Winning the War, Losing the Battle

Responding to reports that the CIA has "decimated" al Qaeda in Pakistan via repeated air assaults, Blake Hounshell says that before we take any victory laps, "native Pakistani and Afghan militants appear to be getting stronger, not weaker, just as Pakistani analysts have been warning for months." He concludes that we're winning the battle but losing the war.

While I think caution is certainly warranted, I think this is ultimately the wrong way to look at it.

We are never going to win the "war" if the war is defined as making the native Pashtun tribes astride the Durand Line come to accept a foreign military presence on their soil - particularly one that frequently drops bombs on and around them. Insisting on that objective will ensure America's defeat.

However, destroying the transnational terrorist organization inside Afghanistan and Pakistan is a crucial objective. And one that, if the reports are to be believed, we are achieving.

That means that once we have thoroughly decimated al Qaeda we should leave. We should leave before the war morphs still further from a battle against people intent on coming here to kill Americans, to a war against people who are fighting because we are over there. As we saw in Iraq with the Anbar Awakening, the two are not the same.

It's surprising how often you'll hear commentators complaining that we "abandoned" Afghanistan in the 1980s, as if anyone had a remotely plausible plan for building an Afghan state in the wake of the Soviet retreat. We didn't then. We don't now.