Re-Assessing Afghanistan From a National Interest Perspective

[unhappycamper]

Re-Assessing Afghanistan From a National Interest Perspective
Dennis Santiago
CEO and Managing Director of IRA
Posted: August 4, 2010 05:08 PM

The acronym MENA stands for Mission Element Need Assessment. It's a document constructed to objectively assess if the self-interests of the United States are compelling enough to warrant the institution of a change to national policy or the initiation, continuation or termination of national action including, but not limited to, acts of war.

A MENA supports what eventually becomes a combination of Presidential Orders, National Security Decision Directives and Congressional Acts and Mandates that instruct the country's apparatus to act accordingly. At this point in time with respect to Afghanistan, that process assumes that sufficient national interest exists to warrant that the United States needs to (a) conduct active military operations in the theater and (b) engage in a program of reshaping the Afghan nation and culture. This conclusion was arrived at nearly a decade ago by the Bush Administration and is currently embraced by the Obama Administration. The questions about Afghanistan boil down to (a) whether or not the conclusion is still valid and (b) what direction the dialectic is headed, so to speak.

Don't get me wrong. I have no trouble with pursuing our enemies to the ends of the earth and killing them. I remember writing cautiously about Afghanistan about a decade ago when Osama Bin Laden fled there and the process of winnowing down the Al-Qaeda network's influence began in earnest. I worried we might be doing some of it the wrong way. We had picked up where we had left off in the 1980's when the Soviet Union was the occupier fighting by proxy using local mercenary armies sprinkled with US advisors and leveraged by US aerial might. It felt too much like the toe dipping that got us into trouble in Vietnam. I also thought that in our myopia we were discounting too much the lessons learned by the Russian military in these very same mountains. I still contend that politically we could have -- and strategically, we should have -- gone in there and done the bulk of the job ourselves. Afghanistan should have been a lopsided battle between two foreign forces making as little collateral impact on the local populace as possible. It was not to be.

As Afghanistan unfolded I worried that actively continuing to fund and encourage the militarization of the Afghan regime -- and by consequence its domestic and foreign opposition -- and attempting to introduce cultural "American-style Westernization" into the country would have dire future consequences. This was not the Mesopotamia where the world's first great libraries were founded, where the Tigris River created the basis of national organization, and secularization -- granted at the hands of a brutal dictator -- had been established. No one has ever succeeded at permanently altering the cultural tribalism of Afghanistan. No one has because tribal organization is a natural equilibrium dictated by the terrain. An axiom of global stability applies, "Mother Earth does not care what the monkeys scurrying about on her surface think."

I actually like Afghanistan as a battleground. It's probably one of the world's best "kill boxes" for concentrating a threat and engaging it in isolation. The fact that Al-Qaeda was stupid enough to retreat there is what I like to think of as a "Blessing of Allah" giving the infidels the perfect laboratory to practice the Art of War.