The Hands of Time

Changing the engineer won't do much good if you wait until the locomotive is fifty feet away from the washed out bridge. Sometimes it's just too late to start over, even if you do figure out what went wrong.

It would be wonderful if we could take Afghanistan back to late 2001 and zip Iraq back to 2003 but, of course, we can't. The matrix of challenges and opportunities that existed then is gone forever. Thanks to a powerful blend of incompetence and neglect, the matrix today presents far greater challenges and far fewer opportunities.

In both countries the "enemies" have gotten stronger and more diverse in character. There reaches a point in counterinsurgency where the insurgents, if unchecked, morph from guerrillas into one side in a conventional, civil war. That happens when enough of the civilian population comes to support the insurgents. We're on the cusp of that dilemma in Afghanistan today.

If a national government cannot establish its legitimacy with its own people, what are we doing supporting it? It would be great if it could all be resolved at the ballot box but that's not how insurgencies play out. We got rid of the Taliban government by force and that's how they're going to try to come back. In a nation as feudal, tribal and backward as Afghanistan, western democracy is a very strange idea that has no natural home.

We're not giving up, at least not yet, but problems are looming on the horizon in Baghdad. If, as is now widely expected, the US coalition begins packing up in 2008, we may be the No. 1 infidel target in the region. We'd better start thinking about that right now lest we pay the price of letting our thinking lag behind Washington's.

America has finally realized that its game plan in Iraq is doomed. Their Plan A has failed and they don't have a Plan B so they're busy, sifting through a bunch of bad options. Is NATO's Plan A doing any better or are we just whistling past the graveyard? There is probably no better time than right now to start sifting through our own options.