More observations on the Hamas Israeli War. A sort of primer, war aims, and campaign aims. Part I.

War Aims.

A lot of reporting on the Hamas Israeli War, indeed nearly all of it, is devoid of discussion on war aims.  Some of it vaguely discusses Israeli campaign aims.  None of it so far that I've seen has discussed Hamas campaign aims.  Given that, a lot of the reporting is sort of naive.

Hamas, having started the campaign, will be discussed first.

Hamas was formed in 1987 (probably considerably more recently than many suppose.  Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah, the political arm of what had been the Palestinian Liberation Organization, controls the West Bank.  The two entities have actually fought each other.  Hamas started off with the goal of pushing Jews out of the boundaries of what had been the 1948 Palestinian borders, but earlier in the 2000s seemed to lessen its demands.

It seems to have returned to them.  As far as can be told, its war aims are to remove the Jews from Israel, dead or alive, and of any age, and create an Arab Palestinian, and seemingly Islamic (not all Palestinians are Muslims) state in its wake.  That's what's summed up in the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", which like a lot of slogans is catchy but doesn't really convey the full meaning of what it seeks.

Those are the war aims.

Without abandoning them, Hamas cannot back down, and Israel cannot unilaterally realistically convert the current war into a large scale punitive action at this point.  War aims can change, but Hamas shows no desire at all to do so.  A limited raid that was not aimed at civilians could have been undertaken if it has some other goal, but it didn't.

The campaign aims are much more difficult to discern.  Perhaps it was to spark a wider war in the belief that it could be won, or perhaps it was just a gross act of terrorism in furtherance of its remote, unobtainable goal.

Of course, discerning campaign aims, is often tricky in regard to an entity like Hamas, or even large entities.  In spite of long knowledge to the contrary, they may have thought that their raid, if that is what it was intended to be, would scare Israel into submission.  Hitting civilians never does that.  The British didn't surrender after the Blitz, and the air raids on civilian populations in Germany and Japan, perhaps if we exclude the atomic bomb, didn't cause them to surrender either.  Air raids on military targets in North Vietnam which inflicted civilian deaths didn't cause North Vietnam to give up.  9/11 only made Americans mad, it didn't achieve whatever it was that Al Queda thought it would, which seems to have been a hoped for general economic collapse.

Israel's war aims are also simple.  Its goal is to destroy Hamas as it views it, correctly, as irreconcilably opposed to its existence and genocidal in nature.  Its campaign aims seem to be to occupy Gaza, or perhaps the northern portion of the Gaza Strip, trap Hamas, and destroy it and its infrastructure.

Outright destroying an underground organization, however, is very difficult to do. The US basically did it in Afghanistan, however, so it can be done.

Nobody is talking at all about what's going to become of the Palestinians.  Israel isn't addressing it. The Arabs aren't either.  Hamas is simply using their own people as human shields and for propoganda.

A cultural existential difference, or Why can't everyone get along?

Cultures play a part in wars, which people in the West are oddly inclined to forget.  Jimmy Carter famously absent-mindedly quipped that the problems between the Israeli's and Palestinians would go away if they all started acting "like good Christians", but of course neither group is predominantly Christian.

I've taken some criticism on a more stretched observation in this area recently, so I'll explain a bit what I mean.

This question posed above is really a Western one, filtered through our eyes, which are the eyes of heavy Christian influence.  As a South American atheist friend of mine once stated, culturally, "we're all Catholics", even if we often don't behave like it.  That's why we're shocked when people don't behave accordingly.  

Historically and culturally, that's not necessarily the default human norm at all, which doesn't mean that every non-Christian culture (including the two in question) default to bad behavior.   But, as Genghis Khan supposedly noted (often filtered in our culture through Conan the Barbarian in a modified form):

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

We don't think that way, and we don't want others thinking that way.

Back to this war, the fact of the matter is that these two groups of people aren't going to get along.  The Western concept that somehow they can be made to is simply in error at this point.

It might have been true a couple of times.  One was in 1948, just before the first Arab Israeli War broke out, although that's pretty debatable. The second time was when the 1993 and 1995 Palestinian Accords were reached. The big problem is that both times, large numbers of Palestinians simply rejected a future which included Jews within the 1948 Palestinian boundaries.

The 1948 rejection was accompanied by voting with their feet by the Palestinians, a logical choice but one that was taken advantage of by Israel in that it offered the opportunity to truly make the country principally Jewish.  Nobody can fault somebody for fleeing fighting, but the fact that it occured meant that a large Arab population removed itself.  If it had not, demographics alone would have repeated what in fact occured in Lebanon, where a majority Christian population at that time is now 32% of the population.

Instead of taking that route, the Palestinians first relied on Arab hostility to take the country back for them, and then for the PLO, which ultimately compromised on that, to do so.  Now, a certain percentage are relying on Hamas.

Regarding that calculation, relying on it in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, wasn't irrational.  After that, it really started to be. At some point, the land belongs to those who live there.  It was Zapata who stated; “The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands”, which is how it should be (and how it's increasingly ceasing to be in the United States)  That same analogy pertains to revolutions.  It instinctively makes sense for the people ruled by another people to rebel, but not so much a people that had once lived in a land where the majority of the population isn't yours, and the majority of your population wasn't born in that land.  Indeed, the fact that the initial Jewish war for independence sort of violated that tenant is part of the reason that many nations around the globe were quite hesitant about supporting Israel early on, combined with the fact that it appeared they'd lose.

Beyond that, as an essay in Minding The Campus has related:

(Professor Mordechai) Kedar, a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, has spent his academic life studying Islamic and Arab history and society. He explains that the animus of Palestinians, Arabs, and Islamists against the Jewish state is based on the consensus of Islamic religious thought that believes that Jews as a religion, people, or nation are never to be the equals of Muslims, and so their independent state, Israel, must be “struck down.”

While that can be debated, there's at least something to it, or there has come to be.   For the most part, since World War Two, Middle Eastern Islam, which is its cradle, has become increasingly more "conservative", if that is the correct term, and militant over the decades.  That was always there, and indeed Saudi Arabia was founded due to the Saud family's alliance with a group so conservative it was regarded as heretical.  Islam does not have a real coexistence ethos as we'd understand it towards other religions.  It's often noted that it has allowances for "People of the Book", meaning both Jews and Christians, but that tolerance is limited and provides that they are to be second class citizens.

Neither Christianity nor Judaism have something similar towards other religions, which doesn't mean that individual Christian or Jewish societies are de facto tolerant.  People tend to generally be intolerant of any group that's different from themselves.

Interestingly, early Middle Eastern governments didn't have this feature to them, or at least not to the same extent.  Turkey just celebrated its 100th founding as a modern state, and that state was founded as a secular one.  Atatürk suppressed Islam in his country.  Jordan has always been a Muslim state, but the Hashemite family that rules it, and once controlled Mecca, has tended towards moderation consistently.  The Baath movement that controls most of Syria and once controlled Iraq was a fascist movement early on that included Muslim and Christian Arabs and which sought a secular state in the Middle East.  The PLO was a secular organization that leaned heavily on Communist thought.  There was at one time a strong sense amongst Arab nationalist that Islam had to be suppressed or, if not outright suppressed, the state's had to be secular. That really began to fall way with the Iranian revolution, and there's been a good deal of retreat from it since that time.

Which takes us to the current highly conservative (again, if that is the right word) Israeli government.

The current Israeli government is the most conservative, again if that's the word, one ever.  It follows part of the global drift towards far right populism.  Prior to the Hamas attack, it was receiving a good deal of pushback from Western nations and internally, in no small part due to an effort to subordinate the Israeli supreme court to the Knesset.  In the irony that all such conflicts create, that's all been forgotten now.  At any rate, a sharp turn to the right by Israel made it pretty clear that any current Israeli desires to really find a mutual solution to the problems now being fought over just weren't there.

All of which leaves us with this.

Hamas has attacked and made it clear that it thinks it can murder its way towards achieving its goals, a sort of accelerated variant of the 1939-1945 lebensraum at this point.  Israel can't allow that to happen.

There are paths to a lasting peace here, but nobody involved, or even with influence, is going to try to bring them about, so the question is whether the warring parties, or more precisely Israel, can bring it about by force.

Monday, April 26, 1943. Intrepid launched.

 

USS Intrepid in 1944.

The USS Intrepid was launched in Newport News.  The aircraft carrier would serve throughout World War Two and two following wars, and be decommissioned in 1974. She is a museum ship today, docked in the Hudson in New York, and served as the FBI operations center following the September 11 attacks on New York.

Riots broke out at Uppsala, Sweden between Swedish Nazis and anti-Nazi demonstrators.

The only President to get the war in Afghanistan right was. . .

 

Barack Obama.

Yes, I meant that.

Already I can hear screaming from some that this is absurd.  Obama was a Marxist Socialist Agent of Destruction who never got anything right. . . 

Well, gentle readers, I'm not a fan of President Obama's.  Basically, I think he stood for very little and like Woodrow Wilson confused talking with action.  But he got Afghanistan right.

Here's why.

President Bush blew it with Afghanistan. The US had to go into the country after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, but the US should have treated that as a criminal act, not military one, which Obama would have done, had he been in office in 2001.  Going into Afghanistan was necessary, but a short, sharp, destructive punitive expedition would have sufficed.

Yes, the last punitive expedition the country went into didn't catch the bad guy, Pancho Villa, but then neither did the long slow invasion of Afghanistan. That took years, and indeed it occurred under President Obama's watch.  The Punitive Expedition into Mexico did serve, FWIW, to keep big forays across the border (well, at least armed ones, big forays across the border are going on right now, but not armed ones), from occurring again.

We could have done that.  We pretty much could have destroyed much of the Taliban, maybe killed Bin Laden, and wrecked Afghanistan as a potential threat for some time without occupying it.

But once you do that, you are in it.  You break it, and we did, you bought it.

President Obama seems to have gotten that. He intended to get out, but didn't. He even launched a "surge" which regained lost ground.

President Trump didn't get it, or didn't care.  Probably the latter.  No matter how you look at it, however, the Doha Agreement was inexcusable.

Also inexcusable was committing to a May pull out, which under the circumstances was abandoning the country to the Taliban.  Further inexcusable was the effort to abandon the country prior to President Biden's inauguration.  It's still unclear what that was even about.

At least Trump listened to his military advisers to the extent he didn't pull out in January of this year.

Then came in Biden and made a hasty, botched, departure.   The administration has given the thin excuse that they expected the country to fall, but not so fast.

So, we have three Presidents who messed it up, and only one who got it right.  We rarely give President Obama credit for much here, but we'll give him credit for that.

September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

 I was getting ready for work.  My wife was getting ready to take our son to preschool.

She was watching the Today Show, and called me up because a jet had hit one of the Twin Towers.  I came up and watched the footage.

Then the second one hit.  I was watching from the stairs.  Right away, I told her it was terrorism.

We all seemingly know the story.  Another jet hit the Pentagon.  Heroic passengers stormed the cockpit of a fourth and in the resulting struggle it went down, taking all of them, and the Islamic jihadist who justified murder in the name of God, to their deaths.

President Bush promised revenge and retribution.

The nation united.

The Administration soon went off course, mistaking necessarily retribution against Al Queda, to whom the jihadist belonged, with the Baathist of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with whom the same didn't get along.  The nation soon set ground in Afghanistan, but the commitment was small.  A larger one went to war in Iraq, leading to the end of the Baathist regime there, but a guerilla war against ISIL thereafter which was eventually won.  In Afghanistan, the larger commitment, and one to rebuilding the nation with a democratic model after the Taliban regime that gave safe harbor to Al Queda was removed.   The slow commitment lead to a messy and protracted war.

That war was more or less won, but a guerilla war against the armed Islamic students of the Taliban, a force that exists only because of Pakistan's support, continued on for 20 years.  President Obama tried to extract the US and then reversed course.  At the end of his administration President Trump negotiated with the very entity which had given safe harbor to those who attacked us on this day 20 years ago and then committed to withdrawal.  President Biden, whom never approved of the nation building mission in Afghanistan, completed what Trump had started with an inept and messy withdrawal that amounted to a surrender to the Taliban and an abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan.

The nation will look back on this day with sadness, as it should.  But what it should be considering as well is what its recent acts mean in terms of its immediate future.  We've left our enemies in power and rejuvenated in a region which gave rise to this attack 20 years ago and their dedication to an isolated and extreme interpretation to a religion that started as a Christian heresy and spread first by excusing primitive and male vices, and then spread by the sword remains unabated and will not abate.

Killing Osama Bin Laden and devastating Al Queda has made us safer, to be sure.  But the ineffective and misdirected nature of our following efforts, followed by the abandonment of that which we created, has not made the world safe.

The third option in Afghanistan

Over the past few days the United States came surprisingly close to obtaining a "sustainable solution" in Afghanistan.

"Sustainable solution" is the phrase used repeatedly by a former government official who was interviewed on NPR on Sunday, when the news broke that the U.S. had called off a meeting with the Taliban that was scheduled to occur at Camp David and which would likely have resulted in that "Sustainable solution".

"Sustainable solution" means a surrender.  More specifically it means that special type of American surrender which allows the public to wholly ignore that the country surrendered and allows an administration in charge to pretend we didn't surrender.  It is, therefore a duplicitous surrender.

Throughout the weekend shows and on to the week the news was fully of analysis about how there were only two options in Afghanistan.  One is surrendering, which isn't what anyone calls it, and the other is keeping on with our low grade commitment. The US has only 5,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at the moment which frankly isn't much, and it isn't enough.  The Trump Administration, in calling off the talks, noted that the U.S. did so as an American soldier had been killed in the days leading up to the Camp David meeting, which was regarded as inappropriate for a negotiating party, while also noting that during the past few days the NATO commitment to the war had killed 1,000 Taliban combatants, which if true would be the equivalent to 1/5th of our own commitment to the war and would also equal about 1/3d of the total number of casualties we've had in the entire 20 year war.

Which brings us to the third option.

We could, and should, actually go ahead and win the war.

First let's state two obvious facts.  One is that if we pull out now, no matter how we term it, Afghanistan will fall back into a brutal Islamic theocracy run by the Taliban.  The second fact is that we've fought the war very badly.

Okay, the first.

We went into Afghanistan in the first place as the country had fallen into the hands of the Taliban and they hosted Al Qaeda.  The attacks on our country that took place on this day in 2001 were planned and stages from Afghanistan.  Afghanistan hosted the Al Qaeda as the Taliban shared the same Islamist view of the world which holds that all opposed to Islam in any fashion are infidels to be conquered by the sword.  It isn't the only view of the world that Muslims hold but it is well grounded in Islamic tradition and theology.  Many Muslims would dispute the last point, but Islam is a religion that is badly fractured into various groups, not all of which hold the same views on certain tenants, including whether there needs to be a Caliph and whether armed expansion of the religion is a central tenant.  The further a person goes, geographically, from the origin of the faith the less likely is it that its adherents hold those views.  But those views are not far removed from those which developed during Mohammed's lifetime or shortly thereafter and while there hasn't been a unified Islam since Muhammad's death, the feature of a violent expansive Islam isn't new to this era, nor has there ever been an era without it since his death.

But there has also often been a different view in which Muslims on a local level didn't pay much attention to those matters and rather focused on others.  Even early on this was the case.  That drama is playing out in Afghanistan now and has been since the Soviet invasion of the country wrecked it.

We easily shoved aside, but that's all we did, the Taliban when we came in with a badly planned and badly lead intervention following the September 11 attacks.  That allowed the tribal elements that opposed the Taliban to fill the vacuum. But we never wiped out the Taliban, even though we largely did Al Qaeda, and its fought on. And fighting on in a country that's in a state of reversed development that's so extensive that it's development has regressed hundreds of years has not been hard for it.  It now controls huge area of the country, although not as much as some American news outlets have reported.

The Taliban controls 14.5% of the country. The Afghan government controls 56.3% of the country. Both sides in the contest now control more of the country than they did in 2018, when the Afghan government controlled about 30% of the country and the Taliban 7% of the country.

So the rest of the country remains in contest, with the Afghan government actually silently pulling ahead, while the Taliban oddly also gains ground.  Right now, if trends continue, the Afghan government can be foreseen to control at least 60% of the country in the foreseeable future and 70% is unimaginable.  On the other had, seeing the Taliban control 20% or 25% isn't either.

Obvious in this is that the war is in fact developing and the Afghan government is winning.  It isn't winning in a George S. Patton advance to the Rhine fashion, but it's winning.

Guerrilla wars, which is sort of what this is, take a long time to win.  The Communist Vietnamese struggled for 30 years to win completely in Vietnam.  The British fought for 12 years in Malaya before declaring the war won, but the actual low grade struggle that followed went on for another 20 years.  The Philippine Insurrection supposedly went on for three years, but only because the U.S. pretended that the war ended then.  So the current war lasting 20 years isn't exactly surprising and shouldn't be.

But the U.S. has no staying power in guerrilla wars and indeed it doesn't in protracted wars at all.  We never have.  That's why we abandoned the Republic of Vietnam to its fate and allowed it to be defeated in 1975.  And that's why we're ready to do the same with Afghanistan.

This has come about in part because we've believed every since World War Two that we can fight a war in which Clausewitz has no part, but of course, we can't, which is the second factor noted above.  And we very much did that in Afghanistan.  Under the inept oversight of Donald Rumsfeld, we committed an economy of troops to the effort in the belief that our opponents were all rude primitives and we were super technical and could win a primitive war with special means. That was stupid.

Part of the reason, indeed much of the reason, we did that is that we were also taking on the Baathist regime in Iraq and had no need whatsoever to do that. That war was our kind of war, an armored advance on an armored enemy.  But it took up most of our effort.  The war in Afghanistan languished with lessor participation and it, over time, has reduced to one in which we really have only a smallish numerical role.  The U.S. may have 5,000 troops in Afghanistan, but the U.S. Army alone has 20,000 in Germany, where the risk of those troops being engaged in combat is quite low.

Not that 5,000 men, in terms of our current force, is small in some ways.  It isn't comparatively.  We have, for example, half that number in Japan and about three times that number in South Korea, where the risk of their becoming involved in combat isn't unsubstantial.  But it isn't a gigantic commitment in terms of men and its not enough to really do anything other than stiffen the Afghan government's will to fight on, which it has been doing.  If we add in non US NATO troops, which Americans routinely forget, those numbers climb to 17,000.

That allows the Afghani government to struggle on to try to control all of its territory.  It isn't enough to really end the war in a decisive way.  That latter fact allows the Taliban to struggle on as well.

So our only alternative is to hang on for eons or get out, right?

No.

The 14% of the country occupied by the Taliban is readily identifiable.  Commitment of an actual combat division, or better yet two, which would be 15,000 to 30,000 men, in combination with Afghani government forces, in a single hard strike would put that 14% to 0% and would cause a massive blood loss to the Taliban.  If it wasn't enough to convince a group of people who are largely willing to die on the basis that they'll go right to Heaven anyway to quit, it'll convince some, and it'll end the existence of many more in a way that would allow the Afghan government to be a presence back on its own territory.

At that point, the maintenance of the peace could logically become a UN, rather than a NATO effort, something that NATO has a lot of experience with. The blue helmets of UN peace keepers could then be a presence.  The United Nations already deploys over 100,000 troops committed by its members around the globe in just such missions, and not all of them are in kind and gentle lands by any means.  And quite a few of those troops are Muslims from Muslim nations that don't have the conquer for a Caliph mindset.  Having those troops, which include female Muslim soldiers from such places as Bangladesh, serve in the region is likely to be less offensive, and indeed perhaps more shocking, than Americans, long term.

That would give Afghanistan a chance to have a future in which the Islamic nation wasn't a base for extremism. Where women were treated as human beings, could vote, and go to school.  And were the type of Islam that most people claim is the real Islam, and which does reflect the view of most Muslims most places, could be restored to its prior place.

The opposite result is grim.  Most of all for women, but for everyone in general.  A victorious Taliban isn't going to be hosting a Summer of Love any time soon, and the kind of forces that will find refuge there aren't the kind that any nation just like it or sharing its views will be able to live comfortably with.

Surrendering in Afghanistan. Maybe the Senate has learned history even if the President has not.

Make no mistake about it, the "peace" that's being considered in Afghanistan isn't a peace.  It's a withdrawal which will be followed by the collapse of the Afghan government and a return to power of the Taliban. 

Saigon, 1975.

It's the helicopter from the Saigon Embassy roof all over again, after a fictional peace with Hanoi, except in this instance, it's worse.  Much worse.

Which is why its refreshing to see the Republican controlled Senate find its backbone, as noted here in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Senate, in a bipartisan rebuke to President Trump’s foreign policy, voted overwhelmingly to advance legislation drafted by the majority leader to express strong opposition to the president’s withdrawal of United States military forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

The 68-to-23 vote to cut off debate ensures that the amendment, written by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and backed by virtually every Senate Republican, will be added to a broader bipartisan Middle East policy bill expected to easily pass the Senate next week.

I hope the Senate's view prevails.

It's frequently noted that the war in Afghanistan is the longest running war in American history, which it is if you don't count the Indian Wars as a single war.  If you do that, no other American war even compares as those wars started sometime in the 1600s and concluded, depending upon how you look at it, in 1890 or 1916.  They're a bit longer.

But the war in Afghanistan is pretty darned long, to be sure. 

Donald Rumsfeld, who reprising the role of Robert Strange McNamara chose to ignore the lessons of history and presume that the United States was not subject to them.

A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the second President George Bush, or perhaps more accurately at the feet of his controversial Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  Rumsfeld took the view that all prior laws of war were no longer applicable to the United States, and therefore even though we knew that Al Queda was headquartered in Afghanistan and sheltered by the Taliban, we could commit an absolute minimum of force to the war there, fight the war with a few specialists and air power, rely on dubious native allies, while taking on a second war with Iraq for what turned out to be dubious reasons, and still win the war in Afghanistan.

Carl von Causewitz looking on with disdain at Donald Rumsfeld from history.

Carl von Clausewitz would have whacked Rumsfeld with his riding crop for thinking such a stupid thing.  

Classic military Clausewitzian thought would have held that having determined that war in Afghanistan was necessary, which it was, it was then incumbent upon the U.S. to use overwhelming force to crush the enemy immediately and leave Afghanistan basically compliant in the wake of a crushing defeat of the radical Islamists.  Instead, we chose to engage basically with special forces and air power while we built up a force to attack Iraq and left much of the ground fighting to Islamic militias of dubious dependability.  That in turn meant that we didn't get around to really committing until well after the war in Iraq, which we didn't have to engage in, in the first place, had become a second guerrilla war which in turn meant that no how badly the Taliban did in combat they'd learned that they could keep on, keeping on.

U.S. Special Forces troops with Northern Alliance troops. The Northern Alliance was a genuinely anti Taliban force, and truly useful in the field, but it wasn't the sort of force that was any more likely to result in a stable government long term than the Montagnards were in Southeast Asia.  Using them was wise and necessary.  Leaving the war nearly entirely to them was not.

Since that time we've fought a war of decreasing commitment sort of hoping against hope that the Afghan government we supported and created after the Taliban were driven out of Kabul would be able to take over, much like we hoped that successive South Vietnamese governments would be able to take over the Vietnam War after 1968.

That didn't work then and its obviously not working now.

Which has lead to the conclusion that we need to do is dress up a defeat, like we did in Vietnam, and get out.  

Of course getting out meant the ultimate fall of our ally, the Republic of Vietnam, and the installation of a brutal communist regime that still remains in power.  The analogy there probably ends, as Vietnam isn't Afghanistan and it never posed any direct threat to the United States.*  Afghanistan has been used as the headquarters for a global radical Islamic war on the world with the goal to establish a new Caliphate and subject the world to Islam.  Hanoi just wanted to subject Vietnam to communism, which it did, but which it is now loosing due to the pervasive nature of American pop and consumer culture.**

If and when we leave Afghanistan, if we haven't succeeded there, it will return to the control of the Taliban in short, probably very short, order.  Compelling the Afghan government to include the Taliban in the government will be no more successful than Hanoi's promise not to resume the war with Saigon, or the fusion of the Royal and Pathet Lao armies was.  The result is inevitable.

Of course, a person might also ask if the same results as the Vietnam War might also be inevitable.  If we haven't won after an eighteen year commitment, why would we win now?

Well, the numbers are part of the reason.

The United States has less than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.  At the absolute height of our commitment, in 2011, when we "surged", we had 110,000 men there, which we built up to rapidly after we crossed the 20,000 number in mid 05 and which then fell off rapidly, falling below 20,000 again in 2014.

10th Mountain Division troops in Afghanistan in 2005.

Now, before we go on, something about this should be obvious.  A country which proposed to unseat its de facto, if not de jure, government of the size of Afghanistan but which didn't even get up over the division level commitment for the first three plus years of that was either acting stupidly or wasn't serious.  And a nation that would commit over 100,000 men for a very brief interval and then presume, when it was known that the war wasn't won, that everything would be fine, also wasn't acdting particularly rationally.  The U.S. should have committed that 100,000 men in the first three months of the war in which case we probably could have totally withdrawn by 2011.

Donald Rumsfeld, here's your sign.

United States Drug Enforcement personnel burning  hashish as part of an American policing operation in an ancillary quasi military operation guaranteed to make enemies of the rural populace.

The thought was, of course, or rather the naive hope was, that the Afghan army we built would take over.  Just like the ARVN. That in fact was not an irrational hope in the late 1960s, but in the case of the Afghan army, given the way we went about it, it certainly was.

Soldier of the U.S. Army (Michigan National Guard) on patrol with Afghans and, in German desert camouflage, Latvian soldier

Afghanistan has had an army since 1709, and a fairly good one in the 1950s, but that all came apart following the Communist coup that took over the country in the 1970s. The army fell apart and the country fell into civil war, from which its never emerged.  Reconstituting a real army after a twenty five year gap has proven extremely difficult and like most armies that exist in a scenario in which a foreign power is putting them together, it's been infiltrated by the enemy.  It's going to take quite a while before that army can stand on its own.  By comparison again, the French put together what would become the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the early 1950s and it wasn't until the late 1960s that it was capable of somewhat standing on its own, although it never really achieved that status.  And like the ARVN its not only has very loyal soldiers, but it's subject to being accused of being a colonial puppet by its clearly nativist opponent.  So while it has 174,000 men, it can't field that number as an effective fighting force.

Afghan commandos waiting for airlift from Russian made helicopters.  With their western airborne transportation and American arms and equipment they bear a worrisome resemblance to crack ARVN units of the late Vietnam War.

Indeed, it's lost over half the country.

So we've lost, right?

Well, we might have, but before we give up, we better at least try to win.  And we can do that.

Indeed, there's no doubt that a second surge, like the first one, would reoccupy the country and drive the Taliban out, probably into Pakistan, in the case of the survivors.  We can debate what to do about that, but serving notice on Pakistan that its border will be regarded as fictional would be one thing to do.  Pakistan isn't going to fight the Untied States under any circumstances, and indeed India would dearly love it to even suggest that it would.  An effort of that type would reoccupy the country and, if a remaining commitment of at least 50,000 men stayed for at time, as in a decade, the country would have a chance.

A chancier, but also probably likely to work means, would be to commit a large, but lesser, force of 50,000 to 60,000 and do the same thing.  Of course, that's not a small commitment either.

The odds are better, however, that we'll simply abandon it, and our effort there, and live to regret the consequences.

________________________________________________________________________________

*See, however, Was The Domino Theory Right? and Looking at the Vietnam War differently.  Not as a war but a campaign in the Cold War.

**Whatever the results of the war have been, the inevitable trend of Vietnam is exhibited by the presence of a Victoria's Secret in Hanoi and V-pop in the country at large.  The South Vietnamese never ended up embracing Communism and the North Vietnamese are abandoning it.