It always annoyed me that the anti-war side said Iraq "distracted" us from Afghanistan. I thought it was a ridiculous charge considering we drove al Qaeda from Afghanistan and drove the Taliban from power; and that al Qaeda itself decided to make Iraq their main effort. It was only after Pakistan opened their border territory to jihadis in 2006 and the al Qaeda decision to abandon Iraq as their main front in 2007 (as the surge offensive and Awakening defeated them and their allies) that you could really say we needed more troops in Afghanistan. There was a lag--mainly in 2008--as we began to shift forces from Iraq to Afghanistan. But that is not a distraction given that it was always way more important to win in Iraq than in Afghanistan and that Afghanistan simply didn't need more US troops until then.
Yet as we fight in Afghanistan, we face jihadis trying to set up in Somalia where we have virtually no troops on the ground. We rely on local allies. If you wonder why we sent special forces to help track down the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, stop wondering:
At a training camp in Uganda, a dozen soldiers crouch, weapons raised as they make their way down a dirt road between shipping containers set up to look like buildings in the Somali capital. ...
The model of the Somali capital, or "Little Mogadishu" as it is known, was built by American military trainers to prepare the Ugandan soldiers to take part in the African Union mission propping up the Western-backed government in Mogadishu.
After al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab rebels pulled out of the capital last year, the United States has stepped up efforts to train Ugandan soldiers who will be part of the push by AMISOM to take more territory outside the capital.
Not that I'm saying we should pour troops into Somalia. If locals or regional allies can handle the problem, I'm happy just helping. But if anti-Afghanistan War people want to follow what the anti-Iraq people argued, they could easily say we are distracted from the real war on terror in Somalia. After all, very few al Qaeda are in Afghanistan now. Sure, some are in Pakistan--that's where we killed Osama bin Laden, after all--but there is far more of a threat in Somalia (and nearby Yemen for that matter) that al Qaeda can set up shop to project terrorist power to our shores.
We aren't distracted from Somalia. We are using a perfectly rational approach to fighting our jihadi enemies there because we can rely on locals and allies. We did the same in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2007 when the jihadi threat (al Qaeda and the Taliban) in Afghanistan was not high enough to challenge our goal of keeping Afghanistan from becoming a haven for al Qaeda again. It was only when the Taliban got a safe haven in Pakistan and al Qaeda gave up on winning in Iraq that the threat in Afghanistan required our forces to smash down the Taliban and prepare the Afghans for doing more to prevent al Qaeda and other jihadis from setting up shop on their territory to threaten us.
Just remember that if the notion that Somalia might need our attention more than Afghanistan takes off, it is just about getting the US out of Afghanistan and not into Somalia. Just as the original notion regarding the Iraq "distraction" obviously wasn't about getting troops to Afghanistan to win. Our president can't even bring himself to say we must "win" the "good war" there. It's all just about "ending" the war "responsibly." Which for our president means only losing after a decent interval to avoid being held responsible for the loss.
UPDATE: While this editorial doesn't bring up the need to get out of Afghanistan to fight in Somalia, it is a call to run from what was once the "good war" that Iraq distracted us from winning.
And the Vietnam reference is laughable, failing to recognize that South Vietman fell to the North Vietnamese invasion because we failed to support South Vietnam after we left--and as we promised we would. But good grief, you don't listen to the left on matters of military history, do you?
