Also, I would like to thank Marc at American Future for upgrading my comment to a post in his own blog, and at The Moderate Voice. For a small blog like my own, such promotion is not an everyday occurrence, but very much welcomed. Again, thanks Marc.
I will disagree with Krauthammer here. First, he says that the assumption that “the world’s one superpower, which spends more on defense every year than the rest of the world combined, does not have the capacity to fight an insurgency in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan” is mistaken. I disagree, as this has been borne by events. Our commanders have in fact said that our armed forces are stretched thin, and that they are near their breaking point. This is particularly true of our ground forces like the army, marines and National Guard. Krauthammer makes much on the fact that we spend so much more on defense than the rest of the world, which is true. However, much of that spending has traditionally gone to acquire high end platforms and technology which has ill-served us in fighting insurgencies, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have not spent that money on our troops, either in on languages, cultural understanding or counter-insurgency training, nor on their health care as recent events have borne out (the Walter Reed debacle).
Krauthammer argues that those who want us to focus on Afghanistan as opposed to Iraq make a mistaken assumption, mainly, “that Afghanistan is strategically more important than Iraq.” His thought experiment, however, fails to prove his own assumption, that Iraq is more important than Afghanistan.
To begin, in bringing a neutral observer to decide, we would have to provide him with all of the facts. For example, we would have to tell him that it was in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, a place completely disconnected from the world, where al Qaeda not only trained, but planned for the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, it is there (particularly among the Pashtuns) that radical Islam has found many advocates, and the fact that the Pashtuns are the most important ethnic group in the country. To this you would also have to add that these Pashtuns do not recognize the Durand Line which supposedly separates a nuclear armed Pakistan from Afghanistan. This means, that if al Qaeda were to reestablish itself in Afghanistan, with Pashto aid, could potentially destabilize Pakistan, or precipitate an Indo-Pakistani conflict, such as that which they attempted to initiate following the Sept. 11 attacks. Afghanistan is also en entry way into Central Asia’s former Soviet republics, where hundreds of caches of nuclear material are still readily available in the black market and where, due to the nature of the repressive regimes in the region is also ripe for jihad. Add to all of this the fact that Afghanistan is currently the largest producers of opium in the world, bringing it millions of dollars in revenue each year; revenue, which has gone directly to finance its Taliban insurgency.
Moreover, and moving to Iraq, you would also have to tell the Martian that Iraq is almost 60% Shiite, 20% Kurd and 20% Sunni Arab. You would also have to tell him that The Shiites and the Kurds control all of the oil wealth of the country, and that due to their recent history under Saddam Hussein, neither Shiites nor Kurds likes the Sunni Baathists in Iraq. Additionally, you would have to tell this poor Martian, that the Kurds have an effective military organization (the Peshmerga), a working government and great economic prosperity which they have zealously and successfully protected from the violence in the rest of Iraq. In addition, to this, you would also tell the Martian that the Shiite south, has decently sized militias that can protect most of the South (excluding Baghdad and its environs) from Sunni violence and that they have been ruthless in prosecuting their own revenge war against the Sunnis in Iraq. In addition, their economy is growing steadily and closely with Iran (the largest Shiite state in the region, and also a target for Sunni Salafi Jihadists who see it in a worst light than the evil West). In fact, as many strategists have argued, Kurdish Iraq is a success. So is Southern Shiite Iraq (to an extent, except for the fact that it is more closely beholden to Iran than to the US). Our main failure, has been at the intersection of the three ethnic groups, and largely Sunni Iraq, which has no oil wealth or many other natural resources to make it a viable state, and hence one of the main reasons why we are trying to keep any future Iraqi state united. In addition, we would have to mention that unlike a Taliban-al Qaeda controlled Afghanistan; a Sunni Arab Iraq would be surrounded by almost all hostile states. It would have to worry about Hashemite Jordan to its West, Saudi Arabia to its South, Shiite Arab Iraq to its southeast, Kurdish state to its North, a secular ally of Iran in Syria to its northwest, and a belligerent Iran to its east. All of these states fear al Qaeda, as much, if not more than we do, because ultimately, they are the main targets of the organization and their revolution in the region (and all of their governments are seen as evil and apostate).
This is a far more complex question, and not as simple as Krauthammer would like to make it.
He makes much of al Qaeda’s admonition that Iraq is the main battlefront in their war against the West, however, this is a case of selective quoting. For al Qaeda has also said, many times over, that one of their most important strategies in this long war is to bleed the US financially to bankrupt it and in so doing, deny it the ability to continue occupying the Muslim world and allow for the rise of a new power in its midst. The attacks on September 11 bear this out. They were as much symbolic as they were military attacks against us. They attached, out military power (the Pentagon), our political power (the White House or Congress), and our Economic power (the World Trade Center, and the airline industry). Their main purpose was not so much to cause heavy casualties (though it was one of their prime objectives) but also to cripple our economy. For years, they have wanted to fight us on their terms, and in their soil. The Middle East and Afghanistan are such places. However, that does not mean that because they want us fighting there, that we should just walk in blindly into the fight.
Iraq is a state, which as I explained above, and as we all know, is far more complex than simply a Sunni Arab state ready for the taking. In fact, it is largely Shiite (60% of the population), Kurd (roughly 20%), and 20% Sunni Arab and other minorities, with the land divided in a roughly proportional way. The Shiites we know will not allow the Sunni Arabs to take their oil resources, and have been pretty successful, if not brutal in defending themselves against the Iraqi insurgency. As pointed out earlier, so have the Kurds. That means that already, roughly 80% of Iraq along with most if not all of its oil reserves are out of the hands of the Sunni Arabs. In addition to this, however, the insurgency itself is not monolithic. The insurgency is composed by various groups, many of which are former Baathists, and as such more nationalist than religious in their outlook and goals (a fact we have been trying to exploit and use against Al Qaeda in Iraq). This means, that even within the insurgency and the territory in Sunni Iraq, not even 20% of it belongs to AQI.
Krauthammer also makes a lot of the fact that many jihadists are flocking to Iraq; however our own intelligence agencies have placed their number at less than 10% of the overall insurgency. What make their impact disproportionate are their suicide operations. Even these, however, account for far less of the violence than the IEDs and other explosions throughout the country. Apart from this, as many reports have pointed out, what motivates many of these people to go to Iraq is the American occupation of it. This means that many of these people (again, as recent reports have borne out) had not, until Iraq subscribed to the Salafi outlook of al Qaeda. In fact, many more recruits have of late been going to Pakistan’s NWFP and to train with the newly founded al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb with a view to expanding the war to fields other than Iraq and Afghanistan. This they are doing, with a view to repositioning themselves for the next phase of the long war.
Moreover, even our own military has stated time and again that the biggest threat to Iraq and our mission there, is not al Qaeda or even the larger Sunni insurgency but the Shiite militias that until recently had monopolized violence in the country.
What all of this adds up to, is the fact that al Qaeda does not really have as much committed to Iraq as they would like us to believe. They know they can’t take the country because of the Shiites and the Kurds, and that they can only hold on to a small sliver of what’s left to carry out their jihad. In Afghanistan, however, they have a better chance of taking over a larger portion of the country as the Pashtuns are the most important group within the country, and one which has both ethnic and religious ties to their brethren across the border in nuclear armed Pakistan; a group, which refuses to recognize the Durand Line that divides Pashtunistan between the two countries. A group that has many grievances against both the largely Tajik controlled Afghan government, and the largely Punjabi Pakistani state. A Pakistani state which is fighting for its own legitimacy in the face of various insurgencies in its south against the Balochs, the NFWP against the Pashto and other ethnic minorities that feel disenfranchised by the Punjabis. Pakistan is also a state from where we got the AQ Khan network which trafficked in nuclear technology as far away as North Korea, and Lybia, and filled with security forces and scientists sympathetic to the al Qaeda cause, through sympathy for the ousted Taliban militia of Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda has said time and again, that they want to destroy us politically, militarily and economically, with the latter being the weakest target and also the one that would undermine the former two the most. The best way to do this, at least for a military our size is to force us to engage them in as many battlefields as possible. As such, our strategy should be to engage when it is strategically to our advantage to do so. Hence, the experts that argue that Iraq is a distraction from the real war on terror, mean not that Iraq is not important but rather that given the many actors vying for power in the country, it is one conflict were al Qaeda will have the greatest difficulty in coming out on top. In the same manner, because of all the fault lines the conflict trips, we are also left with 160,000 American troops policing up to 4 different conflicts and possibly a few more, wasting blood and money in conflicts that are not directly related to al Qaeda. For example, currently in Iraq we have 1) a Iraqi Sunni v. Iraqi Shiite conflict; 2) a regional Sunni v. Shiite conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran; 3) an al Qaeda v. America conflict; and a possible 4) hardline Shiite v. America conflict (US. v. Iran). Add to this the fact that the Kurds if they choose independence would also enlarge the conflict to include Turkey, Iran, Syria and others and you have far too many conflicts only 1 or 2 of which are directly related to our war against al Qaeda. That means that we are spending blood and treasure inefficiently, because we are getting a lot less for what we are putting in. This is in addition to the fact that world opinion has never been on our side and our allies are abandoning us one by one from Iraq.
This is not the case in Afghanistan, where not only are we directly fighting the Taliban (an al Qaeda ally, and the only group capable of challenging the Afghan government), and Al Qaeda right next door in Pakistan. Here, we also have global support for the reasons mentioned by Krauthammer and a cleared picture of who the enemy is, and what we are getting in return for the blood and treasure we are sacrificing.
Now this does not mean that we should abandon Iraq and forget about it, rather it is about seeking a better strategy and alternatives to the current morass in which we find ourselves. Marc, has argued here for a quarantining of Iraq. Others have done so as well, including Joe Biden who has called for a soft partitioning of the country along sectarian lines. They have done so, by looking at a strategy that contains the worst violence within Iraq, sparing the rest of the region, and to ways in which we can still achieve objectives which are still achievable in the country, while also moving to counter the al Qaeda threat and other emerging threats in the world. If we can have a stable Kurdistan (still under a loosely federal government) and a mostly stable Shiite Iraq, then it is easier to control the Sunni region and move to either push out or contain any AQI threat. At the same time, this would allow us to move to take on the rising Taliban and al Qaeda surge in Afghanistan, North Africa, the Horn while also leaving us space for other threats that may emerge.
You may not agree with me on this, but you must at least concede that unlike what Krauthammer said in his op-ed, a focus on Afghanistan makes strategic sense. After all, the most we will be able to get from Iraq even in the best of circumstances is a government or Shiite region very closely aligned with Persian, and Shiite Iran.
