Thu, Nov 07, 2024 | Jumada al-Awwal 5, 1446 | DXB ktweather icon0°C

Exiting Iraq and Afghanistan

Top Stories

What is the exit strategy for Iraq now? asks Leon Sigal in a prescient article in World Policy Journal. He goes on to tell the tale of how George Aiken, the Republican senator from Vermont, in a speech on the Senate floor in 1966, said the way out of US involvement in Vietnam was to declare victory and get out. Having declared victory in 2004 and not got out, it is too late for President George W. Bush or his successors to do that now.

Published: Fri 10 Oct 2008, 9:11 PM

Updated: Sun 5 Apr 2015, 4:35 PM

  • By
  • Jonathan Power

But Aiken had a riposte for that contingency too. A few years later, when it was impossible to declare victory, he was asked how to get out of Vietnam. “In ships”, he replied.

Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are moving towards the only solution that will work -- leaving. In Iraq, surely this is what Barack Obama, if president, must do, despite all the heavy advice trying to persuade him to drag it out until......until a miracle happens and the killing stops, the legal system functions and the “democracy” works. But the killing in this very disturbed society will go on for decades.

US tallies of the Iraqi death toll, supposedly sharply falling, do not even count non-sectarian killings. Nor do they account for the rate of kidnapping, rape and pillage. The US authorities live in a cloud of self-deception.

In Afghanistan, we had this past weekend the senior commander of the British military presence in Afghanistan, to the White House’s alarm, telling a newspaper that the war could not be won- and which army on earth will keep up its morale and fighting edge when the boss says that? “I will not lay down my life if we are going to pull out”, is the natural reaction of a serving soldier in these circumstances.

Every commander of the various national forces in Afghanistan, if not yet the rank and file, must know by now what the British ambassador has told London’s Foreign Office (thanks to a leak in Paris) — that the war is not winnable, that peace must be made with the Taleban, and the West should accept that some dictator (hopefully a reasonable one) is going to come power. Democracy does not have a chance of com ing into being, he argued.

Afghanistan will go back to severe but reasonably honest Taleban rule, which once again will stop the mass killing of innocents and will keep the poppy crop under strict control — which at the moment is doing incalculable harm to consumers in the West and supporting a dangerous mafia.

Only the march of time will dilute the harsher edges of Taleban rule. If the Western NGO’s want to do something useful they can push to allow their schools and clinics to keep functioning, which over a generation or two might lead to the quiet subversion of Taleban rule, just as mission schools in Africa subverted colonial rule.

The Taleban, if no longer pushed, are unlikely to give succour to Osama bin Laden. They don’t want to be massively bombed again. Right now in Saudi Arabia the Taleban are negotiating with the Afghanistan government on how to diminish the conflict, with the Taleban saying they are cutting their links with Al Qaeda.

Iraq, if its lucky, will summon in the peacekeeping and administrative help of nearby Arab neighbours (mainly Sunnis) and, to balance them, those of Shia-ruled Iran, so that they are all forced to stake a stake in the unity and well-being of the country. Faces familiar by religion, language and race should have an easier time than the “infidels” from America.

Some mainly Muslim, Indonesian, Malaysian, Nigerian and Bangladeshi soldiers operating under the UN flag wouldn’t go amiss either. The UN itself could play a supervisory and arbitrating role.

Obama should beware. Too many of his foreign policy advisers are pushing him hard to stay longer in Iraq and increase the American firepower in Afghanistan. But this will tarnish his presidency badly.

As president, Lyndon Johnson had to stand and watch as his marvellous “Great Society” social reform crashed onto the rocks, destroyed by his decision to pursue a major war in Vietnam (one which some of his prominent pro war advisers have now belatedly recanted).

Likewise, Obama could see all his hopes for health care, employment retraining and the creation of a fairer distribution of income, come to naught.

We shouldn’t forget that just before the US went to war in Iraq that George Bush Senior’s former secretary of state, James Baker, urged the younger Bush to take the Iraqi problem to the UN. Lawrence Eagleburger, his successor, said that an invasion of Iraq would jeopardise, not advance, American interests and Brent Scowcroft, Bush Sn’s National Security Adviser, published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Don’t attack Iraq”.

On Afghanistan the “nay” forces were quieter but many of the wise and experienced will now admit that America got carried away by its wrath at 9/11 and didn’t think through what the US would have to do after the initial massive aerial bombardment. Time for a major re-think. Time for getting out?

Jonathan Power is a veteran foreign affairs commentator based in London



Next Story