should we choose to continue it, is long-term occupation."
Hmm. These days, I'd be content if we choose to continue the long-term occupation of Canada. Eliminating the enemy is a military task. Eliminating enmity isn't. I'd say it's a spiritual task we haven't mastered yet. Until we do, going abroad should be for trading, sightseeing and defeating the foe -- time and again, if need be. The place for building a nation is at home.