Reihan:

By its very nature, a counterinsurgency campaign is a limited war, one that relies on winning over the civilian population through the careful use of military force combined with deft diplomacy. The idea is to use persuasion as much as possible and coercion as little as possible. So when Chaffetz writes that we’ve tied the hands of our military, he means that vanquishing enemies, not nation-building, should be our core goal.

One problem with this is that “vanquishing enemies” in a war against a domestic insurgency is a goal that cannot really be achieved without strict rules of engagement and respect for the civilian population. To a large degree, the enemy is “vanquished” by not adding to his numbers with tactics that harm the civilian population. The trouble with Chaffetz’s brand of “antiwar” stance is that he conceives of a “withdrawal” from Afghanistan being a prelude to the perpetual use of air strikes and targeted assassinations. His alternative of “going big” and eliminating strict rules of engagement is a pose of “freeing” the military from constraints that the top commanders themselves insist on having to give their mission the best chance of success. Barring the deployment of an even larger force with few constraints on how they operate, Chaffetz advocates a “withdrawal” from Afghanistan that will be as non-interventionist as Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. In this approach, we will reserve the right to launch attacks on their territory with impunity whenever we wish, but otherwise we will wash our hands of the place and the consequences of our actions. This will not only ensure the alienation of the population from any allied government that might still be in power, but it will contribute to the very radicalization and militancy that Chaffetz presumably would like to see weakened. If the Iraq “surge” failed in its political objectives, and it did, Chaffetz’s proposal would simply ignore the importance of creating conditions for any possible political settlement that is the prerequisite of any withdrawal from Afghanistan that will not lead to greater regional instability.

Critics of the Afghanistan plan such as Chaffetz want to make Afghanistan into a shooting gallery and call it peace. In this way, they can still pretend that they take national security and strategy questions seriously, when they are just reverting to a default position of advocating less restraint, more force and greater indifference to the moral and strategic consequences of our actions. As Chaffetz’s later remarks on Iran make clear, this is not someone interested in reducing the strain on our military or reducing unnecessary risks to American soldiers, as he actively calls for military action that will greatly strain and endanger all of our forces in the Gulf and central Asia. Neither does he give any hint of thinking strategically about how distastrous an Iranian war would be for U.S. and allied interests.

P.S. If so-called Jacksonians don’t believe in limited wars, as Reihan says, their instincts are decidedly not conservative. If self-described conservatives embrace the idea of unlimited and total war, that simply reveals how far removed they are from temperamental conservatism and how great the gap is between movement conservatism and a conservative disposition. Limiting the horror and destruction of war is something that is certainly basic to civilized behavior, and there is reason to think that the desire to impose those limits is a conservative one.

Update: Donald Douglas demonstrates just how dense (or dishonest) militarists can be. As anyone can see, I am defending the proposed war plan against Chaffetz’s insipid criticisms, and I will be defending the war plan in my next column. These are odd things for an “oppose-war-at-all-costs” and so-called defeatist to do. It is a useful reminder that hawks such as Douglas are completely shameless and will say whatever serves them in the moment.