Iraq and Afghanistan

It has recently been announced that the Americans and their NATO allies have greatly increased the scale of their bombing and close air support efforts in Afghanistan. The Taliban challenge has been heating up on the ground recently, and the solution appears to be increased air activity because this is a form of warfare for which the Taliban have no answer. In Iraq after the recent large-scale kidnapping on a major highway, kidnapping that included several Americans, the Coalition has mounted a massive effort to kill or capture the perpetrators, and, hopefully, free the captives.

The problem for our forces is the more "effective" our reactions, the more negative the reactions of the people we are supposed to be helping. With more limited efforts, particularly on the ground, it is more easily believed that the foreigners are trying to protect local civilians. Larger, massive efforts, particularly when they are primarily responses to attacks on Americans or other coalition forces, can easily be interpreted as violence in defense of outsiders, actions that have little to do with the concerns and lives of the local people. These "effective reactions" are also more likely than more limited face to face encounters to lead to mistakes, to targeting, or at least arresting, persons who turn out to be innocent. And thereby reducing the size of the population that truly is innocent.

I read today of a man who joined the Confederate army in Mississippi early in the Civil War. The commentator wrote that this person was not concerned with larger questions such as slavery. He joined up simply because outsiders had attacked his state. Remember that when Shiite Iran fought with Iraq, many, including Saddam, expected that the oppressed Shiites would refuse to fight the Iranians. It turned out not to be so. Even to Shiite Iraqis, the Iranians were outsiders and that made them the enemy. This natural nativist reaction is a heavy burden that our forces must shoulder. It is one that gets heavier the longer we stay and the less our forces on the ground are able to develop direct relations with the people around them. I see little evidence that the extent of this heavy burden has been understood by Washington.