A New Isolationism?
A few months ago, Afghanistan was a "war of necessity." What changed?

The Obama administration's shilly-shallying in Afghanistan is a textbook case of how not to conduct a war, and how not to lead an alliance.

In the 2006 and 2008 campaigns, the Democrats demanded the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and accused the Bush administration of conducting an unnecessary war in that country while ignoring the original campaign in Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned.

As recently as two months ago, President Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity," while Iraq had been a "war of choice." This was a plausible argument, but Iraq died as an election issue when it became clear that victory might be at hand. And so now, the focus of debate has moved to the "necessary" war in Afghanistan, which American voters had supposed to be a settled issue.

One of the many problems that have arisen with the breakdown, since Vietnam, of bipartisan agreement in setting U.S. foreign policy is the tendency to lurch, every four or eight years, between the Republican view that the pre-emptive use of force is justified to forestall aggression and advance democratic values, and the Democratic view that foreign military action requires multilateral approval and must respond to a prior casus belli. Yet these latter conditions have been met in Afghanistan, which raises the question of whether today's Democrats are at heart full-blown pacifists, or at least isolationists.

If either of these is the case, it would represent a radical and dangerous development in American foreign policy. In 1940–41, Franklin D. Roosevelt turned America from a neutral country to one that approved "all aid short of war" to Britain and Canada, and that attacked German ships on detection for 1,800 miles out from the U.S. Atlantic coast. He conceived of and secured bipartisan approval of the creation of the United Nations. His successor, Harry Truman, organized a bipartisan anti-isolationist coalition, launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, founded NATO, and led the defense of West Berlin, Greece, Turkey, and South Korea. Dwight Eisenhower gained bipartisan approval for his "Open Skies" aerial-surveillance proposal and for the defense of Taiwan, and resumed summit meetings with the Soviet leaders after a lapse of ten years. John F. Kennedy was supported by both parties in negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. From 1940 to 1965, a very fruitful time in U.S. foreign policy under five presidents of both parties, it was true that "partisanship ends at the water's edge."

The long nightmare in Indochina changed that. Having plunged the United States into Vietnam under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the Democrats doomed South Vietnam and Cambodia by cutting off all aid to them after Richard Nixon had extracted the 545,000 draftees the Democrats had deployed there on a flimsy legal pretext, and had avoided a Communist takeover in Saigon. Democrats ended all aid to the pro-Western faction in the Angolan war, and made a halfhearted effort to impeach Ronald Reagan for assisting the anti-Communist Contras in Central America. This foreign-policy schism has not healed, though it had become academic for a time after the Cold War ended in complete Western success and the USSR peacefully disintegrated.

If the Democrats will not fight in Afghanistan, it is hard to imagine a campaign they would support. In Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq, the United States has serious allies and a multilaterally (NATO and the U.N.) approved mission. Unlike the Vietnam intervention, it has been properly endorsed by Congress, and the governing party was elected promising a decisive and escalated prosecution of the war. There is not the slightest doubt that this conflict is morally justified, and unassailable in international law, and that it involves the national security of all countries that have been attacked by Islamist terrorists, or might be, including Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. And there is little doubt that it is winnable; a military plan has been put together by the world's foremost authorities in antiterrorist and counterinsurgency warfare, American generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal.

I regret to take issue with old friends with whom I usually agree, such as George Will, but the Afghan expedition does not bear the slightest comparison with Vietnam, or with previous military incursions in Afghanistan by the Soviet Union and the British Empire. Apart from being constitutionally authorized and multilaterally supported, the Afghan war is a response to a direct assault on the United States that originated in Afghanistan. It does not involve U.S. draftees, and the enemy is not receiving the open-ended support of other great powers, as the Vietnamese Communists did from the USSR and China.

There are about 20,000 terrorists in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan; the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had over 600,000 exactingly trained and heavily armed soldiers and guerrillas. The allied casualty rate in Afghanistan, even in October, the costliest month in casualties thus far, is about 4 percent of what the U.S. casualty rate was through most of the Vietnam War.

Afghanistan has been unconquerable because it does not possess the geopolitical value that would justify an unconditional commitment: It is a landlocked, mountainous, primitive country with few resources. If the USSR or the British Raj in its heyday had deployed a full-strength effort to subdue it, that effort would have succeeded. But suppressing Afghan resistance could never be justified by the dividends of any possible success.

This isn't the attempted "occupation" of Afghanistan; it is counterterrorism, not nation-building. It is assistance to a crudely legitimate government in resisting a barbarously primitive movement that enjoys almost no spontaneous popular support, while the civilized world attacks the principal infestation of terrorists in the world.

The Democrats' very public reassessment of what was recently claimed to be firm U.S. policy is no way to lead an alliance. It is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's long campaign to deploy the neutron warhead in Western Europe, followed without notice by his sudden decision not to deploy it. In the present case, Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and other countries committed forces to this war and have endured casualties there, taking American leaders at their word that this was a serious undertaking to deal a lethal blow to international terrorism. Now, Vice President Biden, whose past foreign-policy brainwaves included dividing Iraq into three countries, is promoting the harebrained sophistry of fighting the cave-dwelling terrorists of Waziristan with sea-launched missiles.

The administration seems to be attaching its deployment decision to a serious conclusion to the ballot-stuffing farce of the Afghan presidential election, and, having brokered a patch-up arrangement that involves a runoff election, may now be more resolute. It may also have been taking its allies more into its confidence than is publicly known, as General McChrystal's visit to the NATO meeting at Bratislava last week may indicate. (For trying to carry out his assigned mission, he has been described by the Rahm Emanuelites as "General Stanley MacArthur," as if that were an insult.) NATO appears to be more resolute than the administration. We have come to a strange pass when France is plausibly accusing the U.S. of appeasing the enemy that has inflicted more civilian casualties on this country than it has suffered since the Civil War.

The U.S. has to stop waffling, put the boots on the ground that are the only way to win this just and legal war, and lead its allies, including Pakistan, to the necessary victory over, in George W. Bush's accurate expression, "evildoers," which is now within sight. Get serious about winning, or get out. And if the latter, get ready to welcome Osama bin Laden's murderers back to America's shores, and forget about any "coalitions of the willing" in the future. No one will, or should, be willing to follow this sort of feckless vacillating.

– Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at [email protected]. This is an updated and modified version of a column published October 24 in the National Post of Canada.

© 2025 Conrad Black