Time to Turn Down the Heat to Simmer

I was in Colorado last week and had the opportunity to talk at some length with a retired military officer who served several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan about what the U.S. should do in the latter country. President Trump has now decided that we're sending in more troops, but that was definitely not the advice of the retired officer who had served high up in the command structure. 

According to this officer, we cannot win in Afghanistan short of nuking the whole country because it is a boiling cauldron of tribes who hate each other with a dash of terorists thrown in. At best he thought that if we hired mercenaries to work with tribes whose interests aligned with the U.S. (at least for now) we could probably keep an eye on the bad guys and take them out when necessary, meanwhile leaving the tribes to their games. This is the strategy that worked so well when we went in after 911 and cleaned house. Air power would still be necessary but not ground troops. It is not a country that is geographically suited to the "Big War" approach with armor and large troop movements, etc. but he thinks that this is the war that high level military leaders insist on fighting. 

David French in National Review comes to the same conclusion from a strategic angle:

“Killing terrorists,” Trump says. Afghanistan has its share of terrorists, but what it mostly has is an endless civil war being fought among rival tribal interests in a rugged and empty part of the world that mostly has served only to get in the way when you’re marching your Macedonian army toward India. “Killing terrorists” in Afghanistan is not a national military goal with a defined set of conclusory conditions and a working definition of victory — it’s an eternal game of Whac-a-Mole using U.S. forces as the toy mallet. If concluding our efforts in Afghanistan before Islamic radicalism has been exterminated there means handing a victory to the ghost of Osama bin Laden — who is, let’s keep in mind, dead — then we are never leaving Afghanistan."

www.nationalreview.com/article/450719/trump-afghanistan-war-enough-enough

He's right. We're not going to be able to "nation build" and we're not going to embed democaracy. We need to have enough presence to identify the bad guys, go in when necessary and take them out, and then leave. It's time to learn from out past mistakes.