Achievable goals and minimalism

By Fester:

Sebastian Gorka at the National Post has a very informative piece on the diverse groups of fighters and their diverse motives for fighting in Afghanistan. I think this basic understanding that most people who are shooting/bombing ISAF forces are �accidental� or at least �local issue� guerrillas.

The Taliban are not al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda is not the Taliban. Yes, the Taliban gave safe-haven to Osama bin Laden and his organization after he was expelled from Sudan in the late-1990s. Yes, members of al-Qaeda and even bin Laden's own family have intermarried within Taliban power-groups, including the so-called Quetta Shura. But the Taliban must be understood as a heterogeneous group of warlords with variegated pasts and disparate interests. Some are former members of the governing regime that was dislodged by U. S. special forces and the CIA after 9/11. Others are primarily narcotraffickers, while some are tribally defined and established masters of regions which have proved impossible to domesticate for centuries.

The only meaningful way in which the collective noun "Taliban" --and this is how the word should be understood --must be used, is as a descriptor for those individuals and forces which either subscribe to the fundamentalist totalitarianism that characterized Afghanistan before October 2001, or who exploit this ideology to protect vested interests since they would have too much to lose otherwise and because they have no interest in a vision of the Afghan future tied to the United States.

[h/t Zenpundit]

William Lind at Defense and the National Interest wrote earlier this month that there might be some hope on goal minimalization that recognizes the difference between Taliban and Al-Queada. That distinction is critical to achieving realistic, minimal goal sets:

According to the July 3 Cleveland Plain Dealer, President Barack Obama said something very interesting last week. He told the AP that he has �a very narrow definition of success when it comes to our national security interests� in Afghanistan. �And that is that al-Qa�ida and its affiliates cannot set up safe havens from which to attack Americans.�

Well. If his words were reported accurately and he really means them, President Obama may have built the golden bridge we need to get out. That definition of success may be attainable.

But here�s the rub. Adoption of a realistic strategic goal in Afghanistan means reversing a decision the administration reportedly made last March, at Hillary�s insistence. Hillary demanded, and reportedly got, a commitment to the opium dream of a �secular, democratic, peaceful� Afghanistan.

The first goal set would be a minimalist and achievable goal set. The second one is grandly tied into a failed menage a trois of American exceptionalism, Wilsonian internationalism, and neo-con absurdism. The current political climate greatly favors expansive goal sets as those sell easiest on TV and allow top tier American pundits to piss their pants when they see a senior general give two girls a notebook. Minimal goal sets means that the world is not just about us, it means others have agency, and it means that the United States can not always get what it wants. Those constraints are humbling constraints.


But most of the fighters who are shooting at the United States and its allies, including the forces of the Kabul government, are either basic criminals trying to profit from a lucrative black market in drugs, or local fighters fighting local fights such as the one in the Korangal Valley over who controls the timber trade. Neither of those fights are pressing national interests as we have plenty of history showing that prohibition and supply side interdiction is expensive and ineffective and clan/tribal conflicts over timber rights should not be a major concern towards US national security.

The big problem for US national security is the formation and execution of global terrorist strikes. The best means of minimizing the impact of networks and groups with global reach is by isolating their meta narrative of persecution and using overwhelming resources to attack their financing, training and supply sub-networks. Putting a corps in Afghanistan to fight mostly local and accidental guerrillas is not a good way to actually achieve realistic minimal goals.