Phased Withdrawals Just Make Sense

Ever notice how those who argue most stridently against phased withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan are the very same people who got us into these messes and left us stuck there? These wars have shown us that 21st century military leaders lack the ability to 'finish the job' and won't admit when they've failed no matter how obvious the evidence of their failure.

We've been in Afghanistan for five years - about the same time it took to fight and win WWII. Where are we today? We're stuck in a mess that's worse than it's ever been in those five years. The government we chose to create has become a joke. Warlords rule at least half the country. The bureaucracy and the judicial system are corrupt. The police security force is massively corrupt and oppresses the Afghan people, driving them into the arms of the Taliban insurgency. Opium has become the economic engine of this impoverished country and we're intent on destroying it. The people in the Pashtun south are increasingly turning away from the Kabul government and toward the insurgent Taliban. We have an overwhelming advantage in firepower but the Taliban have the initiative and their control in the countryside is expanding. The Taliban numbers are increasing substantially while NATO struggles to add 3% to its force. In Kandahar province, Canada has roughly one soldier per ten square miles of territory or one combat soldier per 25-square miles.

Add that up and what do you have? We know we're not going to defeat the Taliban militarily, even our defence minister admits that. We know we can't win unless we seal off the border with Pakistan yet we're seriously short of enough troops to fight the Taliban within Afghanistan and have none to spare for this other, essential task. We know the whole thing will come undone without a floor to ceiling purge of corruption within the government we established and yet we have no means to pull that off. We know that we have to create an "alternative economy" to supplant the opium trade but have done nothing to identify and create such an economy.

What has our side achieved in five years? How near are we to victory, to the point where we can unfurl "Mission Accomplished" banners? Our military leaders say they'll need decades to prevail in Afghanistan, even as they keep falling behind. Will they be singing the very same song ten years, twenty years from now?

Maybe, just maybe we'd all be better off if we started imposing some timetables here - not on the Afghans but on our own generals. Maybe we need to tell them precisely what we expect from them, clear benchmarks, and by when. Let's identify what we need out of this. If we give them that, then they can tell us what they'll need in order to deliver. Of course our politicians won't do that because they know what they'll hear and they don't want to hear it. But we need to hear it because we need to decide, sooner rather than later, whether we're really prepared to spend the lives of a lot more of our young men and women to achieve some measure of victory.

If we don't have the will to do what it takes to sort out Afghanistan - beginning with scrapping the hopelessly compromised Kabul government and starting all over - let's at least admit that and get on with phased withdrawals.