Is It Time to Get Out of Afghanistan?

[carl]

Fuchs:

I disagree. To carry your haystack analogy further, you can find the needle if you have access to the haystack and keep looking. If you are not allowed to access to the haystack it is impossible to find it. The needle can rest easier that way.

Afghanistan is big but there are only so many places where humans can live. In a desert area there must be water close by and there may be only so many water holes. The hunters know where those are. You could live on a mountaintop but still there has to be water and fuel available. Probably most of the places where water, fuel, food and shelter are available have people near by. Those people may be with you, a valuable thing; but they may not, and if they are not they can rat you out and the hunters will come for you. In a physical sanctuary, no hunter can come for you.

Political support is vital but so is a sanctuary.

[Fuchs]

You may find the needle, but meanwhile another two or three were thrown into the haystack and you cannot win this without burning everything down.


You sound like some Clancy fans who think a tank's purpose is to be invulnerable. Of course you cane eventually score against the enemy. No enemy is invulnerable (not even in supposedly safe havens). That's not strategically necessary, decisive or even only important, though.


The U.S. never had something like the R.A.F., but the example may still help you understand:

The R.A.F. had a supportive base of a few thousand symphatisers. It had a few dozen murderers/robbers/kidnappers. The latter were able to hide, survive and replace their losses thanks to the supportive base for decades.
Some of them retired into East Germany for a physical sanctuary, but those effectively retired, because the East Germans didn't allow them to return.

The thing that eventually defeated the R.A.F. was not the headhunt, but the fact that the supportive base god disillusioned and separated and eventually the movement faltered because there was neither motivation left nor the infrastructure for ambitious actions any more.
Without that, we could have headhunted for decades without winning the fight. A physical sanctuary was not necessary; the core of the supportive base and illegal income (bank robberies and such) sustained the violent few well within our own population.


The safe haven / sanctuary thing is a strange fixation of U.S. COIN folks - and it's badly misleading because there's always some sanctuary left, but the fight is being lost hundreds of miles away from physical sanctuaries as well. The are obviously not the key to TB success or survival.