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Shadow Government
War by proxy
by John A. Jackson
Outside Kabul American bombers are bombing in support of the Afghan Northern Alliance. The enemy of our enemy apparently is our friend; at least we hope he will do the dying for us.
On that level, fair enough. Too many Americans have died already.
But the policy aspect confounds me. Is the United States really going to repeat serially and in detail all the policy mistakes of the last generation's shameful wars, from Vietnam through Nicaragua, the Gulf War, Somalia and the Balkans?
Our parents and grandparents knew better.
In Vietnam, the most potent and sophisticated technologies of killing were mated inextricably to objectives never defined or even definable. America's leaders simply did not - and seemingly could not - think through what the war was supposed to accomplish.
We could kill almost without limit, but in no way could we win. Nor did we.
In Central America, by premeditated contrast, substantial numbers of U.S. troops were never committed. Instead, we took the tools at hand - the brutal and even genocidal thug armies of the ruling oligarchs - armed them, paid them and set them to do the actual killing and dying for us.
The method worked. But the stain on our national honor will be a long time coming clean. We thought to escape war's penalties by hiring help. Instead we merely took on the shame of their murders.
In the Gulf War, our leaders adopted a policy they could not publicly avow: to return Kuwait to its rulers without either weakening or removing Saddam Hussein. Ostensibly, that policy evolved out of the hesitations of our Arab allies, but it suited our real, unavowable objectives just fine.
We wanted Saddam as a counterweight to Iran. We did not want to have to rebuild Iraq with him gone. We would not take that responsibility. (Nor, I am confident, did we want Iraq's oil trading freely on the world market, or Kuwait's oil in the hands of a large and radical Arab state.)
Imagine if the World War II generation had simply left Germany and Japan, or all of Western Europe for that matter, in ruins after V.E. Day.
We helped rebuild our enemies, not merely out of charity but because doing so was in our national interest. Hatreds that might have become permanent were cured and transformed. Our most dangerous foes have become reliable - and democratic - friends. They do not export hate or terrorists to our shores. Volkswagens and Toyotas is more like it.
The American leaders of 50 years ago knew what to do with the victory for which the nation had fought so hard and sacrificed so much. They did not let it slip away.
The shibboleth of "nation building," a burden apparently to be avoided now at all costs to American honor and long-term interests, was not so terrifying then. Thank God.
Today, however, to save American lives and treasure in the short term, we are enlisting unreliable, murderous and anti-democratic Afghan allies who would never reach power without our support.
We are bombing and bombing, a hundred planes a day sailing into a land mass the size of Texas with about the same population.
Since that is not working, since the Taliban has not obligingly disintegrated, we now turn to the only surrogates who already have weapons in hand - allies whose superiority to the Taliban is hard to see.
Certainly, American strength can put the Northern Alliance in power in Kabul. We can then declare victory and run away.
But aren't we supposed to be fighting terrorism, not employing it? And shouldn't we, for our own sake as well as humanity's, leave Afghanistan better and more peaceful than we found it?
The Bush administration wants to cut the stakes by keeping large American ground forces out of the conflict. But the road it is taking is the road, not to peace, but to endless war.
John A. Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com. ER