George Friedman and the Good War

George Friedman at Stratfor reminds us that there is still a place called Afghanistan and we are still there. Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and the Good War is kind of bad form on his part. He shouldn't be bringing this up and disturbing our collective thoughts, but that's his job. If the world were perfect, Stratforians would not have much to occupy their time.

I think the gist is, we are there, it's not going to get better, and we are going to be staying. He sums it up,

If the endgame in Iraq is murky, the endgame if Afghanistan is invisible.

Still, if we are going to keep AQ neutralized, we have to keep the Taliban off balance.

The neutralist disagrees. Our position is that we shall be forced out sooner or later and we compound the disaster by staying.

We have made it clear, the war was a mistake to begin with. Maybe, if we had bagged OBL and bugged out we could have claimed something, but we didn't. The most intelligent strategy I have ever heard was best explained in a letter to the Antiwar.com letters page years ago. It was posted by George D. of the UK, "the terrorists could have been hunted one-by-one by having a special task force that deals with it, like Israel did in hunting the Nazi war criminals, without going to war with the country that provided shelter for them." Of course such a policy would need focus over a long term and could not be a TV war and no party out of power would have been able to resist accusing the administration of doing nothing.

George ends on the following note,

Thus, while it may be a better war than Iraq in some sense, it is not a war that can be won or even ended. It just goes on.

Not forever.

See our previous discussion of Afghanistan