On Willpower and Warfare

Hawk or Dove?

Like most things in life the simplicity of this question belies the complex nature of it’s answer, and I believe the way in which it is answered goes a long way toward explaining the American culture. As I have said before, war is horrible and should always be the last resort of any civilized people. The American people’s aversion to war is one of our great strengths. We do not believe that might of arms is a reasonable substitute for rational discourse and honestly held beliefs. America, since her inception, has rejected national bullying, and has lent her aid wherever the people of this world have had the courage to declare for freedom. We have the strongest military force on the planet, not because we use force to settle all debate, but to use it against those who do.

As has happened many times in our past, we find ourselves at a cross-roads. We are engaged in a frontless war against an enemy without a true face. A shifting chimerical enemy without regard for the conventions of war or the rights of those who do not wish to engage in it. We fight an enemy who makes no distinctions between combatant and civilian, driven by an ideology that does not allow for reasoned settlement and will except nothing less than abject surrender. This enemy knows that we cannot fight the war on his terms and he uses our respect for the rights and lives of others against us. The problem is not, as others have argued, that we do not understand our enemy. We understand him well. The problem is that our enemy understands us, and views our restraint and the value we place of individual lives as a weakness.

The question is now before Congress, whether or not to send fresh troops to Afghanistan and reinforce our position there. There have been arguments on both sides of this issue both reasoned and irrational, but the central points has not been addressed. Why are we sending them, what do we hope to accomplish, and how do we plan to accomplish it?

The President has stated that “victory” is no longer a viable term. In any conventional sense this only leaves one alternative, and not one that ANY Commander-In-Chief should be willing to entertain. So, victory is undesirable and the alternative is unacceptable. What then are we left with? This is a very important question in any stage of conflict, but when there are already troops on the ground, fighting and dying, this is a tremendous blunder and its cost is counted in lives. The brave men and women of the United States are currently engaged in battle in a far off land and their Commander has left them there to die with no reasonable objective. Battles may be fought in sand and blood, but battles are won in hearts and minds. Every moment that the President spends equivocating costs this nation the most precious of its resources, the lives of its best and brightest and the hearts of those of us at home who stand behind them.

A war that has no objective cannot be won, and any young man or woman sent into such a war is a waste. And it would be the gravest betrayal of trust on the part of our leaders to waste lives in such a way. In the face of this, I could not condone sending more troops to Afghanistan to die for no good reason.

Am I then against the war is Afghanistan? Not at all. I believe that the fight we are engaged in is the defining battle of our time. In the 18th century we fought to establish the rights of men in a government that respected and responded to them. In the 19th century we fought to establish that those rights belong to all men, regardless of their heritage or origin. In the 20th century we fought against an ideological tyranny that participated in conquest and genocide. Today we face a similar enemy. A theocratic tyranny is no better than a political one, and in many ways worse. If we are to remain committed to the causes for which we have fought since our inception, we must remain committed to them today, and fight still.

This does not mean that we should continue to fight the way that we have been. In fact, we must dramatically alter the way in which we approach this struggle. History has shown time and again that guerilla tactics can triumph over traditional military tactics. America owes her independence to this very fact. We can no longer assume that our overwhelming military superiority means that we must always prevail. Unless we can face the enemy on those terms, we must inevitably fail. This does not mean of course that we must cower among the civilian populations and hide behind their children. We must find a way to encourage the people to fight alongside us, and we must find a way to compensate for those advantages that guerilla tactics grant them. Until we can do this, we cannot prevail, and those lives are again wasted.

The war is Afghanistan has already been compared to Vietnam, and those comparisons are legitimate. In Vietnam we also faced an ideologically driven enemy with years of experience and training that was comparable with our own. The Vietnamese also used guerilla tactics that rendered our traditional practices ineffective. Does this mean that we must inevitably suffer defeat in Afghanistan? Well, no. In fact we did not lose in Vietnam. We quit. It was not lack of strength from which we suffered there, but lack of will back home. In the 70’s America proved to the world that we were in fact the paper tiger that we had been accused of being, and since then we have lived under the shadow of that cowardice. For every military action we have engaged in since, the Vietnam question has been raised, and it is the belief that the American will is weak that is responsible for the attacks on our sovereignty and our territory.

If we are to emerge from the shadow of Vietnam, we must learn from the mistakes we made there. We must develop new strategies and new tactics to implement them. We must learn to use our enemy’s weaknesses (the relatively low level of his technology, the disconnected nature of his troops, and the blindness that his ideology forces on him) against him, just as he seeks to do to us. We must state clearly what our objectives are, to our troops and the families at home, and we must be unwavering in our conviction that victory is the only “exit strategy” we are willing to accept.

If America is to remain safe, America must remain strong. We must earn the good will of the world not through pandering to every petty tyrant, but by demonstrating the strength of our resolve and the courage to implement it. Until we are ready to commit to this conflict and the only reasonable resolution to it we must not waste the life of one more American. But if we can summon the will, then we must fight. And we will win.