Taki's Mag

Most versions of the Saint George legend tell us that when the great Christian slew the dragon, he went home. Task accomplished, deed done, dragon’s blood dry on his lance, and king’s daughter rescued, George rushed to the family hearth in Lydda, Palestine, to savor his triumph. Washington’s dragon slayers, fresh from their kill in Abbottabad, should consider his example. They chased the hoary-headed bin Laden from Kabul, hunted him in Tora Bora’s caves, sought him in Waziristan, and pursued his trail from the Hindu Kush to the Punjab Plain. Ten years, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives later, they found him in a rundown house and put a (silver, to be safe?) bullet into his head.

They took the bloody corpse away, inspected it, verified its provenance, and sent it down to Davy Jones’s Locker lest any followers entomb it as the shrine of a new cult. Osama bin Laden is definitely gone, dead, deceased, defunct, no mas en casa. Like Monty Python’s parrot, “’E’s kicked the bucket, ’e’s shuffled off ’is mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.” He is gone and ain’t comin’ back. So why are American forces prolonging their tour in Afghanistan? The Bush Administration called the 2001 invasion Operation Enduring Freedom, but Obama is making it Operation Enduring Operation.

If the United States wanted an excuse to depart from a land where it has waged a Sisyphean battle for ten years, Osama bin Laden’s execution has provided it. The US has seen around 1,500 of its own soldiers killed, another 11,000 wounded, and more than that suffering mental breakdowns. US troops have inflicted uncounted numbers of casualties on the natives—both the rebellious types with weapons and those who happened to attend a wedding that was hit by rockets. The taxpayer is losing about $6.7 billion a month in what began as the hunt for Osama. Now that they’ve achieved the original goal, is anyone in Washington bidding farewell to the Hindu Kush? Alas, Washington gives every impression that it’s seeking excuses to stay.

Why would anyone want another ten years of killing and maiming?  The Veterans Administration hospitals (not to mention Afghanistan’s rural clinics) have enough with which to cope. Can the US taxpayer afford another few hundred billion dollars on a country that has never failed to expel every foreign army that ventured into its impoverished mountains and valleys? The United States, like the British and the Soviets before, will leave Afghanistan one day. How about today? Delay adds only to the cost without changing the outcome.

“I believe the decisions that the president will make for the next stage of the Afghanistan campaign will be among the most important of his presidency, so it is important that we take our time to do all we can to get this right,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said two years ago. What will his successor say two years from now?

All options are, as in Gates’s 2009 review, on an increasingly rickety table—all, that is, except immediate withdrawal. President Obama and his soon-to-be CIA director, General David Petraeus, are considering reducing troop numbers to what they were before the last surge. By removing some of the targets for Taliban attacks, that should reduce the US casualties. However, it would not reduce them as much as if they all left. Without American troops, though, the Karzai government would fall. So what? Will you send your son or daughter to die for Hamid Karzai and his Gucci coat? With Karzai gone, the Taliban would take over—up to a point. They would dominate in the Pashtun areas from which they came and where they dominate anyway. The old Northern Alliance forces would hold their regions and opium fields as they did before the US swept them into Kabul. Those Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras are unlikely to cede territory to the Pashtuns. If Karzai and his brother escape with their lives and fortunes, Kabul would remain a nominal capital with no more sway in most of the country than it has now. All that the US can ask is that no faction provides bases and support to a post-Osama al-Qaeda, a desire it can enforce from bases over the border using special operations and economic leverage.

Why don’t the Army and Marine Corps make a case, as many of their veterans have (notably in Veterans for Common Sense), for a withdrawal that would save them lives, money, and prestige while allowing them to concentrate on their constitutional duty to defend the republic?

For the answer, I turn to another great George. George Sanders may not have been a saint, but he was Hollywood’s English gentleman cad par excellence. Known to a generation as the sibilant voice of Shere Khan in Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book, Sanders played the leader of the Philistines in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 classic Samson and Delilah. To his oft-demoralized military commander, Henry Wilcoxon, the great Sanders says, “Like all soldiers, when you fail by the sword, you ask for more swords.”