Afghanistan and Trump

Since the days of the Great Game, in the mid-1800s, Afghanistan has been known as the ‘Graveyard of Empires’.  Go ahead and Google the term.  They drove out the British Empire twice, Imperial Russia, then the Soviet Union, and have managed to maintain a stalemate with us and our allies since 2001.  Whenever there are no foreign powers to fight, the multitude of competing warlords, tribes and other factions stay sharp by practicing on each other. 

Last night, the Current Occupant of the White House demonstrated that our engagement in that country is yet another critical issue about which he has absolutely no understanding. 

He said, "Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition, attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge."  These crowd-pleasing words sound great, but they are goals, not a strategy – and they are the same goals we have had all along.  The closest thing to a change in strategy is giving the military more autonomy.  But this still does not define what victory would look like, or how to achieve this.  It just means he will have somebody below him to blame when it doesn’t work. 

He cited the service men and women who have lost their lives as reason for staying there to see the battle through.  This is eerily like British and Soviet reasons for overstaying their missions – and very much like the ‘peace with honor’ criteria that kept us bleeding in Vietnam for seven years after our leaders knew it was not winnable.  It defines an escalating cycle of commitment for an unwinnable (and nebulously-defined) war that is already the longest in our history.