"The proposed counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan is at present irrelevant to the goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda, which is located in Pakistan. None of the plots in the West has any connection to any Afghan insurgent group, labeled under the umbrella name “Afghan Taliban,” be it a part of Mullah Omar‟s Quetta Shura Taliban, Jalaluddin Haqqani‟s Haqqani Network, or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar‟s Hezb-e Islami. There has not been any Afghan in al Qaeda in the past twenty years because of mutual resentment between al Qaeda foreigners and Afghan locals. In the policy debate, there is an insidious confusion between Afghan Taliban and transnational terrorist organizations. Afghan fighters are parochial, have local goals and fight locally. They do not travel abroad and rarely within their own country. They are happy to kill Westerners in Afghanistan, but they are not a threat to Western homelands. Foreign presence is what has traditionally unified the usually fractious Afghan rivals against a common enemy. Their strategic interest is local, preserving their autonomy from what they perceive as a predatory corrupt unjust central government. They do not project to the West and do not share the internationalist agenda of al Qaeda or its allied transnational terrorist organizations."

Labels: Common Sense, Defense

"It's too soon to tell, but reductions in defense spending may demonstrate that it's far less expensive to protect the United States from Islamist terrorism as well as the criminality flooding in from Mexico and Latin America by controlling our borders and immigration. We must, however, stop wasting American blood and treasure on misguided military interventions designed to drag Muslim Arabs and Afghans through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in the space of a few years, at gunpoint.

For the time being, no one will say these things. It's easier to go, in Winston Churchill's words, "from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm" and nurture the money flow to Washington."

"The proper military mission in Afghanistan and elsewhere is sanctuary denial. (Vigilance through spatial surveillance, networks of informants combined with the nearby stationing of a small force dedicated to physically eradicate any al Qaeda presence. In other cases Foreign Internal Defense may be appropriate)."

• The objective in conflict or crisis is not to spend lots of American blood and treasure, but to spend as little as necessary in the shortest time possible! (Democratizing the Islamic World and eradicating poppy production in Afghanistan are "nice to have/nice to do," but they are not attainable and they are not vital interests.)
• The United States can avoid direct involvement in most 21st Century conflicts. (Off-shore pre-1914 UK Model)
• Conflict should always be terminated before the cumulative human and political costs defeat the original purpose of U.S. military action.
• Homeland defense – U.S. land borders and coastal waters – will demand more and more military resources to cope with criminality and terrorism emanating from the Caribbean Basin and Mexico (Already an undeclared war.)
• The United States must maintain general purpose military power as a hedge against uncertainty, as insurance against the possibility the United States could be drawn into a war of decision it would otherwise choose not to fight, but we cannot maintain forces large enough to forcibly occupy and transform other people’s societies into reflections of our own.
• We cannot afford to intervene/nation build. The world does not want it and it is not in our vital strategic interest to do it. (Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq … etc.)

Labels: Common Sense, Defense, Leadership