Tue. Feb 27, 2007
Afghanistan and Iraq: Unsafe for VP's
Two events in two days provide a window on the level of control we’ve “wrought” in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re not even safe for Vice Presidents:
Iraq’s Shiite vice president narrowly escaped assassination Monday as a blast ripped through a government meeting hall just hours after it was searched by U.S. teams with bomb-sniffing dogs.
As U.S. forces sealed off the area around the municipal building, investigators grappled with the troubling question of how the bomb was smuggled into the ministry of public works — a seven-story structure with crack surveillance systems from its days as offices for Saddam Hussein’s feared intelligence service.
Iraqi VP narrowly escapes assassination
And today in Afghanistan:
A suicide bomber attacked the entrance to the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, killing up to 23 people and wounding 20.
The vice president had spent the night at the sprawling Bagram Air Base [...] Asked if the Taliban were trying to send a message with the attack, Cheney said: “I think they clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government.”
“Striking at Bagram with a suicide bomber, I suppose, is one way to do that,” he said. “But it shouldn’t affect our behavior at all.”
There were 139 suicide bombings last year, a fivefold increase over 2005, and Rodriguez has said he expects the number of suicide bombs to rise even further in 2007.
Cheney OK after Afghan blast; 23 killed
A five-fold increase in one year. And Cheney says “it shouldn’t affect our behavior at all.” Many say the Taliban already effectively controls most of southern Afghanistan, as we’ve never given the Karzai government the support they need to spread their control outside of Kabul.
And it looks like that will continue. This spring while we are allegedly “surging” our troop levels in Iraq, the Taliban is going to make a major surge in Afghanistan. Mostly because we never finished the job there before we moved on to Iraq.
The failed state of Afghanistan became a base for Al Qaeda, from which they attacked us. And because we did not fully throttle it, it gave birth to the failed state of Northern Waziristan, just over the border in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
And it’s become a base for Al Qaeda. You know what comes next. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I’ve said it before, and it sure applies now: can we possibly get one war right?
Published 11:38AM, Tue, Feb 27 2007
Category: Al Qaeda Iraq
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Peanut Gallery
A late night rumination on this whole “get one war right” thang got me to searching “two war policy,” as in our alleged commitment to fund and size the military to be capable of handling two conflicts. And in that search, I came across a ten year old article that is, well, ironic, at the very least:
The myth of the two-front war: over-preparing for a two-front war that will almost certainly never occur is costing us billions by Lawrence J. Korb, March, 1997
When the Soviet Empire began to collapse in 1989, General Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fearful that Americans would demand “too large” a peace dividend, developed the Rogue Doctrine. This doctrine postulated that in the post-cold war era, the military threats to the U.S. would come from rogue states like Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea, and that the U.S. needed to be able to handle at least two of these rogues simultaneously. Powell reasoned that if the U.S. had only a one-war capability, North Korea, for example, might be tempted to take advantage of the U.S. while this nation was fighting a war in the Persian Gulf.
[...]
A realistic QDR could reduce defense spending significantly without jeopardizing our national security. An objective assessment of the threat would show that we have more than enough forces to protect our interests in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean Peninsula, and that our forces are already increasing their technological advantage at the current levels of defense spending. Moreover, history and logic make it clear that it is not likely that two conflicts would erupt simultaneously.
That last sentence of your comment – the word “erupt” stands out.
Obviously, the Afghanistan war “erupted” in one of the most vivid ways imaginable.
However, the Iraq war “erupted” in ways that were, frankly, merely imaginary.
.
.
Still, we should have been able to get it done. The military itself was up to the task. If any of the REMFs had told them what the task was, that might have helped. Come to think of it, that might still be useful.
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I’ve said it before, and it sure applies now: can we possibly get one war right?
Short Answer – yes, we could have gotten one war right.