Military Views on Afghanistan

I wanted to call your attention to Tom Ricks' post about the recent big Marine counterinsurgency conference featuring GEN Petraeus. It's not so much Ricks' post as the great discussion going on in the comments section. See especially Don Bacon's comment here. 

Amazing that this discussion can go on, in this year, without these military big-shots realize that they can't just talk about tactics. But without the Obama administration's guidance on the future strategy in that region, I suppose there's nothing else they can do - which is sad, in a way. You'd think they could at least try to talk about why they have been strategically unsuccessful in the Middle East.

I will reiterate a common view of mine, that the greatest failure of our military leadership (and our political leadership for that matter) is their inability to craft a regional strategy for the Middle East and/or Southwest Asia, whatever you want to call it. Iraq and Afghanistan are not islands in the middle of the Pacific. They have neighbors, there are regional issues that underlie the success or failure of our military actions in those countries. It's like people are staring through straws.

Comments

[Ray]

A reminder. (How on earth can a strategy work...)

(The Times, 29th September).
"The country has never been permanently conquered or colonised and no external power has held long-term sway here; then again, no internal power has ever controlled Afghanistan for long, either. Home to 50 ethnic or sub-tribal groups, 34 languages and 27 million people, the country's internecine feuds and counterfeuds - ethnic, clannish and impenetrable to outsiders - run through Afghan society like veins through marble."

Labyrinthine.

[Peter]

Hey, as someone who lives on an island in the South Pacific, we have neighbours too. Like Antarctica.

[Ray]

Don't worry, Peter, we'll have a war there someday, too.