Looking for a Son of a Bitch

LOOKING FOR A SON OF A BITCH


We now seem to have a clear strategy for getting out of Afghanistan.

The Greek philosopher Diogenes was once asked why he walked around in daylight with a lantern. He answered, "I am just looking for an honest man." It is obvious that we are not going to find such a man in Afghanistan to lead that country out of its long history of warfare among warlords and its recent experience with repressive rule by the Taliban.

So if a Diogenes optimization strategy is dead, suboptimizing appears to be the only way out.

When President Franklin Roosevelt was asked about our relationship with one time Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, he replied, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Having shed the illusion that a nation building strategy could bring unity and democracy to Afghanistan, we are now in search of whatever "son of a bitch" or "sons of bitches" we can find to help us tunnel a way out of the Afghan dilemma.

We thought Hamid Karzai was our Afghan Somoza but he has strayed from the reservation enough times on important military, political, and corruption issues to create uncertainty about whether he is reliably "ours". And Karzai's control is confined to only a portion of the country.

There have been reports for some time that we have been looking, overtly or covertly, for a segment of the Taliban that is also anti-al-Qaida and bring that element of the Taliban into some kind of meaningful discussions about participating in governing the country. But we are also caught in something of a struggle between Afghanistan and Pakistan over who should take the lead in enticing the Taliban into serious negotiations, and then resolve the problem of the shape of the negotiating table (shades of the Vietnam negotiations in the early 70s) so it would include the United States.

David Ignatius in today's column (July 29), quoted national security advisor General James Jones as saying, "The Taliban generally as a group has never signed on to the global jihad business and doesn't seem to have ambitions beyond its region." Thus the anointment of one son of a bitch. Getting the Taliban to the properly shaped table would indeed help President Obama to meet his commitment of beginning troop withdrawal next summer.

But the search for a son of a bitch goes further in the suboptimizing strategy, according to today's Washington Post. The Post reports that we have aligned ourselves with Haji Ghani who is described as a "hashish-growing former warlord" with a semiofficial police force "who is known to show his anger through beatings". In short, forget the search for an honest man, we will settle for any local strongmen who can maintain order in otherwise bad neighborhoods.

Once we get beyond the media frenzy and Admistration concerns about what's in the WikiLeaks papers and what damage they can do to our national security, we can return to the the central issue of Afghanistan. That is, how to extricate ourselves by embracing whatever sons of bitches we can call ours.