We surely made mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But who has done a perfect counter-insurgency job? Let's not make pursuit of the perfect prevent us from defending the good enough.
The failures in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, through the ensuing two decades have not been battlefield defeats. They have been caused, instead, by our inability to establish, within a timeframe acceptable to chronically impatient Western politicians and electorates, a sustainable local system of governance that also supports Western interests.
But we stayed long enough in Japan, Germany, Italy, and South Korea to succeed on the broader mission following battlefield victories.
Are mistakes--and crimes--in war a modern problem? The Allies killed a lot of Japanese, Germans, and Italians. They are allies now. There was a lot of death and destruction in the Korean War. South Korea is our ally now.
Iraq seems good enough for now. We
have allies who kill jihadis and who will resist Iran with our help.
Whatever mistakes we made--and Hastings goes through a number--don't
seem to have been critical to the military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, certainly.
And have our enemies failed to make even bigger mistakes? And commit even more crimes? Really? That doesn't matter?
Why couldn't Afghanistan turn out well enough to prevent it from being a jihadi sanctuary? I have few goals beyond that. Our effort to sustain that objective is pretty small now. We aren't talking about 100,000+ American troops in direct and sustained ground combat any more.
Afghanistan has a better chance of surviving our withdrawal than I thought because
dependence on China for weapons and massive [investments] means Pakistan is less able to support the Taliban as they did in the 1990s, when they literally created the Taliban and provided military necessities like weapons, ammo and advisors during the subsequent civil war.
Further, "The current Afghan government is much stronger than it was in the 1990s
and the current government sides with the majority of Afghans who oppose
the Taliban and the drug gangs."
And really, if we can't make them friends because of mistakes and can't carry out endless punishments, what can we do? Just endure whatever death, destruction, and hate comes out of those countries?
We've done well enough in Iraq and Afghanistan. And even Hastings worries about losing progress on women's rights in the latter if the Taliban win. There is much more to lose than that, if that isn't important enough to you.
And Hell, let me add that if America hasn't abandoned South Vietnam and let North Vietnam conquer the south after we withdrew all our troops, today we'd have a democratic ally about 20 years behind South Korea in progress economically and politically.
We need a better perspective, I think, to get that time for a broader victory. But in the meantime, we've done well enough. When so many said we couldn't even accomplish this.
