Thread by @Zathras3

This is worth thinking about: how is victory or defeat defined in a war that hasn’t ended? @jimgolby & Peter Feaver attempt to define them in terms of public opinion, or rather of civilian and military/veteran opinion, respectively.

This is a method, to be sure. How different segments of the public react to an ongoing or just concluded war has obvious political implications, and policy implications as well. Large-scale, prolonged US military interventions in the wake of Vietnam, for example, were mostly

...avoided by the American government in the years that followed, while the military made a concerted effort to focus on possible wars in Europe very different from the one it had just fought in SE Asia. One could say both were a reaction to the perception of defeat in Vietnam.

One could also say with equal accuracy they were a reaction to the reality of defeat in Vietnam — to the protracted expenditure of vast resources and many thousands of American lives on behalf of a peripheral American interest, an expenditure founded on mistaken assumptions....

....and pursued with questionable military skill, particularly at the command level. It’s surely possible to manipulate public perception through advocacy, which Golby and Feaver lament was not attempted in the second decade of the Afghan war. But...

....this is not the traditional means by which historians evaluate whether wars have been successful or not.

As a global superpower, the United States enjoyed a very large margin for error in the post-World War II period. Americans never had to worry that its North Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan opponents would celebrate a victory in war on American soil.

The scope of wars America fought after 1945 was, as well, decided in Washington. The United States could afford not to expand the Korean War to China, though Chinese fought in Korea; to not invade North Vietnam as its armies ravaged the South; to unilaterally declare...

...victory over Iraq in 1991; and to leave Islamists unmolested in their Pakistani sanctuaries as the US fought the Afghan Taliban. Defeat or victory, therefore, could always be plausibly defined for elements of the American public as a product solely of American choice.

History, though, has a way of eroding the plausibility of such definitions. We can be sure history will note that no American in the fall of 2001 would have called an 18-year war in Afghanistan acceptable. History will be clear that beginning a war against terrorism...

...that left the chief terrorist alive to inspire and organize for nearly a decade cannot be called a success. History won’t cut any slack to the men who for many years under-resourced the Afghan war, when it might still have been possible to subdue the Taliban under...

...a stable Afghan government, because George W. Bush wanted to go invade Iraq and fight another war he and the American military were unable to win. Finally, history tells us that we don’t always need to wait for the historians.

Republican politicians after 2008 generally abstained from criticism of the Bush administration’s wars. Presidential candidates in 2012 and 2016 did so by virtual consensus, with one exception.

In televised debates before the crucial primary in traditionally pro-military South Carolina, Donald Trump denounced the Iraq invasion & the wars in Southwest Asia. There was no equivocation or nuance in Trump’s remarks; there couldn’t be.

Trump brought the same rank, stinking, putrid ignorance to this policy area that he brought (and still does) to every other. Yet he was cheered raucously then for defying a Republican consensus, and wound up winning the primary, and the nomination, easily.

I submit there is a high price to pay for denying the obvious. If you’re congratulating yourself for brilliant tactical victories in 2002 in a war you’re still fighting in 2019, you’ve lost the war. You lost it, incidentally, a long time before 2019.

The argument over public perception of recent American wars is in large measure an argument over whether careers and reputations can be saved: if we don’t admit failure, failure can’t be punished, not in politics or the civilian national security world or the military.

Careers and reputations pertain to individuals. Individuals can be replaced. George Marshall, operating with a much smaller margin for error in his time, understood this. When he thought commanders were likely to fail, he fired them.

Public perception didn’t enter into his thinking then. I wonder how much it should enter into ours now. The hubris and fecklessness that characterized the early years of America’s Southwest Asian wars reflected a margin for error we won’t have again.

Facing a deteriorating geopolitical position in an era of rapid change, the United States would I think be better to look reality squarely in the face. If that means alienating veterans or damaging generals’ careers by acknowledging failure in Afghanistan, fine.

Individuals will just have to take those lumps. That goes double for the reputations of former officials who mortgaged US foreign policy to the future of Southwest Asia for nearly a generation.

There is a sense of unreality to discussing subjects like this today, when there is no hand on the tiller of the ship of state. Who knows whether disasters a lot worse than Afghanistan could drop on the country’s head tomorrow as a result of the leadership it has now?

But the Trump years will not last forever. Repairing and maintaining the structure of global peace will remain a task necessary for anything else we wish to accomplish as a society. That task will require ruthlessness in assessing success and failure in war and diplomacy,...

....because the United States will not any longer have the option of compensating for inadequate leadership with overwhelming resources. Punting that assessment to public opinion — e.g. can we get away with calling an agreement with the Taliban victory —will not answer. [end]