There were days I worried that Bush thought he was President of Iraq. His state of the union messages seemed full of things about how well we were doing there building this and that. Meanwhile he ignored similar opportunities for investment in the US. Now Obama seems poised to do a similar thing. How dreadfully sad.
Word is he'll annnounce tonight we're ramping up forces in Afghanistan. We can't afford to do that. I don't think it would help us to stay even if we could afford it. But we can't afford it. So that's two good reasons to get out—probable cost and probable effect.
In the Artificial Intelligence community, there is a theory of language understanding, offered by Roger Schank, called “script theory.” The notion is that we are often aided in learning and understanding language by seeing it as a way of navigating well-known scenarios. So it's true you could have to learn all of language in order to go to a restaurant and order, but since you know the routine of a restaurant, you know you'll probably just get someone coming to you and greeting you (so you should learn some greetings), asking your order (so you should know about the foods you like), bringing your food (learn how to say thanks), checking on you later (learn how to be grateful or how to complain or both), and so on. Learning a script is simpler than learning all of a language. You analyze the situation based on your understanding of the script, not on your basis of general-purpose problem solving (which can be much harder to do). This explains why people like familiar things. They are easier to reason about.
Script theory is useful for analyzing confusions people have. Sometimes people are in the same situation but are confused about their script. When I was learning this concept, it was the late 1980's, and we still had a lot of women in the workplace being secretaries, but many women were breaking out into other professions. So the confusion that happens when a man walks into a room and walks up to a desk with a woman sitting at it and asks for coffee could be summed up with simple expletives to describe the man's breeding, yes, but it could also be summed up more charitably by saying that the man is in the wrong script. He's in the “talk to a secretary” script and the woman is in the “oh, no, here's another guy who thinks I'm a secretary script.” They still converse, but the degree of surprise and confusion will generally be predicted by who is in the correct script and who is not.
There's a funny story that I was taught in this, in fact, about a traveling salesman who's supposed to be traveling, but his trip is canceled, so he's home in bed with his wife. There is a knock at the door. The wife reflexively says to her husband, “oh, my god, it's my husband.” And the husband gets up and jumps out the window. Here the two people are not in the wrong script. They are both in the right script. But to understand the situation, you need to know that they're used to being in that script with different players.
You are now armed with a powerful way to understand situational analysis.
There's a tendancy to think that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are like the Cold War. Bush tried to call it the Long War. The notion is that we needed to bite the bullet, get into the war, and win by sheer determination. That's what won the cold war. We waited out the Soviet Union. And Bush seemed to want to play things out like Reagan had. He admired Reagan and liked to copy his playbook.
And I think we are in that script. But I think we're at risk of being, like the traveling salesman, in the wrong roles, not even realizing it. And the joke may easily be on us, with tragic consequences. It's not sufficient to just compare the situations, one must get the casting right in order to analyze things right. I think in that script we are the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn't blink, they ran out of cash. We're running out of cash. All the resolve in the world won't fix that.
The lesson of the Cold War, the lesson we should be taking to heart, is to not overspend. The terrorists know they can make us overspend. They spend a tiny amount of money and we spend a ton of money going after them. They must be laughing uncontrollably. Can't we show them we can be smarter than that?
The Republicans are always saying it's the President's number one job to make us secure. Well, what will make us secure right now is not overspending. The risk to us of terrorism is miniscule compared to the risk of overspending. Our debt right now will cause us not to have the money to afford health care, it will cause people to live whole lives under crushing national debt. It is no small deal. But bad as it is, it can get worse, and it will get worse if we don't get out.
So we can't afford it and we should acknowledge that.
Of course, the Republicans don't want us to acknowledge it. Their theory, and we saw this with Bush, is that if you admit defeat, then you have compromised America. But the rest of the world can see what is going on no matter what we say. We aren't fooling anyone by running ourselves into the ground economically but stubbornly resisting the use of the words “I have a spending problem.” In fact, not saying that makes us weaker because people don't trust us. They will trust us a lot more when we admit the situation and start to take concrete steps to reform our usual way of doing things. We could start with Afghanistan. It's actually something people want us out of anyway, and so it's not like admitting we have a weak banking system. We should just say “we have more important priorities at home.” That would admit little that anyone doesn't already know but would send a powerful message that we have our collective selves oriented again and are back on the path to recovery.
But if we had enough money would it be so bad to stay in Afghanistan? I think it would.
I remember when during the war on terror we started compromising our rights. Terrorists might get us if we didn't, we were told. Oh, I responded, so if we do give up our rights they won't get us? No, they still might. Ok, so then what you're saying is that what our rights are buying us are, say, the difference between being 83% safe and 87% safe, or something like that? I don't think I'm willing to give up my freedoms for the sake of 4% safety (or even more than that). But I wish people would tell me in some real quantified terms what the safety is. Because it can't be that they don't know and yet they can tell me that it matters anyway.
I mention this because the situation here is a similar kind of reasoning. Suppose we won completely in Afghanistan. Would that fix the problem? No. There are still places terrorists can emerge. Lots of them. Are we really saying we're going to go into all of those places? I think not. And if not, then again we're not talking about spending down our entire fortune to make us safe, but rather to make us “a little more safe.” Not fully safe. Just some more safe.
I'm willing to take my chances in a world where we haven't spent ourselves into financial ruin but we've left a few terrorists standing in Afghanistan. I'd rather that than be broke and know I'd really erradicated them. The notion that they might come and get us is a little troublesome. But the notion that we might not have enough money to do infrastructure investment, education, and other forward-looking things is very terrifying to me. And we need our military in case we are legitimately threatened; we are not sufficiently threatened by Afghanistan to be using up our fighting forces. We should be replenishing and preparing for the serious wars that could still threaten us in the future.
The international community is not urging us to stay in Afghanistan. If we need to be in there, let's hear from other countries that it is going to be an effort of all nations, especially the ones that are economically stronger than us. Let them offer people and money to help us and it may be worth thinking about. We are not the world's respected policeman just now. I think we're more like the world's patsies, spending our hard-earned money so that other countries don't have to. And in the end we'll be called economically foolish for it. When the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan in the the late twentieth century, they eventually gave up and pulled out; it was informally called, by some, their Vietnam. We felt we could do better, but we will likely find ourselves humbled there. That's twice we should have learned better from history how to avoid the Soviet experience.
I fear Obama thinks it's the safe thing for ust to stay in Afghanistan. Maybe he thinks because he said he would in the campaign that he'll be beaten up for not doing it. I don't think he should feel bound by such statements. If Obama keeps us in Afghanistan even for a little while, I think the Republicans will use it against him. If it does any good, they will say they thought it up and he went along. If it does no good, they'll say he was the President and should have known not to listen to them. So rather than listen to them, he should do what is obviously right, what the American people want.
Get us out of there, Mr. President. Do it now.
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Comments
but behind it lay the notion of diplomacy -- or doing deals. The only possible upside is that we seemed to finally figure out in Iraq that we needed to cut deals with everyone that would negotiate.
The armed forces have taken that to heart, so it is the new 'last war.' It is also their idea.
The scope and mission of our presence needs to be clear, explainable, and reasonable. If we are there because of a lack of better ideas, then it is hopeless.
We don't need an occupation force in any other country then our own, period.
i guess halliburton and cheney still run washington.
You mention the misconception, “…sheer determination. That's what won the cold war. We waited out the Soviet Union.”
That seems to be the general consensus, but it is an inaccurate perception of what really happened and it’s equally inaccurate regarding the current Mid-East situation. Economics was a key component, as the corrupt financial institutions of the world market (for lack of a better phrase) were integral in the downfall of the Soviet Union, as were their corrupt leaders. As you say;
“The Soviet Union didn't blink, they ran out of cash. We're running out of cash.”
Interestingly, one of the main ploys our government uses in that country is “bribing” the very Taliban members who fight against our soldiers. We are literally funding the enemy. (a great exposé at thenation.com.)
You point out a definite misconception among most conservatives about image versus reality in terms of recognizing a lost cause and acknowledging it as such rather than stubbornly continuing down the same self-destructive path, as tend to do regularly. Our current corrupt leaders are reading the script of those corrupt Soviet leaders. This war is BIG BUSINESS.
“Maybe he thinks because he said he would in the campaign that he'll be beaten up for not doing it. I don't think he should feel bound by such statements.”
Heh, what have you seen from Obama that would make you think that??? Obama hasn’t shown any such concern about feeling “bound by such statements” regarding ANYTHING he said during the campaign.
The idea of government of the people, by the people but the people can't know what that government is doing has always been the problem with the idea of state secrets and such. Of course, now, so much of our government is infiltrated by corporatists, that those "state secrets" largely serve corporations, not the people.
Just so. None of the 19 murderers on 9/11 were from Afghanistan or Pakistan. Their safe haven and base of operations was right here in the U.S.
Rated.