Slow Boil

Even the back burner can get hot...

William Lind reminds us of the other war:

As rising U.S. and NATO casualty counts attest, the war in Afghanistan is heating up. It is doing so on Afghan time, which is to say slowly. When you have all the time in the world, why hurry?...

...the core of this failure by the U.S., NATO and the Afghan government is a common and often fatal military phenomenon: conflicting objectives. On the one hand, the U.S. and its allies want to defeat the Taliban and other "terrorists." But at the same time, they also want to stop opium production. If the Senlis Council's analysis is accurate, attempts to pursue the second objective are pushing us away from attaining the first...

Determining strategic objectives, and ensuring that those objectives are not contradictory, is the job of the most senior level of command, in this case the White House. By demanding that U.S. and allied troops pursue two conflicting objectives simultaneously, the Bush administration has created a no-win situation. Efforts to defeat the Taliban only work if they can gain the support of the rural population, but poppy eradication pushes the rural population toward the Taliban and its allies. (One could add a third incompatible objective, promoting women's rights in a conservative Islamic culture.)

President George W. Bush likes to say, "I'm the decider; I decide." The role of being the "decider" includes making sure that decisions are logically consistent. Mr. Bush is, from that perspective, a failed "decider" in Afghanistan. He failed similarly in deciding to invade Iraq as part of a global war against "terrorism," when the destruction of the Iraqi state proved, predictably, to work in favor of the "terrorists." He is failing yet again in picking quarrels with Russia and China when we need an all-states alliance against anti-state forces.

President Harry S. Truman said, "The buck stops here," in the Oval Office. When it comes to deciding on strategic objectives, President George W. Bush has torn the buck into confetti and tossed it to the winds of chance.

Now I'm beginning to understand why Shrub would point to catching a big fish as his greatest accomplishment: everything else he's done has turned to shit.