The Long, Patient Slog

Bing West – Vietnam Marine veteran and author of The March Up and The Strongest Tribe among many other writings on the Iraq war, writes to Rich Lowry at NRO, urging caution about applying apples to oranges and, along the way, taking an oblique poke at a Dem campaign meme:

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says we are now changing our strategy in Afghanistan. Hmm. What has it been for seven years?? The Command and Control has been an unfathomable mess—created by the military and not attributable to a lack of troops.

One of the Dems – Obama’s – key memes in the election was the idea of shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan (indeed, Amy Klobuchar thought it’d be hunky dory to shift all the troops to Afghanistan, and use it for a base to go back into Iraq if the situation went south.

West notes that the “Anbar Awakening” – really, the start of sound counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq – predated the arrival of David Petraeus.

We have to be careful not to design a strategy that is based on a theory created from myths. If you look at Anbar prior to the Sunnis coming over, you see that the Americans were persisting in very small unit (squads) dismounted patrolling, day and night. If you transfer that model to Afghanistan, you are increasing the risk and assuring many more US casualties. It may Americanize yet further a war that should be quite limited, and focused on how to get to al Qaeda in western Pakistan. Above all, we shouldn’t do it because we believe it worked first in Baghdad in 2007 and became the key to bringing over the Sunnis in a short period of time. That’s not what happened.

West may be being both a little parochial (he’s a Marine) and accurate (the change in approach in Anbar was largely pushed by the Marines’ General Mattis, and the Marines have long embraced the approach to counterinsurgency that the media has largely credited to Petraeus).

Either way, winning the war is no more about “sending more troops to Afghanistan” than it is about “finding Bin Laden”.  You may recall the last time Democrats ran a counterinsurgency – they sent half a million troops, over three times as many as are in Iraq.

We know how that turned out.