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September 12, 2006
How do you Achieve Something?
When I read posts like this (also found here, with more intelligent comments), I wonder how people who could write such a thing ever achieve any goal they set. In my world, you set a goal, along with a cost you are willing to pay to attain that goal; formulate a strategy to attain the goal, complete with some set of observable metrics that tell you whether you are progressing towards attaining the goal; design a plan to implement the strategy, complete with alternatives and options that would be invoked based on the situation as it changes; and set about performing the tasks called for by the plan. Mike Reynolds' ('sideways') world does not appear to work that way, and some of the comments on the Donklephant post indicate that there are some whose worlds are even more divergent from mine.
Let's take the specific incident that Reynolds writes about: Pakistan's recent agreement to withdraw from tribal areas. Reynolds, like Roggio (the link in the last sentence), has a very pessimistic take on this, most prominently indicated by his title: "Did We Just Lose?" (I am cautiously hopeful.) Another indicator of deep pessimism is this:
Our goal was to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven in the near east. If this deal is what it looks like, we appear to have failed.If this deal is what it looks like, we aren’t even back at square one: we’re wishing we could get back to square one.
In fact, if this deal is what it looks like, we just lost a war.
Um, OK, let's take it from the top. The President set the national goal for the war on September 20, 2001:
Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. ... [T]he only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows.
In the same speech, the President began to lay out the strategy he would follow:
We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.
Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
[snip]
We will come together to improve air safety, to dramatically expand the number of air marshals on domestic flights, and take new measures to prevent hijacking. We will come together to promote stability and keep our airlines flying, with direct assistance during this emergency.
We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home. We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act, and find them before they strike.
We will come together to take active steps that strengthen America's economy, and put our people back to work.
The strategy was made very explicit in 2002. Obviously, two parts of the plan were to eliminate the enemy's safe haven in Afghanistan, and to eliminate a major sponsor of terrorism in Iraq. Both of these have been done.
So if Reynolds' and Roggio's most profound fears are true, and the enemy acquires a new sanctuary, a more difficult sanctuary for us to attack than was Afghanistan (and now would be the time to remind everyone that most people who knew anything about Afghanistan thought that the enemy's Afghan sanctuary was more or less immune to serious attack), does this mean that we have lost the war, that our goals are unattainable? Hardly. Indeed, such an outcome, while a setback, would not even mean that our strategy was obviously wrong. It might merely indicate that Michael Ledeen's constant refrain, "faster please," should get more attention than it has heretofore. It might indicate that our strategy needs to be compressed in time, or that we need to modify or even completely rethink our strategy. It does not mean that we have lost.
But there is another side to this as well. What if this development opens the way for US troops to go into Waziristan and fight the enemy directly, with the enemy having no border as easy to hide behind as they do between Afghanistan and Pakistan? What if this development means that the tribal leaders are going to stop their cross-border raids and kick out the terrorists? What if this development is a way for Musharraf, knowing the agreement will be violated, to develop a domestic political consensus to commit real force to the area for the first time? Would this then even be a setback, in retrospect?
Unfortunately, we have developed a serious analysis problem. Our communications are so fast that we get almost instant news of what happens in even the remotest corners of the globe. But we only get that news, generally, if it is in the interest of mainstream journalists to provide it, and when they do, they often get the whole point so completely wrong that the information that is communicated is more false than true. This leads to bad, but rapid, analysis; to incorrect, but rapid, responses. We need to learn to sit back and let events unfold without feeling we have to respond immediately to each and every one. And we need to think through all the possible consequences, not just the most facile rationales or the most immediately horrifying or gratifying possibilities. First reports from the field, goes the military dictum, are generally wrong. We need to remember that.
But more importantly even than that, we need to remember that some goals are important to achieve. We need to remember that goals often have costs that need to be paid, and in this case, while the ashes were still settling over Manhattan, we put a very high price indeed on this particular goal. The world situation has not so changed as to make the goal unreasonable, or unnecessary to achieve. So we must attain our goal.
And we must remember that strategies sometimes are not quite right, but that it is better to do something that makes incremental gains than to do nothing, or worse still to pretend to be doing something while really just hoping the problem goes away. Worst of all is to pretend to be doing something useful while actually doing something guaranteed to make it harder, even impossible, to obtain our goals. If our strategies aren't quite right, we need to adjust them. We do not need to scrap them. If going to the store to get something turns out to be a bad idea, because that store doesn't carry that particular item, it doesn't mean you go to the park instead; it means you find the store that has the item you need.
Further we must remember that any plan we make will be flawed, and even if nearly perfect, will require many changes of direction as contingencies change the situation we are responding to. Worse, we could have to rethink the plan if it is not working. You don't throw up your hands if the store is sold out of the item you want; you get an alternate brand, or you go elsewhere, or you wait for the store to restock. Finally, the enemy gets a say in the situation, too. Imagine trying to get milk from the store while being shot at, and you are closer to the problem the military has.
It's possible, of course, to just throw up your hands at the slightest impediment and throw a screaming fit. Most two year olds do it. I've know forty year olds to do it. But those are people who don't get what they want, and who alienate everyone around them along the way. This war is important; this goal must be achieved, if we are to have a hope of leaving a peaceful, free, and prosperous life. And for that reason, we must not throw up our hands at every setback, must not throw a fit when things are imperfect (I'm picturing Andrew Sullivan right now). Instead, we must get the job done, and where we are making mistakes, we must fix them.
Reynolds' approach, though, to declare defeat when something happens that might be bad, or might not, is hardly a way to set about that process. At least, not if we care to win.
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