Is It Really Time to Panic Over Afghanistan?

Here we go again. A serving American officer wrote an opinion piece for a private military journal that argued that the military is lying about progress in Afghanistan. He has seen Afghan security forces shirk their duty and talked to American troops who despaired of Afghans ever being good soldiers.

I have no doubt the officer is sincere and is accurately reporting what he saw. I assume he has good motives and either wants to win or doesn't want troops to die in a pointless mission. I'll add further that he had to be pretty brave to put his views down on paper.

But he didn't see everything and he is wrong to think that he must see what he thinks he needs to see for our side to win. Afghans don't have to be as good as our troops. Heck, individually they don't even need to be as good as the Taliban.

I think our Afghan allies are better than the enemy, since Taliban gunmen increasingly recoil from taking on many Afghan army units the way they tend to do with our troops. That's why the enemy relies on IEDs and assassinations. But the whole only has to be good enough to beat who they face. We can get that, too, by building up our side and knocking down the enemy side before we hand off responsibilities to Afghans.

I wasn't going to comment on this article since we've seen it before over Iraq. Even when our surge was winning on the ground, pessimism was in the air. The press eagerly served up any American officer to say we can't beat the enemy. Then we went and beat the enemy. Despite the fact that many Iraqi security forces shirked their duty and despite the fact that American troops despaired of Iraqis ever being good soldiers.

But the article is getting quite a bit of attention. I don't believe we've been screwing up in Afghanistan. And citing the length of the war misses the point that our objectives have changed and circumstances have changed.

In 2001, our objective was to smash the al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan. We did that. For several years after that, a small force was sufficient to prevent Afghanistan from being a sanctuary for terrorists.

It was only after 2006, when Pakistan again allowed their territory to be a sanctuary for jihadis, and after 2007, when our surge finally defeated al Qaeda in Iraq and led al Qaeda to refocus on Afghanistan as their main fight, that we needed to do more to keep Afghanistan in the win column. Bush ordered more troops to Afghanistan and then Obama ordered even more. With a Pakistan sanctuary we needed more troops used more aggressively to pound the enemy down, and we needed a bigger Afghan security apparatus to keep the enemy down.

The objective of keeping Afghanistan from becoming a terror haven again remained the same, but the means had to escalate in the face of Pakistani decisions and battlefield victory in Iraq.

We only had two real fighting seasons at peak strength of fighting the enemy in the new circumstances we faced. If all goes well, we can have far fewer troops in place even as the fight continues under newer circumstances.

The military isn't lying--it's winning an evolving war against an evolving enemy. I worry more about our civilian leadership choosing to retreat from a winnable war than I fear the military hiding a losing war.

Unless we choose to lose, we can win in Afghanistan.