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| Lt. General Daniel Bolger |
Bolger has several explanations for why the US lost. The post-Vietnam army was built, deliberately, for short, conventional, decisive conflicts, yet the post-9/11 military leadership embraced – sometimes deliberately, sometimes through miscalculation – fighting insurgents and terrorists who knew the terrain, the people and the culture better than the US ever would.
“Anybody who does work in foreign countries will tell you, if you want long-term success, you have to understand that culture. We didn’t even come close. We knew enough to get by,” Bolger said.
More controversially, Bolger laments that the US did not pull out of Afghanistan after ousting al-Qaida in late 2001 and out of Iraq after ousting Saddam in April 2003. Staying in each conflict as it deteriorated locked policymakers and officers into a pattern of escalation, with persistence substituting for success. No one in uniform of any influence argued for withdrawal, or even seriously considered it: the US military mantra of the age is to leave behind a division’s worth of advisers as insurance and expect them to resolve what a corps could not.
The objection, which proved contemporaneously persuasive, is that the US would leave a vacuum inviting greater dangerous instability. “It would be a mess, and you’d have the equivalent of Isis,” Bolger conceded.
“But guess what: we’re in that same mess right now after eight years, and we’re going to be in the same mess after 13 years in Afghanistan.” The difference, he said, is thousands of Americans dead; tens of thousands of Americans left with life-changing wounds; and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead, injured, impoverished or radicalized.
Finally, somebody in who commanded in Afghanistan is telling the truth about what we did there and in Iraq.
And Bolger would certainly be a voice worth listening to as he not only served as the Commanding General of the Combined Security Transition Command in Afghanistan, he also commanded NATO forces in the region and currently teaches military history at North Carolina State University.
Of course I would disagree with the Lt. General in that I don't think we needed to go into Afghanistan in the first place, and definitely not into Iraq, but that we had no plan in place for after the initial invasion is now obvious to just about everyone.
What I respect the Lt. General for saying is that the number of American, Afghan, and Iraqi deaths that resulted from our poor planning and lack of exit strategy could have been avoided if only the Bush Administration had understood what they were getting themselves into.
I also appreciate the fact that the Lt. General recognizes that the wars were lost almost as soon as they started, and the losses were NOT the fault of the President who was elected to clean up the mess left behind by the last administration.
This is what Bolger said on Democracy Now:
"Is it appropriate to send thousands of young American men and women into foreign countries to go house to house and try to sort out who’s a terrorist, who’s a villager?" asked Bolger.
"That’s something we tried in Southeast Asia, and it didn’t work," added Bolger. "And yet we repeated it once in Afghanistan and then again in Iraq. And that’s very disturbing, and I think that led directly to our failure in both campaigns."
"[W]e missed the fundamental strategic error of that thought, and it’s an error based in arrogance, hubris, whatever word you want to use," said Bolger.
"Hubris" now where have I heard THAT word before?
It is important that we keep examining how we got into these two wars, and how we fought and ultimately lost them. Because history is being written right this minute, and if the conservatives have their way they will whitewash every mistake made by the Bush Administration, and lay any blame for perceived failure at the feet of the President who they want to blame for everything, including the arrival of Ebola on our shores.
We just cannot allow that to happen.
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