Winning the War in Afghanistan

[carl]

2,200 years ago, Cato repeated after every Senate speech (and he lived very long, was Senator for many decades) that he believed that Carthage muzst be destroyed. Carthage posed no real threat any more, but he wanted it destroyed.
Such extremism was not atypical in ancient Rome: As long as it could, the Republic and early Empire were not able to accept the survival of a threat. They were quite childish and naive, obviously. The consequence was war after war, expansion after expansion - until the empire had not only passed its optimal size, but even grown further to a size that was so much suboptimal that the benefits of a small empire were consumed to the degree of fragility of the huge empire.

Seeing as how Rome lasted a rather long time after the death of Cato the Carthage killer, I'd say that they were doing something right, however childish and naive it may have been. Also I think maybe you could say that one of the things that did Rome in was that they did actually started to accept the survival of external threats in order to fight each other. They were too interested in civil war and neglected the external threats which eventually did them in. That huge new empire wasn't fragile because it was huge, it was fragile because the Romans cut themselves to pieces.

This same inability to stand the survival of even a small threat, this extremist view that sheds centuries of warfare that usually had a lot of restraint - this inability probably stems from 1943 when the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. This counter-productive extremism means that easy ways out of troubles are blocked by extremism.

That is easy to say now when political and emotional realities of the time can be easily forgotten. At the time, rather harder to do, especially given the nature of the opposition. Besides, we did end up allowing the Japanese some conditions.