“Winnability” in Iraq and Afghanistan: what does it mean?

For some time now (and certainly, long before last Thursday’s killing of Benazir Bhutto), I’ve been intending to write a post here about the concept of “winnability”, as it applies to the US-led COTW’s campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. What does it mean to “win” in either country? How could we define it? How could it be achieved? In general, though, I’ve been moving much closer to the view that neither of these campaigns are actually “winnable” in the ways and the political frameworks within which they are currently being waged. I’m increasingly of the view that, if these campaigns are to be “won”, then they simply cannot be won under US leadership, for a number of different reasons.
We could give a first approximation of “winning” in either country as comprising the restoration of calm throughout all or nearly all of the country and and the emergence and consolidation of the key elements of good governance there. That’s a pretty minimalist definition, though it is one in which I have tried to keep the interests of the citizens of the two countries front and center, which is where they need to be.
But who could say, after the experience of six years of a US-led COTW running an occupation in Afghanistan, and 4.5 years of the US-led COTW occupying Iraq, that continued US “leadership” of of these occupation/pacification efforts could in any way be a formula for “winning” in these terms?
I’m not writing this as a “self-hating American”. I just think that the US (a) is too militarized and violence-prone as a society for most of its leaders even to know how to start thinking about winning a complex politico-military campaign in today’s unprecedentedly interconnected world; (b) lacks the political vision, administrative capabilities, political commitment, and– last but not least–troop numbers to be able to win either of these campaigns, let alone both of them together; (c) lacks the global political legitimacy that would be required to mobilize other countries to contribute meaningfully to these campaigns under its leadership; and (d) lacks the political legitimacy within, specifically, the world Muslim community to be able to lead a winning pacification campaign either of these two majority-Muslim countries.
Some further questions arise. First of all, if not the US, then who?
Answer: the United Nations, with all its flaws… But at least, regarding the global legitimacy question, the UN is infinitely preferable to the US. Real UN leadership of the pacification/nation-building campaign is the only way forward I see in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Second: might not the US be able to win one or both of these campaigns under some different, post-Bush president? I don’t think so. Bill Richardson, Ron Paul, and Dennis Kucinich have all vowed they will pull the US troops out of Iraq. That is an excellent start to reframing the US’s engagement with the world. But then, what about Afghanistan?
Even with the best will in the world, and most visionary kinds of policies emanating from both the next administration and the next Congress, I still don’t see that in January 2009 any US President can re-tool the whole way the country’s foreign policy and particularly its military works within the required time-frame. Despite the recent surface innovations introduced in some parts of Iraq by Gen. Petraeus with his new COIN manual, the vast bulk of the US military– and many of its NATO allies– remain focused on very heavy use of lethal weapons– the “bludgeoning” approach that seeks to bring about either the complete obliteration or the complete submission of “the enemy.”
But as the Israelis discovered in Lebanon in 1993, 1996, and 2006, that is a highly anachronistic view of warfare.
The US-led COTW forces are learning that in Iraq and Afghanistan every single day, too. But there’s not much, really, that they can do about it. You can’t change the whole way the US interacts with the rest of the world and the way the 1.4-million-person US military has been trained and indoctrinated for several generations now, within just a few months.
The chronically war-burdened peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan need a new, non-militarized– and preferably also intentionally anti-military– concept. And they need a new decision-making framework within which it will be pursued. Real national independence would be a good starting-point for that framework. But insofar as the societies involved may still be unable to reach internal agreement on the particular political form of that independence, there would be an important role for the UN in helping to mediate the negotiations required to reach that formula; in delivering vital services, including public security, for each country until its national government can take over; and in providing other forms of support to these war-stressed countries. The UN played a generally helpful role in helping midwife the great waves of decolonization that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. And now, a UN that is potentially a lot more capable than it was then could play a similar role in both these countries today.
(It goes without saying that this should be a UN that is truly an equal effort of all the powers on the Security Council– and not just a face-saving facade for the US-UK condominium, as it was in Iraq in the 1990s.)
But truly, I still can’t see a US-led COTW “winning” in either Iraq or Afghanistan…