Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
– George Santayana
With the economic travails we’ve been facing, it sometimes takes you by surprise that we’re also still at war halfway around the world – a war that launched 1,000 movies and television series and is now entering a new phase, as we leave Iraq and march into the next stage: finishing the job we started.
President Barack Obama made it clear in his campaign that he believed we had lost sight of what we had set out to accomplish when we started this “War on Terror.” The problem arose when it became clear that al-Qaeda was not just some loose affiliation of Islamic extremists – it was a widespread organization that was able to adapt to our tactics, and in many ways, completely circumvent them. What we expected to be a quick, shock-and-awe smackdown on a small group of under-equipped, under-trained glorified militia instead became a protracted, bloody and costly eight-year war that has no end in sight.
And it is this situation our new president gets to play with. In what is fast becoming a common theme, Obama is once again expected to perform a task that would have been difficult at full capacity with already exhausted resources – in this case, our battle-weary soldiers who have been engaged in a war in the wrong country.
Obama’s first act was to immediately begin the withdrawal from Iraq, and begin planning operations in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Afghanistan is in many ways more of a quagmire than Iraq is. After the jailbreak last year, the Taliban, our other major opponent in this conflict, has regained strength. We’ve also done Afghanistan no favors in neglecting it in favor of invading Iraq. Rampant corruption and the rise of warlords has made unifying any kind of resistance against the Taliban nearly impossible.
Considering we will be starting our withdrawal from Iraq with it in a “less-than-stable” condition, we’re moving from a war that, despite what the Republicans would have you believe, we did not win (unless you consider not getting forced out of the capitol city “winning”) and are now essentially moving right into Iraq 2.0. Even as we move our initial 17,000 troops into Afghanistan, Mullah Omar (the leader of the Taliban) has urged the unification of the 15,000 Afghan Taliban with the 15,000 Pakistani Taliban in order to coordinate their resistance. While our increase in troop size brings us to 54,000, the Taliban is already giving us a run for our money, and a unified force would be a disastrous development.
In light of this, Obama has seriously considered the most unlikely weapon of all: dialogue. We threw the full force of our military at the insurgents in Iraq and they not only held out, some would say they won. Now we’re throwing the not-quite-full force of our fatigued military at a new country that’s not at all happy to see us. It is because of this that Obama has considered trying to open a dialogue with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in an effort to at least foster a cease-fire, if not an end to hostilities. This would ideally be accomplished through intermediaries in the Afghan government because after all, when this is all over, they are the ones who must maintain security and the peace.
And that is the core of the problem. You can kill as many terrorists as you want, but you cannot kill an idea, especially one that glorifies dying for it. Our mistake in Iraq was believing that if we killed enough insurgents, everything would calm down. But this is not a war of numbers – it is a war of ideas. Even if we had somehow killed every insurgent in Iraq, if the citizenry of Iraq still hate us, we have not won that war. What needs to happen is a changing of ideas; if possible, to show the Arab world that we do not want to threaten their way of life.
Easier said than done, right? It is unlikely that we will change the minds of hard-liner Taliban and al-Qaeda, but they aren’t the ones we’re trying to reach. The key is the average citizen in the Middle East. The fact is, not everyone in the Arab world agrees with the tactics exercised by the terrorist groups, and would actually like to be able to walk out their door in the morning and not wonder if it is the last day they’ll see.
Al-Qaeda means “the foundation” in Arabic. Perhaps that is the key to its undoing. Rather than try to engage in a conventional war, which it has made clear it is not going to fight, instead, erode its foundation by actually winning “hearts and minds.” Al-Qaeda and its ilk rally support by claiming they fight in the name of oppressed Muslims everywhere. If the Muslim world can be shown that al-Qaeda is nothing but a group of thugs who kill innocents in the name of freedom, perhaps its support can be removed from within. When people stop flocking to al-Qaeda’s banner, then we could conceivably defeat it. But when the Taliban’s numbers rise as more soldiers from the Pashtun tribes who live along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and others answer Mullah Omar’s call to wage jihad against “the occupation forces inside Afghanistan,” al-Qaeda and its allies becomes a Hydra, where every head cut off is replaced by two more.
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