Late Lamented War

The President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama declared over a year ago that he was uncomfortable with the concept of victory in Afghanistan. Since then, President Obama has initiated and maintained rules of engagement (ROE) for US forces (and more broadly, the international forces in Afghanistan) so restrictive as to ensure there will be no victory for America and her allies there. Beyond those ROE so constraining that there is no way to win, the United States is acting like France in the World War II era looking for a way to surrender. American foreign policy now seeks a path to appease the Taliban rather than to defeat them. The world's lone superpower is capitulating to an Islamist, Sharia-imposing ragtag band of vicious murdering terrorist thugs. The supposed "good war" that during the Presidential campaign of 2008 and actually well before that, since soon after hostilities began was the conflict in Afghanistan as opposed to Iraq that the Democratic Party supposedly wanted to wage to win to eliminate the threat of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but now is the fight that Democrats and President Obama are rushing to abandon. Suddenly, the true antiwar radicalism of the Democrat Party as a national entity has fully emerged. The focus on drawing down from the Iraq War to focus on winning in Afghanistan was only a veneer, a ploy to club the last Bush administration and Republicans with, not a sincere effort toward winning. US casualties have skyrocketed in Afghanistan under the current President's leadership as Obama split the baby with his generals and did not authorize the full amount of troop surge those military commanders including those on the ground there had sought, all the while, increasing mission range to much broader areas of that inhospitable country and boosting mission tempo. This while our forces hands are tied by the most limiting rules under which US forces have ever been forced to fight. The first US effort at total war was directed by Lincoln and Grant in the American Civil War and conducted by Sherman on his "march to the sea" where he demoralized the civilian populace of the South by means of sufficient destruction of all productive resources that the Confederacy was so wounded that the will to continue the fight was lost. However objectionable this tactic may seem now, there is little doubt that the brutality unleashed led to the more rapid capitulation of the Southern Confederacy. During the Second World War, the United States did not confine fighting strategy to a scrupulous standard and in fact some might say in instances like the fire bombing of Dresden was little better than our Axis enemy as we engaged in moral relativism and means to an end attacks that left hundreds of thousands of innocent non-combatants dead. Yet this deliberate bloodletting was considered an oxymoron of a "good war" and even termed so by such illustrious liberals as Studs Terkel, who realized that in the fight against totalitarianism and fascism, all out war was the only way to triumph. America and her allies will never pacify the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban by waging a Marquess of Queensberry campaign; all this will achieve is an enormous amount of unnecessary and avoidable casualties amongst the good guys (our side) in a struggle of attrition with an opponent who believes that he is religiously mandated to die as a martyr to his faith and declares that he loves death more than the infidel loves life. The war in Afghanistan is eminently winnable even if waged without a single ally by the United States alone, all that is required is the will to triumph and absolute dedication to do whatever is needed including distasteful brutality as was manifested in the Second World War and that we visited upon ourselves by ravaging the Confederacy in the American War Between the States. In this day and age of asymmetrical warfare and weapons of mass destruction, there is no virtuous way to wage war- only the realization that our adversary is evil incarnate and that we do not lose our righteousness of cause using every method available to defeat him. Any effort that does not reflect absolute resolve as a nation by the United States is a recipe for further conflict, further US casualties, more attacks by Islamist terrorists on the homeland, and ultimately futility and disaster.