The Objective Standard Blog

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Washington’s Failed War in Afghanistan by Elan Journo

Posted by ARI Media at 4:27 pm

America’s campaign in Afghanistan was once widely hailed as a success in the “war on terror.” We have nothing more to fear from Afghanistan, our policy makers told us, because the war had accomplished its two main goals: al Qaeda and its sponsoring regime, the Taliban, were supposedly long gone, and a new, pro-Western government had been set up. But as the daily news from Afghanistan shows, in reality the war has been a drastic failure.

Legions of undefeated Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers have renewed their jihad. Flush with money, amassing recruits, and armed with guns, rockets and explosives, they are fighting to regain power. In recent months, they have mounted a string of deadly suicide bombings and rocket attacks against American and NATO forces; more U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan in the last 20 months than did during the peak of the war.

Taliban forces have effectively besieged several provinces in southern Afghanistan. Local officials estimate that in some provinces the “number of Taliban . . . is several times more than that of the police and Afghan National Army.” Taliban fighters are said to amble through villages fearlessly, brandishing their Kalashnikovs, and collecting zakat (an Islamic tithe) from peasants. With astounding boldness, they have assassinated clerics and judges deemed too friendly to the new government, and fired rockets at a school for using “un-Islamic” books.

The Taliban and al Qaeda forces are so strong and popular that Senator Bill Frist recently declared that a war against them cannot be won, and instead suggested negotiating with the Islamists.

How is it that five years after the war began—and in the face of America’s unsurpassed military strength—Taliban and al Qaeda fighters are threatening to regain power?

Victory in Afghanistan demanded two things. We had to destroy the Taliban and we had to ensure that a non-threatening, non-Islamic-warrior-breeding regime take its place. But we did not think we had a moral right to do what was necessary to achieve either goal.

Our military was ordered to pursue Taliban fighters only if it simultaneously showed “compassion” to the Afghans. The U.S. military dropped bombs on Afghanistan—but instead of ruthlessly pounding key targets, it was ordered to gingerly avoid hitting holy shrines and mosques (known to be Taliban hideouts) and to shower the country with food packages. The United States deployed ground forces—but instead of focusing exclusively on capturing or killing the enemy, they were also diverted to a host of “reconstruction” projects. The result is that the enemy was not destroyed and crushed in spirit, but merely scattered and left with the moral fortitude to regroup and launch a brazen comeback.

Even with its hands tied, however, the U.S. military succeeded in toppling the Taliban regime—but Washington subverted that achievement, too.

A new Afghan government would be a non-threat to America’s interests if it were based on a secular constitution that respects individual rights. The Bush administration, however, declared that we had no right to “impose our beliefs” on the Afghans—and instead endorsed their desire for another regime founded on Islamic law. Already this avowedly Islamic regime has jailed an Afghan magazine editor for “blasphemy”; earlier this year Abdul Rahman, an Afghan convert to Christianity, faced a death sentence for apostasy. The new Afghan regime cannot be counted on to oppose the resurgence of Islamic totalitarianism. Ideologically, it has nothing to say in opposition to the doctrines of the Taliban (two members of the Taliban leadership are in the new government). It is only a matter of time before Afghanistan is once again a haven for anti-American warriors.

The failure in Afghanistan is a result of Washington’s foreign policy. Despite lip-service to the goal of protecting America’s safety, the “war on terror” has been waged in compliance with the prevailing moral premise that self-interest is evil and self-sacrifice a virtue. Instead of trouncing the enemy for the sake of protecting American lives, our leaders have sacrificed our self-defense for the sake of serving the whims of Afghans.

The half-hearted war in Afghanistan failed to smash the Taliban and al Qaeda. It failed to render their ideology—Islamic totalitarianism—a lost cause. Instead, at best it demonstrated Washington’s reluctance to fight ruthlessly to defend Americans. How better to stoke the enthusiasm of jihadists?

America cannot win this or any war by embracing selflessness as a virtue. Ultimately, it cannot survive unless Washington abandons its self-sacrificial foreign policy in favor of one that proudly places America’s interests as its exclusive moral concern.

Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand—author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

Copyright © 2006 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Posted in: Foreign Policy and War

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Insulting Our Soldiers vs. Sacrificing Them

Posted by Craig Biddle at 1:52 pm

John Kerry has once again proven himself despicable. He has insulted our fine soldiers, saying: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” That is reprehensible. And Kerry’s effort to defuse the blunder by saying that it was “a botched joke about the president and the president’s people, not about the troops” is ridiculous.

That said, let us bear in mind who is insulting the troops by calling them “stupid” and who is sacrificing them by sending them off to bring “freedom” to savages in the Middle East. Sticks and stones (and mortars and mines and suicide bombers) will break their bones (and kill them and ruin their homes and leave their children fatherless), but names will never hurt them.

While John Kerry is merely insulting our troops, George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress that supports him are sacrificing them on the altar of religious altruism by bringing democracy (i.e., unlimited majority rule) to Middle Eastern mystics who want only to vote themselves into theocracy. And Bush and company are doing this while ignoring (or befriending) our primary enemies: Iran and Saudi Arabia. In other words, as bad as all these politicians are, some are substantially worse than others.

As I said in “Notes on the Coming Election,” we need to focus not on politicians’ words, but on their actions and the motivations behind them.

Posted in: Foreign Policy and War