I was reading an article at The New Republic, a lefty source I seldom check, because it had an intriguing premise. It was that what’s happening with our military presence in Iraq is truly not an end to our “combat" role there but merely a rebranding of that role to one of “training and advising.”
The author argues that the number of our troops there won’t diminish, but their role will be differently described, while changing almost not at all in terms of day-to-day activities. Probably true, and not especially important.
This led me to think about our role in Afghanistan and places like it, places that are now, and for the foreseeable future will be, essentially ungovernable hotbeds of angry tribal folk - people likely to harbor violent anti-Americanism.
Both Trump and Biden have wanted to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan because they believed correctly that “we couldn’t win.” Win being defined as establishing a stable representative government of non-troublemakers.
I ask you to consider that winning is the wrong U.S. goal in such places. How various tribal peoples (mis)govern themselves isn’t our problem, and we’ve proved we are not adept at nation-building.
The correct U.S. goal is to maintain conditions in these locales such that the locals cannot meaningfully organize to make trouble for the U.S. homeland. This will often involve covertly helping tribes battle each other to a standstill, it’s a balancing act like that Britain played across the Channel in Europe for many decades.
Indeed it is the role the U.S. played in Afghanistan when the Soviets were there in force. Our mistake was to then replace the Russians as occupiers, to try to make a modern nation of it.
We could model the CIA’s activities in these backwaters like those of the British “politicals” in the Indian subcontinent pre-1948. British agents would work behind the scenes with rajahs, warlords and satraps to keep the locals focused on fighting each other, instead of fighting the Brits.
This is a cynical, brutal business, best done in the shadows with no publicity. Probably the best current practitioner of this arcane intervention is the ISI in Pakistan. It is the Pakistani version of the CIA/DIA, and could give Machiavelli lessons in playing both sides against the middle.
