I made the assertion in an earlier post that the United States lost the War of 1812. Agim Zabeli disputed that conclusion, pointing out some of the reasons one might say that the United States won the War of 1812. This difference of opinion actually underlines my original point, which is that it is very difficult to say whether a person, or a country, or an organization, has succeeded or failed in an endeavor, unless one has a clear statement of the objectives they hoped to achieve. In the case of the War of 1812, some of the motives for taking the United States into war with Britain stated before the war, were downplayed after the war, and some different war aims were asserted to have been decisive. If one can move the goalposts at will, one can always claim victory.
One standard for victory in battle is possession of the field. In the American Civil War, there were several battles which might appear to have been a victory for one side or the other, but the palm is usually awarded to the side which stays on the battlefield after the fighting is over. I think it is the Battle of Chickamauga which is particularly troublesome in this regard.
Another standard depends upon a determination of which side was the aggressor. The Battle of Gettysburg, for example, is clearly a victory for the Union forces for two reasons:
First, the Confederates retreated back to Virginia after the battle, leaving the Union in possession of the field;
Second, the Confederate invasion of the North was stopped, and its objectives were not attained.
If, however, one asserts that the objective of General Meade's army was (or should have been) the destruction of General Lee's army, then the Union Army cannot be said to be the clear winner at Gettyburg. Rather, one might say, both sides were frustrated in their objectives.
Whether the United States interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were successful depends, therefore, upon one's view of what the American government intended to accomplish in those conflicts, as well as upon what has actually been attained.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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4 comments:
Glenn:
Good points. Another consideration is that shifting (or evolving) goals are not necessarily “moving the goal posts’ and sometimes there can be legitimate, good faith arguments about whether a particular case was an ‘evolution’ of a goal or a ‘shift’ of a goal.
I think you and I probably agree we have about as much chance of turning Afghanistan into a civilized country as Lord Auckland would have had, in the unlikely event Lord Auckland was foolish enough to attempt such a thing. Our foray into Afghanistan will end badly. Does that mean we failed? Well, it depends. What are our goals in Afghanistan and what were they earlier? We have certainly accomplished some things: We wrought great damage to al Qaida, and drove Osama bin Laden out from under their protection. We killed a lot of Jihadis, stood up a ‘government’ and secured its abilities to conduct a couple elections. But we can’t stay there forever and don’t want to. We will leave and the place will go from being a shithole, with American soldiers intermittently protecting some areas of it, to a plain, old shithole again.
So do we win or lose? In my view we successfully carried out some necessary actions, and then over-reached. I don’t think it was ever ‘winnable’ in any normal sense, but t wasn’t ignorable either.
I get the same feeling about Iraq. One of our problems is what we software types call "scope creep." The legitimate goal in going into Afghanistan was to overthrow the Taliban government, smash up Al Qaeda, and seriously reduce the chances that someone would mount another attack on the U.S. from Afghanistan. I think we accomplished much of that rather quickly, and we could have pulled out in 2004 without affecting our security in the least.
Sure, it would be nice if Afghanistan turned into the kind of place that would never support Islamic extremists again, but, in fact, compared to the average Tunisian or Turk, virtually all Afghans are toward the extreme end of Islamic practice. And, like you, I don't see that anything we've done in the past seven years has changed that.
On the other hand, the logic of those goals leads one to ask why we didn't invade Pakistan. As long as these people have sanctuary, supply lines, and sympathizers in Pakistan, they will constitute a continuing source of infection for Aghanistan.
I feel the same about Iraq, but, again, one ends up trying to settle on what our goals should have been. In my view, the real threat from Iraq was the same as in 1990: the Iraqi army was a threat to its neighbors. Once we had smashed the army, overthrown Saddam Hussein, and established that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we could have left the place to stew in its own juices. Iraq is never going to be a model democracy. In particular, I don't understand why the U.S. military spent so much effort on training the Iraqi military. As far as I'm concerned, the region is better off the weaker Iraq is.
Glenn, I agree about Iraq to a large extent. I think part of the problem was that George Bush, rather than being the blood-thirsty ogre the lefties imagine, was actually the kind of guy that felt we should try do some good in Iraq after we whacked Saddam. "All people yearn, etc., etc."
It was a fool's errand. I think both places - Iraq and Afghanistan - should have been targets of serious punitive attacks rather than invasion, conquest, and attempted, uh, reformation. The reformation was never really possible.
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