Contextes de border pour le sens concret
Afghanistan should not be approached as counter-insurgency battle as in
Iraq, but rather as a distant border war.
The Afghan campaign began as a large-scale punitive expedition
--
target of the expedition because al-Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group
made up mostly of Arabs, had used the Pastun-dominated borderland
between historic Persia and India (today Iran and Pakistan) as a base
--
group. At that point, the vital American interest in this historically
wild and lawless border region ended. The Afghan war is not a necessary
war.
--
traffickers, and criminals, just as it has been for millennia. It is a
border region, and the only war that can be successfully fought on the
border is border war. Effectively, Afghanistan is now a distant border
for the United States, one that has to be monitored and muzzled, but
--
is providing security to the civilian population, which the enemy seeks
to undermine and disrupt through intimidation and violence. In border
warfare, the objects are deterrence, preemption, and reprisal, which by
--
promote. This is the type of campaign we waged successfully in Iraq but
which is foundering in Afghanistan. On the other hand, in border
warfare, civilian casualties are an inevitable but necessary
consequence of combat on a lawless border, and the moral and legal
responsibility for those losses rests with the enemy combatants who use
the border areas.
In a recent column entitled "The Western Way of War," the Jerusalem
--
Israel is not now engaged in counter-insurgency war, nor, really, has
it ever been. It fights border wars. Even before Israel became a state,
beginning in the 1930s, when Jewish combat groups under the eccentric
British officer Orde Wingate took the fight to hostile Arabs, the
Israelis have excelled at border war when allowed by officers and
politicians to fight it properly. Evelyn Waugh in his satirical novel
--
parlors of dissident Arabs."
In a border war, the enemy is on the other side of the border, and the
population on the other side of that border is by definition an enemy
population. Soldiers are bound by the various rules of war not to
--
Israel's latterly problem is that it has imposed counter-insurgency
tactics on its soldiers in its border wars. The Lebanon campaign of
2006 was frequently and falsely described in the press as a
counter-insurgency war when it was nothing of the sort. It was a
deliberate war waged by Hezb'allah on a lawless border using a
combination of guerrilla and conventional tactics. Israel's relatively
--
are not counter-insurgency conflicts -- they are just incredibly
complex border wars. As Glick pointed out in her column, Israel's last
truly successful campaign was when it went into the West Bank heavy and
--
criticism.
The Western Left has problems with borders, which they, in their
usually clouded and contradictory world, view see as impediments to
universal fellowship. Of course, few leftists actually live in
borderlands, preferring the security of large, comfortable cities run
on fossil fuels from which to expound their opinions. But borderlands
are often inherently problematic and violent, as we can see on our own
southern border today. Afghanistan is such a land, and it likely always
will be.
--
campaign for which such tactics are counterproductive. And Biden and
his boss, no doubt, would quail at my description of border war now in
Afghanistan -- or, if we continue to do nothing, likely one day again
on our southern frontier (as happened early in the 20^th century).
But the fact is that Afghanistan should be treated as a lawless border
state, not worth our blood and treasure unless we are threatened, at
--
exact intelligence and there are collateral losses to Afghan civilians,
sad as that may be, in the context of border war, it is acceptable.
Sometimes a grenade through the parlor is the only way to go.