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97 CHAPTER 6 A Case for Staying the Course Frederick W. Kagan America has enduring, vital national interests in South Asia that can only be secured in current circumstances by the implementation of a successful comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. The failure or abandonment of that strategy would do serious harm to American security interests globally. The strategies and approaches that are proposed as alternatives, or as mitigations, offer little hope of even limiting the damage. It may be impossible to succeed in Afghanistan, or the United States and its allies may choose to give up trying, but the consequences of the failure or abandonment of the current effort will be dire and must be factored into any such decisions. Today, America has three primary strategic interests in Afghanistan: preventing the reestablishment of terrorist safe havens, affecting the Pakistani strategic calculus regarding Islamist groups that threaten the stability of the Pakistani state and the subcontinent, and not losing a war. Preventing the defeat of NATO in its first out-of-area operation is a fourth interest that has gained new urgency. A few months ago it seemed highly unlikely that the Alliance would undertake another out-of-area operation. But NATO forces have now operated in Libya as well as Afghanistan, and the effectiveness and cohesiveness of the Alliance remains important. It is definitely not in the interest of the United States or the West for NATO to be humiliated in Afghanistan. The Consequences of Defeat It has been common for decades to dismiss the third interest—not losing a war—as an invalid reason to continue fighting. America lost the war in Vietnam, after all, and nevertheless won the Cold War. This reasoning is specious. America’s defeat in Vietnam was followed by a very bad decade. The Soviet Union surpassed the US nuclear arsenal. America’s principal ally in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, fell in 1979, giving way to the current, virulent Islamist regime in Tehran that began 98 Frederick W. Kagan its tenure in power with an act of war against the United States (seizing the American embassy) and by holding American hostages. In Central America, Anastasio Somoza, another important ally, fell in 1979 as well, to a diverse collection of revolutionary groups from which the Soviet-aligned Sandinista regime emerged as the ruling clique. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, following the seizure of power eighteen months earlier by a Soviet-aligned communist revolutionary movement. Nor did Ronald Reagan’s accession to power in 1981 immediately transform the situation. A communist faction took Americans hostage again in Grenada in 1983 in the process of seizing control of the tiny island state. That same year, Cold War tensions reached their peak with the deliberate shooting-down of Korean Airlines flight 007 after it strayed into Soviet airspace. Thus, within a decade of America’s defeat in Vietnam, American policies in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia were in ruins; the Soviets appeared to be advancing and gaining power; and the threat of nuclear conflict was probably higher than it had been since the Cuban missile crisis. Did these events result from US failure in Southeast Asia? Each certainly had local roots driven by local dynamics not related to that withdrawal, but the general perception that the United States was weak and could be defeated by staunch resistance had turned inward, and helped, at least, to fuel some of these policy disasters. It does not seem to have occurred to the Soviet Politburo as it invaded Afghanistan that the United States might make any significant response.1 The Iranian hostagetakers , and the cannier Ayatollah Khomeini (who made the ultimate decisions in that crisis), were confident that the United States would not respond effectively to their provocation.2 The Sandinistas, and the Cubans and Soviets who backed them, were similarly confident that no meaningful American operations would unhinge their success. It is at least as appropriate to ascribe part of the policy disasters of the decade following the US withdrawal from Vietnam to the perception of American weakness as it is to pretend that those disasters had nothing to do with an American defeat consummated four years earlier. It is also inaccurate to dismiss those defeats as irrelevant, in light of America’s subsequent victory in the Cold War, for there was nothing inevitable about the peaceful end of the Cold War in 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev acceded to power by one vote...

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