By Jonathan Power
What is the exit strategy for Iraq now?” asked Leon Sigal in a prescient article in World Policy Journal back in fall 2007. He went on to tell the tale of how George Aiken, the Republican senator from Vermont, in a speech on the Senate floor in 1966, said the way to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam was to “declare victory and get out.” Having declared victory in 2004 and not got out, it is too late for President George W. Bush or his successors to do that now.
But Aiken had a riposte for that contingency too. A few years later, when it was impossible to declare victory, he was asked how to get out of Vietnam. “In ships,” he replied.
Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are moving towards the only solution that will work—leaving. In Iraq, surely this is what Barack Obama, if he becomes president, must do, despite all the heavy advice trying to persuade him to drag it out…until a miracle happens wherein the killing stops, the legal system functions, and “democracy” works. But the killing in this very disturbed society will go on for decades. Washington’s tallies of the Iraqi death toll, supposedly sharply falling, do not even count non-sectarian killings. Nor do they account for the rate of kidnapping, rape, and pillage. The U.S. authorities live in a cloud of self-deception.
In Afghanistan, we had recently the senior commander of the British military presence in Afghanistan telling a newspaper that the war could not be won—and which army on earth could keep up its morale and fighting edge when the boss says that? “I will not lay down my life if we’re just going to pull out,” is the natural reaction of a serving soldier in these circumstances. Every commander of the various national forces in Afghanistan, if not yet the rank and file, must know by now what the British ambassador has told London’s Foreign Office (thanks to a leak in Paris): that the war is not winnable, that peace must be made with the Taliban, and the West should accept that some dictator (hopefully a reasonable one) will come to power. Democracy as we know it does not stand a chance of coming into being, he argued.
Afghanistan will likely return to severe but reasonably honest Taliban rule, which once again will stop the mass killing of innocents and will keep the poppy crop under strict control—which at the moment is doing incalculable harm to consumers in the West, and keeping an ugly mafia in business. Only the march of time will dilute the harsher edges of Taliban rule. If the Western NGOs want to do something useful, they can work to make sure their schools and clinics keep functioning, which in a generation or two might lead to the quiet subversion of Taliban rule, just as mission schools in Africa subverted colonial rule.
The Taliban, if no longer pushed, are unlikely to give succor to Osama bin Laden. They don’t want to be massively bombed again. Right now, in Saudi Arabia, the Taliban are negotiating with the Afghan government on how to diminish the conflict, and the Taliban profess that they are cutting their links to Al Qaeda.
Iraq, if it’s lucky, will summon in the peacekeeping and administrative help of nearby Arab neighbors (mainly Sunnis) and, to balance them, those of Shiite-ruled Iran, so that they are all forced to stake a stake in the unity and well-being of the country. Faces familiar by religion, language, and race should have an easier time than those of the “infidels” from America. Some mainly Muslim, Indonesian, Malaysian, Nigerian, and Bangladeshi soldiers operating under the UN flag wouldn’t go amiss either. The UN itself could play a supervisory and arbitrating role.
Obama should beware. Too many of his foreign policy advisers are pushing him hard to stay longer in Iraq and increase the American firepower in Afghanistan. But this will tarnish his presidency badly. As president, Lyndon Johnson had to stand and watch as his marvelous “Great Society” social reform crashed on the rocks, destroyed by his decision to pursue a major war in Vietnam. Likewise, Obama could see all his hopes for health care, employment retraining, and the creation of a fairer distribution of income come to naught.
Time for a major re-think. Time to get out?
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