Is there anyway to avoid this

Rapid troop increase in Afghanistan

Defense Secretary, Robert Gates was in Afghanistan today. While there he said some scary things. Not to his own fault. Just reflects the reality of the task ahead.

The U.S. plans to send 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan as soon as possible (which folks estimate is 12 to 18 months). The US already has 34,000 troops in Afghanistan. NATO forces have 30,000 troops.

So, as a new administration gets set to take office. And as a new state stands on the precipice of collapse, I ask: is there anyway to avoid this?

It certainly seems necessary. The US can't make the same mistake we made in invading Iraq--trying to fight the war on the cheap. Doing so will just drag the war out for longer, and may even worsen conditions. In fact, that's kind of what's been going on in Afghanistan since we first sent troops in 2001. The old Jacksonian strand of thinking might be on target here; if we're going to fight, we have to give it all we've got.

That said, the reality is pretty stark.

Building a democratic nation takes a while. It took lots of money, time, and troops to build democratic states in Japan and Germany. Iraq likely won't be a stable (by stable I mean little violence propagated by non-state actors)democratic (by democratic I mean electoral democracy with peaceful power transitions and little violence propagated by state actors) nation for some time (if it ever is).

And Gates and General McKiernan recognize this. There not deluding themselves.

General McKiernan: "Let’s put it in historical perspective — this country has been at war for the last 30 years,” General McKiernan told reporters, using the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as the starting point. “Thirty years. That’s not going to stop overnight."

Robert Gates when asked if he thought the war would last 10 to 15 years: “I think that we are in many respects in an ideological conflict with violent extremists,” he said. “The last ideological conflict we were in lasted about 45 years.”

That said, there are clear differences between Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan has a democratic government--albeit a weak one. The US does not have to deal with building political culture and political institutions in quite the same way as we've had to do in Iraq. Also, the US has NATO support. None of that bullshit, coalition of the willing--some actual support.

Nonetheless, there are some new obstacles. The conflict in Afghanistan is increasingly becoming a transnational war that threatens to drag Pakistan into it. This is a serious obstacle the US didn't have to face in Iraq. In comparison to Afghanistan, Iraq's neighbors seem stable and innocuous.

So, it's scary to know that our military leaders have committed troops to Afghanistan for the next three to four years (according to the article). If anything, it tells me that if conflict is absolutely necessary to stave off collapse and Taliban control, the US must have international support.

The US will need to cooperate and appeal to its NATO allies. The US will need to listen to their concerns and explain our own concerns. The US will need to ask for more troops.

And the US will need to do become solid partners with Pakistan and the Zardari government--not to mention the Karzai and Singh government.

And the US better hope that Iraq is a success. The whole point of Iraq (as explained to me by Rice's writing) is to build a democratic state that can stabilize and democratize the region. By her account, the US has stood by authoritarian leaders as long as they defended our interests. Now, this strategy has proven unsustainable, and democratic stability is absolutely necessary. The hope is that Iraq will serve as a strong, democratic ally that can be an outlet for US soft power and an ally in hard power. (Yet still sovereign; they should not be a US puppet, just a US friend). Iraq will be both a model and an anchor in the region. A pivot.

The hope is that pivots will make state-building projects in neighboring nations easier. It'll continue to get easier. But who knows if that's the case.

I have no military knowledge, and I don't know what makes wars stablize and what makes them spiral out of control. But it seems like there's no way to avoid this. Seems like we'll have a war that's dragged on and intensified for over a decade by the end of Obama's term. Let's hope we can learn from our on-the-ground mistakes in Iraq. And let's hope we can confront this reality with the most success and least amount of death possible.