Mr. Dion's Creep

A common feature of failed counterinsurgency warfare is the eventual drift into "mission creep."

Mission creep is the temptation when the original mission isn't working to either expand the initial commitment or move on to an even bigger mission. It happens - all too often - and it almost always winds up the same way, in failure.

Vietnam is the classic example of mission creep. America originally sent in military advisors to work with the South Vietnamese forces. Then that progressed into combat formations with a massive supporting effort from the US Air Force and US Navy. Carrier battle groups lined up off the North Vietnamese coast. Bombers flying in from Thailand and Guam. Air war over North Vietnam. Carpet bombing in Laos. Invasion of Cambodia. Eventually just under 600,000 US soldiers in South Vietnam. And it all ended with helicopters flying off the rooftop of a hastily abandoned American embassy. What began with Eisenhower ended with Nixon/Ford, claiming the lives of 50,000 Americans on the battlefield and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, the countrysides still littered with mines and unexploded ordinance and the generational scourge of Agent Orange. All for a little country that, at the end of the day, really didn't matter very much at all.

Now Stephane Dion has concluded that NATO's efforts in Afghanistan are probably doomed to failure without taking the fight to the insurgent and terrorist strongholds inside Pakistan's tribal lands. He's probably right.

Unfortunately Mr. Dion has the same blinkered vision that Richard Nixon had when he authorized the secret invasion of Cambodia. Neither of them realized that they were addressing but one of several fatal flaws. Nixon thought he would destroy North Vietnam's sanctuary infrastructure in Cambodia and eliminate the threat to the south coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. It didn't work for Nixon and the same thinking won't work for Dion and NATO either.

At best - at the very best - you can staunch the flow of the insurgency temporarily but only temporarily. Much as I hate this hackneyed phrase, "we have all the watches, but they have all the time." Time is not on our side. It is on theirs. They're the home team, not us. It's Year Six of this fumbled effort and that means that Year One options are long foreclosed. If there was ever a time for a military operation to sweep the tribal lands it was at the outset before the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to get their infrastructure established there and cement their alliances with the locals. They haven't survived this long by being fools. They have almost certainly prepared a long time ago for the possibility of the arrival of westerners in the tribal lands.

Speaking of the locals, the Pashtun and Baloch tribesmen of the border regions, what sort of reaction do we expect from them? Do we think they haven't been watching where this war has gone these past six years? Do we think they're going to be any more welcoming to us than they have been to the Pakstani army in recent years or to the British armies of the past? If an infidel force shows up, even with the support of the Pakistani army, what might that do to the simmering Baloch secessionist movement, how might that spread and, in turn, destabilize Islamabad?

Six years, six lost years and what have we learned? We ought to have learned that counterinsurgency warfare cannot be fought "on the cheap." We ought to have learned that but we haven't. We don't even have but a fraction of the force needed to secure Kandahar province so we have to send our soldiers out on patrols, trolling for IEDs. NATO cannot maintain the existing force structure. If it could, it would be able to relieve us with another nation's soldiers but it can't and it won't.

There's no appetite among the NATO membership for the existing war so where are we going to conjure up support for a new and wider war, one that could have repercussions throughout the region that we can't even begin to contemplate much less hope to control?

Yesterday US Defence Secretary Robert Gates stirred up a hornets' nest by slagging NATO forces as not up to the job of counterinsurgency warfare. Guess what? He's right. He's right except that he's disingenuous if he doesn't include his own forces in that description. That's why his own forces haven't laid their hands on bin Laden in six years. That's why the Taliban has come back, resurgent. That's why al-Qaeda has morphed into a much harder target spread throughout the Islamic world, Europe and even North America. That's why the bulk of his own army languishes, worn out, in Iraq.

Mister Dion may be right, the key to the future of Afghanistan may depend on what happens across the border in Pakistan but that is just one issue that will ultimately dictate what fate befalls Afghanistan, just one key.