Out of the Iraq Skillet and into the Afghanistan Fire

Did the Surge work? Right wing commentators seem to think so and to imagine that Obama is now embarrassed at missing this golden opportunity. Think back a year, however, and recall what the Surge was supposed to achieve. We were going to send some more troops to Iraq to create a security situation in which the Iraqis could negotiate a peaceful arrangement among themselves.

A more peaceful situation has resulted, but the negotiations never panned out. Yet the "fragile" peace is looking ever better. Why? Mostly because the politicians want the money that expensive oil can bring them, but they can't publicly abandon positions of supposed principle. I don't think many of them have real principles beyond profit maximization, so this shouldn't be an obstacle to their finding a modus vivendi so we can go home.

But, alas, that's not what the Surge is going to deliver. Obama actually has something of a problem here, because it appears that with the success in Iraq, we are merely freeing more troops to go to Afghanistan. To sound pro-Jingoist, he has allowed himself to say that we should have put our efforts into Afghanistan rather than Iraq because that's where (roughly) Osama Bin Laden is.

But it's hard to say we should have in the past without being stuck saying we should now, and Afghanistan is a genuine quagmire. In Iraq, the terrain is mostly flat with little vegetation and our military can prevent the build up of any significant fighting force. Not so in Afghanistan, as we are increasingly seeing. We want the Paks to jump in. Not damned likely. They know this region and they are not fools.

It's interesting that we have so much more European support for our objectives in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Maybe it's some vast Machiavellian plot through which the United States bankrupts itself and the Euro becomes the international reserve currency. It seems to be working.