The spirits are up at the White House these days: everybody’s busy congratulating themselves for a war well fought and deservedly won.
That we deserve to win the War on Terror is beyond respectable dispute (although, evidently, not beyond dispute altogether). But did we win the war? Actually, did we go to war?
Unilateral carpet bombing assisted by 200 spies on the ground is engaging in a military endeavor, but it is not fighting a war. Fighting a war is sending dozens of thousands of troops on the ground to face an enemy.
We were reluctant to do that. And guess what? That’s why we don’t have Osama.
The first phase of the War on Terror — the Afghan Phase — is over, and we are ready for a mid-course assessment of success and failure.
Going into the war on October 7th, what were our goals for the Afghan Phase? They fall into two categories: Security and Retribution.
(We also liked the idea of liberating Afghans and restoring, at least for a while, their inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. But that wasn’t one of our goals; it was a bonus. We didn’t go into Afghanistan to liberate the Afghans, much as we can be proud of having done so.)
On the security side, there were two main goals. The first was to destroy the Al-Quaeda network. The second was to send a message to every rogue government out there: if you harbor, you pay.
On the retributive side, our goal was to bring justice to those responsible for the 9/11 terror attack. That crowd is unfortunately just that, but three people stand out: Osama the mastermind; Al-Zawahiri the theoretician; and Omar the landlord.
Three and a half months and hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars worth of explosives later, we have nobody. We brought justice to a bunch of disoriented losers (as should be) but where are the three chieftains?
We don’t have Osama, we don’t have Al-Zawahiri, and we don’t have Omar. This is bad for justice, but it is also bad for security.
With Osama and Al-Zawahiri hanging out — we are almost sure we can narrow it down to, let’s say — somewhere between Lybia and Indonesia, we have no idea how functional the remains of Al-Quaeda are or can be.
To be sure, we have limited the security threat posed by Al-Quaeda. But we didn’t destroy it. For real destruction, a necessary condition would have been the elimination of Osama personally.
(Perhaps this would have been a sufficient condition as well: other people could always organize, and carry out terrorist attacks under the deserted banner of Al-Quaeda, but the original beast would have been put to rest.)
To be fair to the administration, the Afghan Phase does seem to have sent the desired message to rogue governments. Everybody wants to be our friends now. (Even the Syrians! No doubt, this is success.) And the main reason they want to be our friends is, for the most part, not the attenuated moral sense they have acquired since 9/11. Rather, the reason they want to be our friends is that they are afraid: since september 11, you can feel the American rage in the air.
The balance sheet doesn’t look good, though. Rogues most certainly got the point, for now. But we have no justice and too limited security. Perhaps we won the war in Afghanistan in the sense of coming out on top. But we didn’t win it in the sense of getting what we wanted.
Why have we failed?
Why did we not win the war in Afghanistan? Because we didn’t go to war in the first place. We don’t have Osama because we didn’t put troops on the ground. This is simply the price of the White House strategy (the Colin Powell strategy?) in Afghanistan.
Had we landed fifty thousand troops on Afghan soil by late October, we would have right now 200-500 casualties and Osama, Al-Zawahiri, and Omar on death row.
We can debate on whether it’s worth it. That is, we can debate on whether the War on Terror is worth its price. We can debate on whether we should fight a war and accept the casualties in the name of justice and security.
What we can’t do is go around congratulating ourselves for supposedly winning a war we were reluctant even to fight. We bombed the Taliban to bits, and threw Osama to the streets, but this is a far cry from winning the war.
