Atlantic Council

George Will’s new column, sounding the retreat in Afghanistan, is making a big stir. For months, now, the picture of our fortunes in ‘the good war’ has grown gloomy. It seems we are ready for our pundits and commentators to give voice to our slowly building fear that victory in Afghanistan is impossible.

Yet Will’s case for retreat is instructive: it doesn’t declare impossibility but unthinkability. “Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops,” he writes, “perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.” Instead, he proposes, the American and NATO effort should move entirely offshore, relying on missiles, bombs, drones, and the occasional special-forces drop. Just as Bismarck prevailed in the Franco-Prussian War by stopping short of Paris, so today may we prevail by stopping short of a long, costly occupation. Success isn’t beyond our reach. It’s just that doubling down on our current path to success is unaffordable.

From one perspective, Will’s position belies a growing gap in our minds between success and victory. Presumably, the impetus behind a large, growing land force in Afghanistan is an outdated or even romantic notion that wars should only be fought in pursuit of victory, and that victory can only be secured through conquest.

As Peter Bergen crisply explained in a New York Times op-ed this March, the fear that Afghanistan is unconquerable is just a red herring. “Since Alexander the Great, plenty of conquerors have subdued Afghanistan. In the early 13th century, Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes ravaged the country’s two major cities. And in 1504, Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, easily took the throne in Kabul.” Obviously times have changed in key respects over the past five hundred years. But Afghanistan’s notorious rugged terrain has not changed. And, as Berger shows, the Soviets’ disaster in Afghanistan was caused by a military strategy completely at odds with our own.

But all Bergen manages to prove is that we aren’t doomed to failure in Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean we ought to affirmatively choose a strategy of victory over one that simply avoids defeat. And from Will’s perspective, compared to Pakistan – “a nation that actually matters” – Afghanistan is of secondary, or perhaps tertiary, importance, whether we stay or leave. Avoiding defeat, and counting that accomplishment as a success, becomes easier and more plausible the lower the stakes are in an Afghanistan we’ve evacuated.

Here, Will is on shaky ground indeed. The grim argument in favor of leaving Iraq in a hurry turned on the likelihood of a debilitating conflict between Sunni and Shia in Iraq and a division of influence between Arabs and Iranians in the broader region – developments which would prevent a single power or a coalition opposed to American interests from asserting control and establishing order in our wake. Should we retreat quickly from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan will be sure to quickly establish an expanding presence. The presence of US allies willing to invest substantial sums in Afghanistan -- foremost among them India -- will rapidly diminish.

Afghanistan’s strategic and economic resources will fall into precisely those hands we would least wish to see claim them. To be sure, Afghanistan lacks Iraq’s valuable oil. But strategic poppy reserves are perhaps a more effective source of illicit funds than Saddam ever enjoyed.

All this holds true even if we simply stipulate, with Will, that a military effort almost wholly reliant on virtual and remote war can effectively prevent the resurgence of actual terrorist enemies able to plan and execute catastrophic attacks on the homeland. The reality is that if we leave Afghanistan, the stakes there will be lowered only in those respects that pertain to our costs in blood and treasure. In other respects, the stakes will actually be raised. Doubtless, there are serious questions as to what kind of war we can afford in Afghanistan, and for how long – questions that should be put in perspective by the immense outlays that the current administration intends to see through in pursuit of its sweeping domestic agenda. But if we’re prepared to face up to our fears and face down our myths in Afghanistan, the uncomfortable possibility must be considered that we can afford neither to double down nor to cut our losses.

Rather than cause for despair, this should be an occasion for truly creative policy thinking. Increasing decentralization of formal power and responsibility, for instance, may allow Afghanistan to better conform the tasks of governance to the reality on the ground. Perpetuating a situation in which the presidency cannot escape the taint of fraud seems like a recipe for concentrating and heightening the institutional pathologies associated with the slow and rocky transition to democratic rule reasonably free of corruption. In this sense, the connection between the reassertion of tribal and local control in Iraq and the creation of conditions favorable to a phased US withdrawal may be suggestive.

In the meanwhile – whether or not victory remains in our grasp – the 21,000-troop increase in the strength of US forces in Afghanistan should be allowed an opportunity to succeed. The immediate alternatives to this modest action raise, not lower, the stakes -- and the risks -- we face.

James Poulos is a doctoral candidate in Government at Georgetown and the founding editor of Postmodern Conservative. AP Photo.