Ten Years Gone
Ten Years Gone
by Stanton S. Coerr
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In Afghanistan, there is no road for the American war…there is only the path we make by moving forward. We have, however, moved down a path like this once before. President Barack Obama is proceeding in Afghanistan in 2011 by pushing down the same national strategic path John F. Kennedy took fifty years earlier when he began main force intervention into Vietnam, and we are headed for the same failures. In providing neither coherent overall foreign policy nor a crisp and specific national strategic endstate for the campaign in Afghanistan Obama, like Kennedy before him, leaves foreign policy to military officers on the ground to invent as they go.
As in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan was lost before it was begun: it is lost because it cannot be won. Again our massive and superior military force is losing a campaign to a tough insurgent force. Again we are spending tens of billions overseas, and collapsing under our own weight in the field. Again our strength is being used against us. And again, by providing military answers to political questions, we are in quicksand in the developing world.
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Stan Coerr is a veteran of ground combat in Iraq, and he is a former commanding officer. He is now in the civil service, and lives with his wife and three sons in Mclean, Virginia.