Whither to Afghanistan?

George Will’s recent column, “In Afghanistan, Knowing When to Stop” September 1, 2009 has drawn quite a lot of heat from fellow conservatives, such as Bill Kristol, who wrote: “Will is urging retreat, and accepting defeat." With very little NATO support our troops slog on there, in a rather hopeless attempt at nation-building. According to Will, “The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.” After all, we won the war there, what else could we be doing? Will wonders: “Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one.” As David Harsanyi has said, in support of Will, “Or is victory achieved when we finally usher this primitive tribal culture, with its violent warlords and religious extremism, from the eighth century all the way to modernity? If so, we're on course for a centuries-long enterprise of nation building and baby-sitting, not a war. The war was won in 2002.” Haven’t we learned anything from the failed Soviet attempt to control this tribal culture on some of the most inhospitable terrain imaginable? Will wasn’t the first conservative to raise the issue of whether or not we had overstayed our rationale for being in Afghanistan. Diana West wrote in, “Let Afghanistan Go,” on April 23, 2009:

This is not to suggest that there is no war or enemies to fight, . . . there most certainly are. But sinking all possible men, materiel and bureaucracy into Afghanistan, as the Obama people and most conservatives favor, to try to bring a corrupt Islamic culture into working modernity while simultaneously fighting Taliban and wading deep into treacherous Pakistani wars is no way to victory -- at least not to U.S. victory. On the contrary, it is the best way to bleed and further degrade U.S. military capabilities. Indeed, if I were a jihad chieftain, I couldn't imagine a better strategy than to entrap tens of thousands of America's very best young men in an open-ended war of mortal hide-and-seek in the North West Frontier.

West, by the way is an outspoken critic about the dangers of Islamic jihad, so she’s definitely not a pacifist or defeatist. West interview retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely who said: "There's nothing to win there. . . . What do you get for it? What's the return? Well, the return's all negative for the United States." Vallely went on to recommend a strategy of the using

"the maximum use of unconventional forces," such as Navy SEALS and other special forces, who can be deployed as needed from what are known in military parlance as "lily pads" -- outposts or jumping-off points in friendly countries (Israel, Northern Kurdistan, India, Philippines, Italy, Djibouti ... ) and from U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups.’ Such strike groups generally include eight to 10 vessels "with more fire power," the general noted, "than most nations." These lily pads become "bases we can launch from any time we want to," eliminating the need for massive land bases such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, by now a small city of 20,000 American personnel who continuously need to be supplied and secured at enormous expense.

"There's no permanent force," the general said. "That's the beauty of it." We watch, we wait and when U.S. interests are threatened, "we basically use our strike forces to take them out, target by target." This would work whether the threat came from Al Qaeda, Pakistani nukes or anything else.

He continued: "This idea that we're going to go in and bring democracy to these tribal cultures isn't going to work. If we have a problem with terrorist countries, like Iran, it's a lot cheaper to go in and hit them and get back out."

In other words, don't give up the battle; just give up the nation-building. "It's up to somebody else to build nations," the general said. "Not us."

While, like most Americans, I was in favor to invading Afghanistan after 9/11, it might be time to reassess our strategy there, and in the rest of the Middle East. American capabilities have been badly wounded by the financial collapse and we don’t seem to be learning from history: Most great empires (including reluctant empires like the USA) collapse after overextending themselves militarily, like Rome and Great Britain, and by living off past productivity and going into debt. While I thought the Iraq War was a strategic mistake, things change. Iraq seems like a more feasible location for any hubris of nation-building. Maybe we should focus where there’s at least a slim chance of a pay off.

Terrorism and fertility rates

Reading through a Times article in the Press on current conditions in Guantanamo Bay, my attention was drawn to a chart listing the nationalities of the remaining inmates (the figures were provided by the Brookings Institute but I can't find them online).

While only six current detainees come from "Axis of Evil"member Iraq, a staggering 38 percent of the remaining 245 inmates come from Yemen - a small, impoverished country that rarely makes it into the news, but happens to have to one of the world's highest fertility rates.

I then checked out the respective fertility rates, for the ten listed nationalities of Guantanamo inmates, at the CIA Factbook (the latest fertility rates are shown in parentheses):

94 Yemeni (6.32)
27 Afghani (5.8)
20 Saudi Arabian (3.83)
17 Chinese (1.79)
10 Algerian (1.79)
10 Tunisian (1.72)
8 Syrian (3.12)
8 Libyan (3.08)
6 Iraqi (3.86)
6 Kuwait (2.76)

With second and third placed Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan also having high fertility rates, it reasonable to conclude there's a pretty strong relationship between terrorist recruitment and a high fertility rate.

Historically, a country with a youthful demographic is more likely to be an aggressive country, and in the Muslim world this aggression tends to take the form of terrorism against rival sects or non-Muslims.

China bucks the trend with a below-replacement fertility rate, but relative to its huge population, it's not a particularly fertile source of terrorist recruits.

Not only do Yemen and Afghanistan have the highest fertility rates outside Sub-Suharan Africa, but they also lack significant oil revenues to help support the rising tide of hungry mouths they need to provide for.

Most Middle Eastern countries, either have successful population control programmes (such as Libya and Iran) or, like Saudi Arabia, have sufficient oil revenues to at least keep most people out of poverty for the next few decades.

If the current U.S. government is serious about winning the war on terror, it might want to look at what he can do to encourage Yemen to follow other Arab states like Libya and Algeria in adopting serious population control measures.

Diminishing returns

As the "War on Terror" enters its 8th year, and the United States government rues is inability to capture Ben Ladin, its worthwhile pondering whether the neoconservative idea of trying to fight an underground problem like terrorism with an on-going, all-out campaign is an effective strategy.

Economists have many questionable ideas, but one old economic chestnut which has a lot of relevance to real world concerns is the Law of Diminishing Returns.

The idea that there is a point beyond which additional inputs of money, labour and energy result in progressively smaller benefits, is something everyone from farmers to students can relate too. But it often seems to be overlooked by right-liberal politicians and public servants.

In the Bush led campaign against Islamic terrorism there were some spectacular early successes against the Taleban forces in Afghanistan and a large number of terrorist suspects were rounded up and detained at Guantanamo Bay.

However, the longer the war has dragged on, the more difficult it has become to sustain the progress made against Al Qaeda, and the more feed up US citizens have become with the intrusions and annoyances associated with homeland security.

A similar situation has occurred in Iraq where the easy victories of the war's opening weeks have given way to a war of attrition in which further progress has become dependent on employing large numbers of troops in risky street-fighting over an extended period of time.

The "Surge" of the last few months has lead to a lessoning of hostilities, but there is no guarantee that the situation won't deteriorate when US troops are pulled out.In the 80s and 90s, the US had its first lesson in the limitations of ongoing campaigns with the so-called "War on Drugs," which has done relatively little to reduce the amount of hard drugs coming into the United States and Canada, despite attracting considerable investment from the federal government.

One of the reason why sustained campaigns like the war on terror run into diminishing returns is because they soon become predictable, and the target organisations, which are often made up of small autonomous units, quickly learn to modify their tactics. Although Al Qaeda has scaled back its operations in the West, it has now entrenched itself in Pakistan and is focusing on conducting attacks in unstable regions where US and British influence is limited.

A partial solution for the US may be to abandon predictable, on-going campaigns and focus on random surprise attacks on discrete targets. If large-scale initiatives are no longer working then take a rest and go back to the drawing board.

In the 19th Century, a cornerstone of British Imperial success was the short-term punitive expedition, where specific opponents where intimated through gunboat diplomacy.

While the US and Israel launched effective punitive expeditions against Libya and Iran in the 1980s, the Bush regime dismissed the seemingly sensible approach of punitive air-strikes in Iraq and instead chose the far more costly strategy of regime change.