US Marines in Helmand: No time for teatime.
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Now that all eyes are on Afghanistan, it is more important than ever that we keep our experience in Iraq in view. We must now assess the net effect of the Iraqi "surge" strategy, however shocking that may be, before we recommit to that same disastrous strategy in Afghanistan. The simple lesson of Iraq is that nation-building in Islam builds a nation that is Islamic, and, therefore, constitutionally, legally, religiously, and culturally incapable of standing as an ally against global jihad.
The fact is, we don't "get" anything from our heavy investment in Iraq, just as we won't "get" anything out of our heavy investment in Afghanistan. We urgently need a new line of battle drawn around the West served by a multilevel strategy organized and coordinated around a simple principle: opposition to the spread of Islamic law. (While our leaders NEVER point this out, the spread of Islamic law is the inspiration of jihad violence, more delicately known as "violent extremism" or "terrorism.") Such a multilevel strategy would include not just military means (lily pads), but, for example, an energy policy designed for energy independence, immigration policy designed to halt the creation of sharia demographics in the West, economic policy to bar sharia-compliant finance and purchase of our educational institutions, and travel restrictions on sharia nations to prevent the physical movement of jihadis to their battle stations. After all, pre-9/11 Afghanistan provided a base for al Qaeda, but al Qaeda didn't launch its WTC attack from an Afghan hilltop. It had to get from the Islamic world into the Western world. In this time of war (jihad), we would need to restrict such access acordingly.
When you take this global view, our current focus on Afghanistan appears hopelessly, mindlessly narrow. But it remains the focus of debate today. Do we surge, or do we not?
Let's get something clear: The US military aquitted its "surge" mission in Iraq successfully and professionally. But that was only one half of the surge strategy as conceived by its authors -- and the only part of that strategy under US control. The US military surge was ordered specifically to trigger actions and behaviors in the Iraqi body politic that would justify all that US investment and sacrifice. These have not happened and will not happen, again, because an infidel nation cannot fight for the soul of an Islamic nation and come away having won its heart and mind. We set up a sharia-supreme state, and we will leave behind a sharia-supreme state (and the sooner, the better, I would add.)
What follows is a reprise of an August column which takes a look at conditions in post-surge Iraq.
Question for Americans: How can we as a nation even consider using our military for another "surge" in Afghanistan when the "surge" in Iraq has left little more imprint on the sands of Mesopotamia than the receding tide?
This, to clarify, is not the antiwar Left writing. I am writing from a pro-military, anti-jihad point of view that has long seen futility in the U.S. nation-building strategy in Iraq, and now sees futility in the rerun in Afghanistan. Problem is, the same blind spot afflicts both strategies: the failure to understand that an infidel nation cannot fight for the soul of an Islamic nation. This, in essence, is what President Bush and now President Obama have ordered our troops to do.
I don't suggest these missions are ever considered in such terms, which implicitly acknowledge intractable differences between Judeo-Christian-based Western cultures and Islamic cultures. Doing so, of course, is a taboo thing -- a grievous violation in the PC realm where decisions are made. But the omission helps answer my opening question. I seriously doubt Americans would approve of re-running the surge in Afghanistan if there were an honest reckoning of the religious, cultural and historical reasons why the surge failed to achieve its promised results in Iraq.
This is not to say the U.S. military failed. On the contrary, the U.S. military succeeded, as ordered, to bring a measure of security and aid to a carnage-maddened Islamic society. Given U.S.-won security, surge architects promised us, this same Islamic society was supposed to then respond by coming together in "national reconciliation." They were wrong. Not only did Iraqis fail to coalesce as a pro-American, anti-jihad bulwark in the Islamic world (the thoroughly delusional original objective), they have also failed to form a minimally functional nation-state. And the United States is now poised to do the same thing all over again in Afghanistan.
I write this as the volume of talk of an Afghanistan "surge" is getting louder, drowning out the quiet undercurrent of eye-opening reports now emerging on post-surge Iraq. Late last month, for example, the New York Times reported on a bluntly revealing memo written by Col. Timothy Reese, an adviser to the Iraqi military's Baghdad command. In it, Reese urgently argues that the United States has "reached the point of diminishing returns" in Iraq due, among many other things, to endemic corruption ("the stuff of legend"), laziness, weakness and culture of "political violence and intimidation."
Reese considers Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) "good enough" -- just -- to keep the Iraqi government from toppling. That's reason enough, he writes, to leave early, by August 2010 instead of December 2011. Reese describes a "fundamental change" in the U.S.-Iraq relationship since the June 30 handover -- a "sudden coolness," lack of cooperation, even a "forcible takeover" by ISF of a checkpoint. While Iraq will still "squeeze the U.S. for all the `goodies' that we can provide," he writes, tensions are increasing and "the potential for Iraqi on U.S. violence is high now and will grow by the day."
And that's the good news. The Washington Times this week reported on an even more dire prognostication to be published by National Defense University written by Najim Abed Al-Jabouri, a former Iraqi police chief and mayor. Al-Jabouri focuses on problems within the ISF, where, he writes, the divided loyalties of what is essentially a series of militias beholden to competing "ethno-sectarian" political factions could easily drive Iraq to civil war. He writes: "The state security institutions have been built upon a foundation of shifting loyalties that will likely collapse when struck by the earthquake of ethnic and sectarian attacks. Iraq's best hope for creating a long-term stable democracy will come from an independent national security force that is controlled by the state, and not by political parties competing to control the state."
Al-Jabouri insists the United States should exert its "leverage" to revamp the ISF, which, given Reese's evidence of plummeting U.S. influence in Iraq, seems farfetched even if it were a good idea. Which it is emphatically not. An infidel nation cannot fight for the soul of an Islamic nation -- a truism that, in a more rational (non-PC) world, might bring surge enthusiasts to their senses.