Afghanistan: Why are we there? Can we win? What if we lose?

by Lt. Col. Al Fonzi

Why are we there?

Sunday afternoons in our home can be lazy affairs, especially in the late Fall when my wife and I are often engrossed in a book, occasionally an old movie, or like today, a long drive on remote country roads in the county. While approaching Pozo, a small ranch community considered part of “North County” but southwest of Santa Margarita, my wife asked me why we were in Afghanistan and what would happen if we just left? The answer took up most of the drive home to Atascadero, about 45 miles worth of winding country roads.

We are a military family, having spent most our married life living the life of gypsies, with only the last third of our marriage being in one place. Even so, until 2006, I was still in uniform, as was our oldest son Joshua, a medical corpsman assigned to the 1st Marine Division. My life has been lived almost entirely upon or near military bases, growing up mostly in the mid-west in a military town, with the roar of jet engines from B-52 bombers and a nuclear armed and always on alert base of the Strategic Air Command nearby.

It was only natural that I would serve in the military, as did my father, all of our family friends and male relatives up to my generation. My father and all of my uncles served in WWII in various theaters of operation, all in combat. When my turn came in late 1968, my first year of college, I didn’t fight the draft notice and enlisted. I served two tours of duty in Vietnam, having volunteered for duty there as did every single member of my unit. So much for the myth of most of us being forced to serve. I was selected against my will by means of subterfuge by the military to serve in intelligence.

Being an enlisted man is nothing like “James Bond”. It consists mostly of tedium, long hours and occasionally, a healthy dose of fear. It’s a strange feeling to realize that somebody out there really doesn’t like you and really intends to kill you. At any rate, I was assigned to a signals intelligence unit; we intercepted all kinds of North Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian communications, radar signals, etc. and helped setup enemy anti-aircraft units for ambush by “Wild Wiesel” units suppressing enemy fire as our fighter-bombers went in for a kill. We were an airborne unit and I flew over half a hundred missions over North Vietnam and Laos, mostly Laos as it was a little safer there for our unarmed reconnaissance aircraft. My second tour of duty was spent down south supporting the Naval Advisory Group and their work in the Mekong Delta against enemy infiltration. No glory, just mud and long hours, a near miss during the Easter Offensive in 1972 when we thought we might have to fight our way out of Vietnam against the South Vietnamese as well as the North, but that is another story.

The point of all this, is that my career spanned from the Spring of 1969 to January 2006, from an absolutely junior enlisted man to my final rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. I served in SE Asia, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Okinawa, to Korea, Europe, Bosnia and finally in Iraq, in virtually every kind of ground and reconnaissance unit. In Bosnia, I was the Chief of HUMINT (human intelligence, aka spies,) and Counterintelligence for the National Intelligence Cell run by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). I was fortunate to be able to move about the entire country, based out of Sarajevo, (the French sector of control) and interacted daily with the locals. Most troops remained on their bases except for forays out in multi-vehicle armored convoys or combat patrols to keep the peace. Their interaction with the populace was nil. My work in Iraq involved working first with the 1st Armored Division, the with the 1st Cavalry Division Government Support Team, finally as the G2 for the Chief of Civil Military Operations which gave me additional mobility, but also the drawback of becoming a higher profile target. More on that later. An incident in May, 2004 brought me into close contact with the CIA station Chief in Baghdad and working on his behest, whether I liked it or not. The worst part of my tour had two components; my son Joshua was in Iraq at the time with the 1st Marine Division, or 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment based in Ramadi. In early April his company was hit hard and overrun, taking nearly 50% casualties in one night (12 KIA and 22 wounded). I spent about five hours on a helipad with him at the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad a few days later as he attempted to hitch a ride back to Combat Outpost in Ramadi. He had brought the 22 wounded in with a medical evacuation chopper. We watched a lot of casualties come in that night, many from his unit, including two fellow corpsman and friends of his who were wounded after the initial fight. That was the only time I was able to see my son while we were both in Iraq. The second bad event was the IED that exploded next to my door a few months later while on a patrol in the vicinity of a place called Latifia, part of the so-called “triangle of death” SW of Baghdad. After that event, I had some internal hemorrhaging in my brain which led to a semi-conscious state and loss of memory for about 15 hours. After that the docs said my war was over and sent me back to Fort Bragg for the next three months for medical tests and eventually retirement against my will the following year. I’m telling you all of this not because I am or have done anything special; I’m not and haven’t. Only my duty as I see it based on a long family tradition, that at least on my wife’s side, goes back to the French and Indian War. What I don’t understand about my country today, is the indifference to the pain and suffering I have seen in the world and the naïve belief that ignoring it will somehow protect us from what lays beyond the oceans.

Afghanistan is about a remote a place on the earth as one can find. Most people do have trouble locating it on a map. As children, most adults may have some idea of the region based upon old movies, like “King of the Khyber Rifles” or “Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” adventure tales for young boys mostly based upon the tales of Rudyard Kipling and the British Colonial experience in the region, albeit romanticized in the extreme. It is a harsh region, with illiteracy approaching 90% in most regions. For the last 30 plus years it has been the center of modern superpower conflict, a repeat of the similar conflicts that occurred in the 19th century, but far more deadly for the Afghan people.

The modern story begins, not surprisingly, with our very own worst 20th century president, Jimmy Carter. No man has ever demonstrated the degree of naivete as he, and held so much power to do so much long term damage. Carter’s presidency was marked by a desire to change the world as he wanted to see it, not as it really was. His human rights campaign in Iran set the stage for the return of a vicious tyrant and theological fanatic, the Ayatollah Khomeni, who set about to return Iran as close to the 7th century as he could get it in the few years he remained alive. Tens of thousands were executed by his regime, and nearly a million died in the Iran-Iraq war, started by Iraq but prolonged needlessly and waged most savagely by Khomeni, including walking 12 year old boys through Iraqi mine fields to clear the way for Iranian human wave assaults on Iraqi positions. He also initiated the suicide bomber as a significant military tactic, first in the Iran-Iraq war and later in Lebanon, with his support of Hizbollah, a Shia Islam terrorist group sponsored, equipped and trained by Iranian agents. It was a Hizbollah suicide bomber that destroyed the US Marine barracks in Lebanon on October 23, 1983, killing 241 Marines, most of whom were still in their beds at that early morning hour. It was that attack that precipitated the US withdrawal from Lebanon after our attempt to provide peacekeepers ended in disaster. In the six months prior to that attack, Hizbollah attacked the US Embassy twice, each time inflicting major damage, even killing our entire intelligence staff, including our senior CIA representatives, and the French garrison, killing between 40 and 60 people in each attack. The Iranians are extremely dangerous as both a terrorist threat in the region and as a potential military threat to our allies and interests in the region.

As Khomeni’s regime took hold, the Russians, then known as the Soviet Union, took great note. The USSR shared a border with Iran and having a revolutionary Islamic regime on its border with the southern Soviet Republics with their predominant Muslim populations was a prescription for permanent unrest. So, they did the logical thing from a Russian point of view. First, they precipitated a Marxist coup in Afghanistan and attempted to impose a Marxist, godless regime on a people with no history of a central government, a deep seated mistrust and hatred of foreigners and a deep reverence for Islam. When their Marxist puppet government was staggering under tribal assaults, the Russians invaded Afghanistan to preserve the Marxist regime. For the first five years the Soviets held the upper hand, inflicting severe casualties on the largely non-unified and disorganized tribes who only received marginal assistance from foreign powers. Around 1985, a US congressman, named Charlie Wilson, decided to do more, a lot more, and virtually doubled the covert military assistance budget to the CIA in Afghanistan overnight. This was a watershed in US involvement in the Afghan conflict, taking place simultaneously at the same time that President Reagan was staring down the Soviets in Europe, missile for missile, challenging them to “tear down ..the Berlin Wall,” starting SDI missile defense, and generally giving the Soviets a very bad time all over the world. By 1989, for a lot of reasons and only marginally because of our support to the Afghans, the Soviet Union collapsed. In the five years of our assistance to the Afghan tribal resistance, the Soviets lost hundreds of combat helicopters, dozens of fixed wing fighter bombers and thousands of troops. As far as the Afghan tribes were concerned, they did it all and defeated an “infidel superpower.” Actually, our intermediary was the Pakastani intelligence service, called the “ISI.” The ISI equipped and trained, with our help, about 80,000 Afghan tribesmen of whom over 40,000 were from other Muslim countries. Some of these guys would later show up in places like Chechnya in the Soviet Caucasus, Bosnia and later Iraq. In 1990, the world was celebrating the “end of history” and talking about a peace dividend. Saddam Hussein of Iraq had different ideas. He was miffed with Kuwait over slant drilling by the Kuwaitis and not paying for the oil they “stole from Iraq.” So he ordered his four million man army to invade Kuwait, quite successfully and virtually overnight. After watching Iraq loot Kuwait, the western world was alarmed at having Saddam, no humanitarian, sitting on the jugular of the western world’s oil supply and ordered him to leave, via notice from the United Nations. Stupidly, he refused. The US led coalition defeated his army, almost in detail, six months later in 100 hours of conflict proceeded by five weeks of intense aerial bombardment.

Unfortunately, we didn’t finish the job, allowing his Republican Guard divisions to largely escape intact which kept his regime of terror alive another dozen years. A sidebar to all of this was the effect on Osama Bin Laden. Recently returned to Saudi Arabia from Afghanistan and the fight against the Soviets, treated as irrelevant, ignored by all, he offered his services and those of his followers to liberate Kuwait. The King of Saudi Arabia preferred the US offer and Bin Laden was incensed at both the Saudi dynasty and the US, whom he considered infidels trespassing on holy ground; the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, home of their Prophet Mohammed and Islam, were located within Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden moved off to Sudan until he was expelled about five years later and sojourned to Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. During the 1990’s, Bin Laden and his followers plotted, trained, recruited and raised money from their base in Sudan until US intelligence made it too hot for him to stay. Saddam continued to stick his thumb in the eye of each successive US administration and the UN, playing a spectacular and ultimately fatal bluff with the world in keeping people believing he still had weapons of mass destruction or was on the verge of reconstituting both his military and WMD weapons programs.

In Afghanistan, after the Russians departed in 1989, the US congress (Democrats in charge again) lost interest in Afghanistan, turning down any real effort at building a civil society. The result was the rise of warlords in a country awash with weapons and drug money from opium crops, chaos, hardship and terror for the population. The Taliban, which translated means “religious students” were an outgrowth of the Madrassa school system funded by Saudi Arabia. Another legacy of Jimmy Carter was his self-righteousness and insistence on de-funding foreign regimes that didn’t closely resemble Jeffersonian Democracies. (He also didn’t like intelligence agents and fired 3000 of the most experienced agents of the CIA in 1978-80, deciding to allow satellites to collect what we needed. As a result, we were virtually blind on the ground in much of the Middle East for the next 20 plus years.) Carter’s State Department was especially incensed with the Pakastani government’s lack of adherence to democratic principles and their excessive corruption, even by Middle Eastern standards. As a result, they defunded most of Pakistan’s aid package, leaving a vacuum happily filled by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis funded over 30,000 religious Madrassas, which taught an extreme form of Wahabbist Islam of the type practiced in Saudi Arabia, contrary to the previous Pakistani nearly secular form of Islam practiced at its founding.

A generation later we have most of the young male population thoroughly indoctrinated in probably the most extreme and least tolerant Islamic sect. By 1994, the Taliban began to make a move that eventually brought most of the country of Afghanistan under their control, the local population grateful to almost anyone who could bring some type of stability to their lives. The warlords had practiced rape and murder and pillaged with abandon for five years; the people had had enough and rallied to the Taliban cause. For a time, even the opium trade was suppressed as the Taliban were as merciless with drug dealers as they were with women accused of adultery after being raped. About this time, Bin Laden was deported from Sudan with his followers after US pressure on Sudan was exerted, whereupon he was welcomed by the Taliban back to Afghanistan. Bin Laden set up his base organization, known as Al Queda to most of us and launched numerous attacks against the US, including the attack on the USS Cole and the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed nearly a thousand people.

We all know that Bin Laden’s group planned and launched their 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon from Afghanistan in 2001. Not many know that they tried an even larger attack against us in 1995. Known as the Bojinka Plot, Bin Laden attempted to bring down 12 airliners over the Pacific and fly suicide bombers into the TransAmerica Building in San Francisco, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the WTC in New York, the White House, the US Capitol Building and the CIA or the Pentagon. The plot was overly ambitious and accidentally discovered by the Philippine police when the plotters accidentally set their apartment on fire and a laptop computer with all the details was confiscated. If the laptop had been discovered in an American city, the laptop might never had been searched under US privacy laws that existed under President Clinton, another holdover from the early 1970s and the Church Committee that eviscerated the CIA under President Carter. As we know, the scaled down 9-11 plan approved by Bin Laden around 2000 and executed a year later on September 11, 2001, worked nearly perfectly and well beyond Bin Laden’s expectations.

Afghan culture puts extreme emphasis upon hospitality. Our demand for the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden or face dire consequences was met with disdain, as their culture requires. In their world, it would be better to turn over their virgin daughters to an outlaw motorcycle gang than violate their hospitality customs, which require a host to defend a guest to the death, lest the family be forever dishonored. (Oddly, this custom saved the life of a Navy Seal, the lone survivor of a deadly ambush years later in Afghanistan, as a village gave him sanctuary against a rival tribe hunting him and eventually escorted him back to US forces.) President Bush’s demands for the extradition of Bin Laden were rebuffed and led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Unlike our Russian predecessors, we did not fight on Afghan terms with a conscript Army that was road bound and held to rigid command and control procedures. Using Special Forces and a pick-up alliance of rival tribes and deadly air power to back it up, we crushed the Taliban and drove them into the Northwest Frontier provinces of Pakistan where they remained for the better part of the next several years. Once again, however, we lost interest in Afghanistan, refusing to put adequate resources on the ground to build up an alternative society to Taliban tyranny. (In the Third World, corruption is endemic, to a degree most Americans could not fathom. Afghanistan is no exception and is probably worse given its long history of decentralized authority and very weak or non-existent central government. Corruption at every level is and has been rampant and is the single greatest impediment to establishing any type of stable society in that country. Once again, the corruption feeds the insurgency and recruits for the Taliban and to some extent, for Al Qaeda which is able to enforce some justice for the disenfranchised tribesmen and their families against rapacious warlords and government officials.)

In 2002, a tactical victory secured in Afghanistan, the Bush administration began to take a hard look at Iraq and Saddam’s disinformation campaign on WMD. Interviews with the FBI after his capture revealed that Saddam had waged a ten plus year campaign to keep his enemies believing that he still maintained a substantial stockpile of WMDs and was rebuilding his nuclear, biological and chemical weapon programs. Even his closest generals didn’t know what he had or didn’t have, nor did western intelligence agencies. Ironically, the only western official to loudly complain that Iraq’s WMD program was neutered was a UN inspector by the name of Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps Reserve Major, who stated that Iraq’s WMDs had been 99% destroyed. At a hearing before the US Senate in early 2003. Ritter was ridiculed by a US senator (Senator Joe Biden I believe) who stated that such an assessment was “above his (Ritter’s) paygrade.”

In March, 2003, the US invaded Iraq and began to search for Saddam’s hidden stockpiles of WMD. A year later we concluded we had been “had,” but by then the damage had been done and a serious loss of credibility incurred for US Intelligence Agencies, and most importantly, for the United States of America before the world. Worse to come, the insurgency gained significant ground after the military’s program for incorporating the Iraqi Army into any countrywide security program was scuttled by Ambassador Bremmer, who fired the entire Iraqi Army and anyone who had ever been a member of the Baathist Party. (Saddam’s political party, very similar to the NAZI Party in Germany, upon which it was actually modeled.) The problem was, anyone who held any kind of job beyond that of goat herder in Iraq had to be a member of the Baathist Party to hold a job. There was nobody left to run any part of the government or any government service, including water, sewer and trash pick-up. That left the US military and a handful of State Department employees to operate a country of 22 million people in an area bigger than California. At the time we had about 160,000 troops in the country, which declined for the rest of 2003. The insurgency along with resentment of US forces grew, especially as Al Queda made its presence felt, establishing strong relationships with disaffected members of the Iraqi Army, and allied with Sunni Muslim clerics against the majority Shia Muslims, now in power courtesy of the US Armed Forces.

Can we win?

By 2007, the American public was disillusioned with the war in Iraq. Calls for withdrawal were loud and constant; the situation was retrieved only by the vision of a few US military leaders and the political demise of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who had resisted any attempt at imposing a counterinsurgency strategy involving an infusion of more troops into Iraq. The surge worked, as many soldiers knew it would, if allowed to work as planned.

Counterinsurgency strategies are troops on the ground intensive. An example I gave to my wife today on our drive to Pozo, was to illustrate the distance between Pozo and the nearest Sheriff’s substation in Templeton. The latter is about an hour’s drive from Pozo, maybe a little less. Imagine being besieged by 50 heavily armed men who surround your home, proceed to butcher your family due to your political outspokenness or refusal to pay their extortion “tax” for protection. What would your neighbors do when confronted by the impotence of the government in its ability to protect you, or even failure to respond at all upon your plea for assistance? Would they resist or comply? Without troops in your community to protect you and your local police, (police in Iraq frequently only had a few handguns and less than a few dozen rounds of ammunition, against 40 to 50 heavily armed insurgents complete with machine-guns, rocket propelled grenades, etc) you would likely do whatever you had to do to survive, or leave, as many refugees do all over the world.

Right now, in Afghanistan, we are short troops on the ground; when I was in Iraq in 2004, we were short 17 companies of Infantry in the capitol zone, which meant that half of the proposed security missions could not be conducted on any given day. The bad guys were winning, and continued to do so for about the next three years in most of the country. The surge changed the equation in our favor and gave the Iraqis a chance to fight back once they knew were committed enough to win. In Afghanistan, the ground commander had an approved (by President Obama) counterinsurgency strategy, which is troop intensive. We have to provide security to the people on the ground or they will transfer their allegiance to the Taliban and Al Queda in order to survive. Most are too poor and too uneducated to leave and have no other options.

Now that strategy is in jeopardy as the political left is pressuring the President to abandon Afghanistan, or go “lite” and muddle through until a respectable time has passed for us to give up and just leave. Such a strategy is a prescription for certain defeat and a return of the Taliban with basing rights for Al Queda. The so-called “counter-terrorism strategy,” using remotely piloted drones, like the Predator drone, to fire missiles at targets of opportunity will not work without good intelligence on the ground. Without troops on the ground to provide security for the population, you will not receive reliable, accurate or timely intelligence. In essence, you will be shooting at shadows in the dark. Some may argue that we did this (troop increases) before in Vietnam and draw false analogies on the gradual buildup and subsequent loss there, all for naught. During the first four years of that conflict, our strategy was flawed, but so was that of the enemy, who suffered enormous casualties in a gambit that failed in the Tet Offensive of 1968. After the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong were shattered (over 40,000 dead).

But, we had lost our will to fight and began to withdraw. Under General Creighton Abrams in 1968-72, (Abrams replaced General Westmoreland who commanded US Forces in Vietnam until 1968) we developed a Vietnamization strategy that armed and trained 300,000 Civilian Defense Corps civilians to protect their villages from the enemy with the help of the South Vietnamese Army. When the North Vietnamese launched a conventional invasion in 1972, the South Vietnamese stood and fought to defend their homes and families, and along with our air support, defeated the “Easter Offensive” of the North. Air power alone would not have stopped the North Vietnamese, it took the determined resistance of the South to save the day. By 1975, the US Congress had decimated US logistic support to the South Vietnamese; 2/3 of their aircraft were grounded for lack of fuel and spare parts; artillery units had less than 60 rounds to fire per week, and the Army was starved of every type of ammunition and support. When the North Vietnamese launched their final invasion in April 1975, after two years of massive rearmament by the Soviet Union and Chinese in violation of the 1973 peace accords, the South Vietnamese were defeated by a conventional invasion, even though some South Vietnamese units fought to the death in place. Millions were slaughtered by the communists over the next five years, about a million fled to America as refugees; some live in Atascadero after surviving Cambodian Khmer Rouge (communist) death camps. We abandoned over 400 South Vietnamese intelligence operatives who were executed by the North Vietnamese when their conquest was complete. Yet we have won in other places.

In the Philippines in the 1950’s, an Air Force intelligence officer named Colonel Edward Lansdale along with a single heroic Philippine patriot, Ramon Magasaysay, who became the Defense Minsister and eventually President, defeated the communist Huk insurgency without American forces in any significant numbers. He fought corruption and won by instilling a democracy that is still hobbled but effective. Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam with far less success, especially after President Kennedy gave quiet acquiescence to a coup that toppled the Diem regime but resulted in Diem’s murder in November, 1963. Lansdale had neither prior knowledge or involvement in the coup and had been frustrated by his inability to persuade President Diem and his family to institute reforms throughout the country. The point is, counterinsurgencies have been won in the past, as the British did in Malaya in the 1950s, adapting their strategy to the situation and being persistent and determined to win. We also fought successful counterinsurgencies in the Philippines in 1904 and should not forget the 30 plus years of counterinsurgency fought by the US Army against the Plains Indians in the American West in the latter half of the 19th century. The key ingredient is willpower for a long hard slog, which is often costly in blood and treasure, but usually better than the alternatives.

How do we define victory, many will ask? I define victory in both a military and social sense. We will have “won” when we have killed or captured most of the senior leadership, particularly the key leaders, of both Al Queda and the Taliban. We will have won in a social sense when an Afghan girl can go to school like her brothers without fear of a Taliban fanatic throwing acid in her face. We will have won when an Afghan woman can testify in a courtroom and her testimony is given equal weight with her male attackers. Finally, we will have won when we leave behind some kind of semblance of a government and a society that at least attempts to provide some type justice and respect for human rights and doesn’t support terrorism or tolerate them on its soil. It may not look or be like a Jeffersonian Democracy, but it will be theirs and hopefully, decide to join the community of nations in at least a 20th century sense.

What if we lose?

What will happen if we abandon Afghanistan? Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, is a nuclear armed state. It is unstable at best, fighting a powerful insurgency against an ideologically motivated and determined foe. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are well armed and well equipped with significant support in the ISI and the Army, the only unified force in the country. Pakistan hates India, also nuclear armed, which equally hates Pakistan. One report received in the 90’s revealed Pakistani plans to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack upon India and is believed to be keeping that option on the table.

After the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, Pakistan loosely controlled an army of about 40,000 combat experienced guerrilla fighters and terrorists. They have not hesitated to form terrorist groups to attack India, like the devastating attack on Mumbai (Bombay) India last year or the attack on the Indian Parliament several years earlier. They have fought a full-scale war at least once and engaged in prolonged border clashes including the use of heavy artillery on numerous occasions. Allowing Afghanistan to become a terrorist refuge again will destabilize Pakistan even further, perhaps even allowing the Taliban or Al Queda sympathetic leaders to take control of the government. The threat of nuclear proliferation to terrorist groups is not out of the question and Pakistan has been implicated in spreading nuclear weapons technology, especially “know how” throughout the region, including to Iran. With Iran arming with nuclear weapons in the West, you would have a belt of radical Islamist regimes from South Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan opposite the jugular vein of the oil resources of the western world. This would encourage Gulf States, such as Saudi Arabia and other confrontation states (Jordan and Egypt) to seek nuclear weapons for their own defense.

An American retreat in Afghanistan will completely compromise US credibility and its willingness to protect its friends with a nuclear shield. Undoubtedly, Israel will seek every military advantage and may initiate preemptive strikes against any neighbor or near state that poses an actual or perceived threat to its existence. Should hostilities actually occur, the situation will be absolutely unpredictable and uncontrollable in outcomes. Hostilities between Pakistan and India may very well embroil China, which has both interests and close ties to Islamic states and has a historical rivalry with India. Once that happens, China, allied with Iran and ostensibly Pakistan, against India and probably Israel, would likely rise to support their protégés against any US attempt to intervene. The devastation of a nuclear conflict would be catastrophic for the region, with the deaths of 100, 200 or 500 million people in a regional nuclear war.

Even without a nuclear hostilities, the ability of such a hostile alliance, nuclear armed, to intimidate the world with terrorist attacks, combined with bullying of European and regional powers, would neuter American power in the region, probably forever. Even the notional threat of conflict in the region normally sends crude oil prices spiking; an outbreak of actual conflict (conventional or nuclear) would send oil prices spiraling to over $200 or more a barrel overnight. This will translate to between $5 and $10 for a gallon gas, some even think $20 a gallon gas is possible, assuming you can even get it. Food shortages will ensue, first in third world regions where everything is scarce, but the Middle and Working classes of America will be hit especially hard by high prices, out of control inflation, fuel shortages and even shortages of food and many essentials.

The shock to our economy will be comparable or worse to that of the 9-11 attacks with high and prolonged unemployment levels, probably on the order of the 25 – 30 % levels experienced in the Great Depression will occur. It could be considerably higher. Environmental damage will be catastrophic on a planetary scale; some scientists have postulated the dust clouds hurled into the stratosphere will induce worldwide cooling of temperatures for up to two years, which might resemble the “The year without a summer” in 1816 when a massive volcanic eruption in SE Asia caused it to snow in New England in July. Temperatures were lowered nationwide, causing worldwide crop failures and food shortages. The economic consequences are incomprehensible and left to the imagination; none of the outcomes are favorable for peace, economic prosperity or even the survival of the western world, at least as we know it.

The United States has a moral obligation to keep its commitments. We have an obligation to keep faith with the soldiers we have deployed and their families, who trusted our leaders to support them and to treasure their lives, not spend them wastefully or foolishly on quixotic foreign adventures. The campaign in Afghanistan began not as a “war of choice” as the current president described the war in Iraq, but a “war of necessity.” It occurred after a catastrophic attack upon our nations’ leading city and the symbols of American power. Most importantly, the Afghan war began as a war in response to 3,000 Americans whose lives were violently taken from them and their families on September 11, 2001. For their sake alone, we must continue this fight until the end, lest we forget… lest we forget their loss and the sacrifices so many have made on their behalf.

Al Fonzi is a Middle East and counter-terrorism specialist. He is a retired U.S Army officer with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and over 35 years of military service. His duties included service with the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), participation in three wars or periods of national crisis. He holds a masters degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California.