by Liam Kloef

Created on: December 21, 2009   Last Updated: December 23, 2009

No, we should not have sent more troops to Afghanistan. But arguments for and against seem to be driven by ideology, and it was ideology that’s got us bogged down in Iraq: poorly thought-out idealist schemes, commonly called social engineering stateside but nation building in foreign lands.

We were told in 2001 that troops were going to Afghanistan to fight terrorism; specifically and presumably to smoke out al-Qaeda and its al-Qaedettes and to capture, if possible, Osama bin Laden.  Immediately, U.S.-NATO forces overthrew the Taliban government: to be sure, a repressive, radical Islamic regime and a protector of al-Qaeda terrorists.

But the Taliban was not al-Qaeda, and so immediately we were already not doing what we claimed to do. The Bush administration, cheered on by a pliant press and even more pliant general officer corps, insisted that Taliban and al-Qaeda were one in the same: radical Islamists.

And so we were going to defeat radical Islam. Meanwhile, after the Taliban, U.S. troops governed in Kabul, while overseers and assorted diplomats arranged an election. Again, this was not our explicit intent.

Whereas many Americans oppose that awful social engineering stateside, they heartily endorse the same machinations under the guise of nation building. 

We are now in the same sort of predicament as the Soviet Red Army was in Afghanistan in 1987: trying to prop up a corrupt and feeble government while fending off opposition from a variety of ethnic warriors, the Taliban and even our famed ally in that war on terror, Pakistan.

In other words, in the cogent phrase of retired U.S. Army colonel Douglas Macgregor, we went into Iraq and Afghanistan looking for more enemies to fight. And we found them.

To cite Macgregor again, our military and civilian leaders mistook regions of temporary tactical importance (get al-Qaeda and get out) for one of permanent strategic value (beat back the Taliban, arrange elections; occupy). 

The result of that error is the U.S.-led occupation of a vast country that does not want us there if we are not going to relieve it of 40 years of civil war.  At present, there is no indication that we can.

There’s a good deal of talk about “lessons learned,” but there’s little evidence of this. I’m reminded of the old (now much-maligned) OSS, officers of which in 1944-45 recruited prisoners of war (nominally, the enemy) to aid in defeating the Nazis. They

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