In an interview on ABC's "This Week," CIA Director Leon Panetta defined 'winning' in Afghanistan thusly:
“Winning in Afghanistan is having a country that is stable enough to ensure that there is no safehaven for Al Qaeda or for a militant Taliban that welcomes Al Qaeda,” Panetta told host Jake Tapper. “That’s really the measure of success for the United States.”
“Our purpose, our whole mission there, is to make sure that Al Qaeda never finds another safe haven from which to attack this country. That’s the fundamental goal of why the United States is there,” he said. “And the measure of success for us is: do you have an Afghanistan that is stable enough to make sure that never happens.”
Steve Benen has already pointed out the absurdity of hoping to stabilize Afghanistan to that extent, given the nature of the U.S.-backed semigovernment:
the measure of success is still dependent on a functioning Karzai government that can function, deliver services with competence and without corruption, and be viewed as legitimate by Afghans. And by that measure, hope is elusive.
But the bigger problem is in the second paragraph of the Panetta quote, the goal of "mak[ing] sure that Al Qaeda never finds another safe haven from which to attack this country."
The problem is, what we used to call the Third World is full of unstable regimes that are only the nominal governments of much of their territory. There are plenty of potential safe havens out there, and stabilizing them all is beyond impossible. Even if we miraculously achieved our goals in Afghanistan (and it would take a miracle), either al-Qaeda would continue to operate out of the tribal lands in Waziristan, or it would pick up and move to somewhere else in the world.
For awhile lately, I'd lost track of just what we were supposedly trying to accomplish in Afghanistan. All the available explanations seemed to be a crock. Now that the rationale has been stated by one of the top guys involved, it's still a crock: we can't do it, and it wouldn't matter if we could.
So can we bring our troops home now?
