It's Called Democracy, Dammit!

There are many types of government and each of them comes in a variety of shades. Democracy is one and, yes, hands down the best.

Each form of government has its strengths and weaknesses. Democracy also suffers from weaknesses and foibles. It's when political leaders choose to ignore those weaknesses that problems often arise.

In a totalitarian state, warfighting is the exclusive ambit of the masters. They decide when to go to war, against whom, for how long and just how that war is to be fought. It's when democratic leaders try to exercise the same powers that things can go sideways quickly.

Democracies have to exercise their martial powers in accordance with the public will. The people will generally support what they see as a valid war but their support is inevitably conditional.

Popular support for a war is a function of numerous factors; things such as what triggered it (watch out for lies), the quality of their leadership (lies are toxic), the legitimacy of the cause, the duration of the fighting and the state of progress. As a general rule, leaders of democracies who institute wars need to deliver results.

Democratic populations will support offensive war but they want a reasonably quick war and they want a decisive result. It's football, not cricket they're after. Get the job done and win.

Winning, however, means winning within the rules. The rules are, in turn, defined by popular acceptance. Totalitarian states can get away with reprisals, for example, where democratic states cannot. That's not to say that democratic states don't have a rich track record of excesses, they do. Usually, however, they can get away with this sort of unpleasantness either by concealing it or thanks to a public that really doesn't want to know. Abu Ghraib and rendition are two recent examples.

Today's democratic wars are fought with precision-guided munitions, not bayonets. Fact of life. We've lost our taste for mutilation and blood flowing in the gutters. That's one of the reasons why we despise insurgents. Their is not a sanitized war and we find it repugnant.

How many times have we heard pundits, even our own military leaders, rebuke the guerrillas for not coming out and fighting like men? We get that all the time. It's pathetically ludicrous. That would mean their "men" coming out onto the playing field with antiquated assault rifles and RPGs to stand and face our "men" replete with the latest tanks, artillery, small arms, attack helicopters and jet strike fighters.

Unfortunately our war fighting machine, powerful as it is, won't win guerrilla wars. End of story. Counter-insurgency is the most numbers-dependent type of warfare there is. You need massive numbers of soldiers on the ground - not tanks, not artillery, not jet fighters. We don't have the numbers to pull it off, we don't.

We can't be defeated militarily by the insurgents. They don't have the high-tech toys and firepower to do it. But staving off defeat is anything but winning because their war isn't decided by military victory but political victory. They're not out to win our war, they don't have to win our war. They're not even going to try to defeat our forces militarily.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that guerrilla warfare is unpalatable to democracies. We are neither prepared nor willing to commit the troop levels necessary for this fight so winning is out of the question. That means we have to get somebody else to fight the insurgents and who better than the locals? In reality, they're the only group that can win if only because they have nowhere else to go.

We've squandered six years in Afghanistan, six years while precious public support for the mission bled out. We had six years to help forge a viable, central government; six years in which to raise and train an adequate security force; six years in which to establish some semblance of security in the countryside. I'm sorry to say this but that is the face of failure.

We're a democracy, we don't have six years to squander on indecisive warfighting.

Canada is a very small player in George w. Bush's incompetently managed war on terror. We like to look at our performance in isolation of the rest but we can't. It's sort of like focusing on keeping one room of a house intact while the rest of the place is burning to the ground.

We control very little of our own situation. Everything the big players do ripples through our domain. Our fortunes are affected by what goes on in Iraq, in Iran, in Pakistan, in Washington, in Brussels, and in the Middle East generally.

The lead partner in the ridiculously named "war on terror" is going through the DTs. Republicans have read the polls and know this war thing will break their backs in 2008 so they're scrambling to find a way out. Their already conclusive failure in Iraq is going to have serious repercussions on the NATO war in Afghanistan. All those gleeful jihadis will be looking for the closest bunch of infidels to lay into and who do you think that would be?

Our fate is now very much in the hands of the American people who must be the least sophisticated populace of the Western nations, the NATO members. Will they have any appetite for continuing the war in Afghanistan after the humiliation of Iraq? America is a democracy albeit both an incredibly powerful and clumsy one.

Thirty years ago we saw what happened to American public opinion when they lost a major, unwinnable war. If that pattern is repeated after Iraq, it means big trouble for us in Afghanistan. Then again, that's democracy.