How do you win a war when it is being led and conducted in a country you are not at war with?
It seems to me we are at another turning point in the road, and one of the few moments when American enmeshment in Afghanistan might be turned back. We have to weigh the chances of serious terror groups re-grouping and operating even more freely throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan against the risks of more money, more troops, more casualties and more blowback. And let's not fool ourselves: neither of these is a good option. That's the Bush legacy.
But if McChrystal is right, he is strategizing Afghanistan as a semi-permanent protectorate for the US. This is empire in the 21st century sense: occupying failed states indefinitely to prevent even more chaos spinning out of them. And it has the embedded logic of all empires: if it doesn't keep expanding, it will collapse. The logic of McChrystal is that the US should be occupying Pakistan as well. And Somalia. And anywhere al Qaeda make seek refuge.
In the end, Gulliver cannot move. And his pockets are empty. Whom does that deter?
You know, how this is handled will, I think, ultimately shape what America means in today's world, and what they can or can not achieve in the future. I'm saying we can see clear historical patterns in our behavior, but we refuse to acknowledge it. We think we're different, that we'll make it out alive with our nice little American "ingenuity," but it's so much more complex than that.
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