victory

One of the themes of the GWOT has been winning and losing. We can't lose Iraq. We aren't winning Afghanistan. We will win this war.

But as Donald Rumsfeld asked years ago, how do we know if we are winning? Can we define winning in a body count? The temptation is to say yes, because that gives us something that we can easily measure. But if we've learned anything over the last 7 years, it's that killing more of them than they've killed of us hasn't contributed to victory.

Is it in the absence of attacks? If the U.S. homeland is never again attacked, have we "won"? The problem with this definition can be illustrated in Israel. Israel has historically preconditioned negotations with the Palestinians on stopping all attacks against Isreal. But no terrorist movement is so unified. The very threat of terrorism is in its asymmetry. A few people with limited resources can easily carry out a terrorist attack. If countries as powerful as the U.S. and Israel cannot stop such attacks, it is ludicrous to suggest that governments as weak as the Palestinian ones can. Thus, the West will never "win" such wars. (And you could argue that Israel knows this, and that setting such a precondition is simply a tactic to avoid negotiations.)

Counter-insurgency strategies usually refer to "winning hearts and minds" of populations in order to "win" the war. But once we move away from body counts or numbers of attacks, we encounter the problem of how to measure our "victory". And so we go back to wondering whether we're "winning" or "losing".

In reading excerpts from Bob Woodward's latest book in The Washington Post a few weeks ago, I was struck by how often Pres. Bush referred to "winning". I want to win, how do we win, we have to win. It seems so black and white when put that way. But I suspect that we will never "win" the GWOT until we begin to understand the nuances involved--and there is considerable evidence that we are starting to do so.

Exhibit A is in Iraq, where we enlisted former Sunni insurgents to assist in providing security and fighting al-Qaida. That strategy has been largely successful, and if the transition of moving "Awakening Councils" or "Sons of Iraq" from American to Iraqi government (Shia) control is successful, will likely allow the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq in the next five years with a reasonable claim to "victory".

Let us hope that Exhibit B will come from Afghanistan, when we begin to negotiate with the Taliban, as a number of prominent people have begun to suggest. Unfortunately, Afghanistan has to progress much further before it can achieve a footing similar to Iraq. (While Afghanistan has more people than Iraq, it has a budget only 1/20th the size.) By bringing the Taliban into the government, they can become part of the solution rather than the problem. Then perhaps all of that Western money can go into economic development rather than military power, and "victory" can be measured in dollars rather than lives lost.