War is War

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan says we invaded Afghanistan and started the insurgency there. No. We conducted UW to assist the Northern Alliance insurgency to prevail.

What I actually said was this:

We need to face reality, and the reality is that these "insurgencies" do not exist because of the governments they are fighting. They exist because we chose to remove governments we didn't like and replace them with governments that we like.

Whether we removed the government we didn't like through UW or through invasion is really quite irrelevant. What matter is that we removed a government an installed one that was shaped and designed by us to suit our purposes. That government now faces an insurgency, and we are deluding ourselves if we pretend that today's insurgent/government conflict is not a consequence of our intervention. If we hadn't intervened there would still be conflict, but the government that exists today would not exist and the conflict would be fundamentally different: we wouldn't be in it and the Northern Alliance would not have prevailed.

That realization is important because it underscore the reality that we do not necessarily have to be involved in insurgencies, or in COIN. We are involved now because of our choices, choices that were in no way necessary. If we do not wish to be so involved in the future, we can make different choices. The COIN role is not something thrust on us by circumstances beyond our control. We chose it.

If we shifted our focus to forcing GIROA to evolve rather than enabling them to stay the same we would get on a faster track to helping stabilize the country.

One could argue that the belief in our capacity to force other governments to evolve is what got us into today's mess in the first place. I'm not at all convinced that we can, or that we should try. The evolution of other people's governments is generally not our business.