It's relatively easy to outline the downsides of counter-insurgency. But what are the risks of communicating 'you can do whatever you like to us, and there will be no real consequences'? You also adopt the faddish notion of Trump and others of 'forever wars'. For low to mid-intensity conflicts, a war of a few to even twenty years is hard…
It's relatively easy to outline the downsides of counter-insurgency. But what are the risks of communicating 'you can do whatever you like to us, and there will be no real consequences'? You also adopt the faddish notion of Trump and others of 'forever wars'. For low to mid-intensity conflicts, a war of a few to even twenty years is hardly a 'forever' war. The enemies of democracy and modernity take a much longer-term perspective and this confers a considerable advantage over those in the West raised on video games and the internet with the attention spans of fruit flies. The blithe and faddish thinking in your article that all foreign interventions are doomed to failure was behind the disastrous unforced errors of both the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and its botched execution. The relative stability in Afghanistan with no U.S. casualties for 18 months was purchased at a meagre ongoing cost of a troop deployment of 2500 with air support. What was needed in those circumstances was a capacity for long-term thinking and the enduring loyalty of a true friend. The Afghans deserved better than to be sent back into the Dark Ages based on the fashionable salon room thinking as reflected in the sweeping and shallow assumptions of your article.
To flip that around: Israel has been communicating for decades that terrorism will be responded to with disproportionate force. That is exactly *why* Hamas launches attacks. So we can't say that Israel's conventional response is a deterrent.
I think the idea that Afghanistan experienced 'relative stability' prior to U.S. withdrawal is revisionism. U.S. forces may have been safe, but 2016-2018 were extremely deadly for Afghan civilians. The political system had no public support: The 2019 election had a turnout of less than 20%. The state was always situated precariously on the back of American occupation.
I agree that the withdrawal was a catastrophic disaster. I agree that long-term thinking is necessary — if the invasion had been managed under the philosophy that Petraeus espouses today, I think it *may* have enabled genuine success.
But what threw Afghanistan into the dark ages was the ruinous invasion that was unleashed on the country in 2001. We provided some of them — mostly those in the cities — some freedom but no security, in the name of pursuing our domestic priorities. We pivoted to a misguided effort to gift them democracy only after the quagmire began.
I think there are situations where foreign intervention are necessary and good. I think there are few, if any, situations where occupation can attain strategic goals or benefit local populations. You certainly seem to disagree.
It's relatively easy to outline the downsides of counter-insurgency. But what are the risks of communicating 'you can do whatever you like to us, and there will be no real consequences'? You also adopt the faddish notion of Trump and others of 'forever wars'. For low to mid-intensity conflicts, a war of a few to even twenty years is hardly a 'forever' war. The enemies of democracy and modernity take a much longer-term perspective and this confers a considerable advantage over those in the West raised on video games and the internet with the attention spans of fruit flies. The blithe and faddish thinking in your article that all foreign interventions are doomed to failure was behind the disastrous unforced errors of both the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and its botched execution. The relative stability in Afghanistan with no U.S. casualties for 18 months was purchased at a meagre ongoing cost of a troop deployment of 2500 with air support. What was needed in those circumstances was a capacity for long-term thinking and the enduring loyalty of a true friend. The Afghans deserved better than to be sent back into the Dark Ages based on the fashionable salon room thinking as reflected in the sweeping and shallow assumptions of your article.
To flip that around: Israel has been communicating for decades that terrorism will be responded to with disproportionate force. That is exactly *why* Hamas launches attacks. So we can't say that Israel's conventional response is a deterrent.
I think the idea that Afghanistan experienced 'relative stability' prior to U.S. withdrawal is revisionism. U.S. forces may have been safe, but 2016-2018 were extremely deadly for Afghan civilians. The political system had no public support: The 2019 election had a turnout of less than 20%. The state was always situated precariously on the back of American occupation.
I agree that the withdrawal was a catastrophic disaster. I agree that long-term thinking is necessary — if the invasion had been managed under the philosophy that Petraeus espouses today, I think it *may* have enabled genuine success.
But what threw Afghanistan into the dark ages was the ruinous invasion that was unleashed on the country in 2001. We provided some of them — mostly those in the cities — some freedom but no security, in the name of pursuing our domestic priorities. We pivoted to a misguided effort to gift them democracy only after the quagmire began.
I think there are situations where foreign intervention are necessary and good. I think there are few, if any, situations where occupation can attain strategic goals or benefit local populations. You certainly seem to disagree.