Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

Do you fight a war even if it’s a losing cause? Is the sacrifice of a soldier worth it if the mission is ultimately doomed? Is the illusion, or even the transitory action of doing the right thing, for the moment, worth the cost?

Sometimes in life you have to apply yourself even if it may not, in the end, amount to much. Is this what we are doing in Afghanistan?

International relations expert Gwynne Dyer feels that unless you have half-a-million troops on the ground (instead of 3,000) for a period of 25 or 30 years, forget it. There ain’t any reformation in Afghanistan without it, he says. Contrarily, UNB Professor Lee Windsor says that we are making progress, “winning” in fact.

There have only been a few successful counter insurgencies in history: the U.S. in the Philippines in the 1890s and the U.S. Indian wars in the 1860s through to 1900 and with Britain in Malaysia in the 1940s. Other than that, “low intensity” counter-insurgencies have been failures — huge ones; with big strategic consequences.

The Afghanistan mission comparisons to WW1 or WW2 are also fallacious. They go something like, “Well, when we were fighting Hitler in 1940, we still kept at it despite Britain’s weak strategic situation”. The difference, however, is Germany was a first world nation directly challenging the existence of states and directly challenging the balance of power. Afghanistan is categorized as a “failed state” and was not even an “asymmetrical” threat for years under the Taliban.

If the truth be told, the Taliban might have coughed Osama up had we given them some more time and let them save some face. All that they wanted was evidence that Osama was behind 9/11 and some dialogue. All America wanted to do was kick some ass.

Now, I’m no Taliban apologist here. They are an odious lot. But so they were/are in Somalia (another failed state and there are a lot of them) and the West cut their losses there, didn’t they, after the Black Hawk Down incident? In fact, Somalia has a huge fundamentalist, West-hating terror field there and it is growing as we speak. Was leaving Somalia and cutting our losses there a good idea? I think that it was. Staying would have created more opposition, more terrorists, like in Iraq today where al-Qaeda was non-existent there before America invaded.

America left Lebanon after the 1980’s suicide truck attack which killed hundreds of American soldiers at a base. Was former U.S. President Ronald Reagan right to do bail out? Nobody ever called Reagan a wimp, did they?

Nor did Reagan invade Libya after it was established that Libyan strongman Qudaffi was directly and operationally behind the terror attack at Lockerbie, the disco bombing of U.S. soldiers in Germany, and the downing of another airliner in Chad.

Neither Saddam nor the Taliban were ever operationally involved in terror attacks. Secular Saddam even rooted out fundamentalists in Iraq; moreover, the world was a safer place when Saddam was in power and oppressing his people and counter-balancing Iran.

The limits of military power are not something that we like to admit, but there it is.
When an enemy is well supplied as the Taliban are from Pakistan, and as the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong were along the Ho Chi Min trail, and when an enemy is motivated and willing to lose longer than you are willing to win, then it is over.

So, what about the sacrifice? Well, you have to ask what the death accomplished. Is showing the world that we keep our UN and NATO commitments enough?

Maybe it is. But you know what? If it was me, and it was my wife or son who was dead over in Afghanistan I would say all the right things to people like me in the media (we’ve heard it all before) but in the quiet of my bedroom, all alone in the darkness, with nothing between me and my agony, and my despair, I would, through welling tears and sad, heavy breaths, cry out to the God that left me, or that never was, that there had to be another God damn way.