The Underground Fire

When I was a Boy Scout, we were taught the proper method of extinguishing a campfire: First, make sure you douse it completely with water to remove the heat and stop the combustion, then stir the ashes around with a green stick to make sure there are no remaining embers and separate any fuel sources from each other, and finally dump some dirt on top of the remains to choke off any possibility of oxygen seeping in and letting a stray coal ignite into flame.

If all you do is dump dirt or sand on the campfire, the flame will go out and the fire will appear to be extinguished. But the fire has not gone out – there are live coals still smoldering deep in the dirt, ready to awaken back into flame if uncovered. In some cases, hot coals can start an underground fire that works its way through tree and plant roots, exploding into flame at a point distant from the original campfire.

I’m belaboring this point because I want to make sure you follow my reasoning as I use fire as a metaphor for our current military involvement in Afghanistan (and, to a lesser extent, Iraq).

Our overt use of military power in Afghanistan is like a flame. Just as fire is a highly visible and powerful force that can provide warmth, generate power, and generally be of service to humans, overt military power can accomplish objectives that clearly serve humanity. However, without a clear and unambiguous mission for that military power, it can become as destructive as a fire that has jumped beyond the fire pit to spread uncontrollably to the surrounding forest. Support for this war is draining away as it drags into its tenth year without a clear sense of any overarching mission or progress.

Not only are we fighting the Taliban insurgency, now we’re having problems with our supposed ally. New revelations about the level of corruption within the Afghan government have surfaced. President Karzai himself is quoted acknowledging receiving payoffs from Iran, “They do give us bags of money—yes, yes, it is done, we are grateful to the Iranians for this”. In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Fouad Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins University states, “The brutal facts about Afghanistan are these: It is a broken country, a land of banditry, of a war of all against all, and of the need to get what can be gotten from the strangers. There is no love for the infidels who have come into the land, and no patience for their sermons.

“In its wanderings through the Third World, from Korea and Vietnam to Iran and Egypt, it was America's fate to ride with all sorts of clients. We betrayed some of them, and they betrayed us in return. They passed off their phobias and privileges as lofty causes worthy of our blood and treasure. They snookered us at times, but there was always the pretense of a common purpose. The thing about Mr. Karzai is his sharp break with this history. It is the ways of the Afghan mountaineers that he wishes to teach us”.

The reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place – ten years ago this month – was to find Osama Bin Laden, capture or kill him, and as many of Al Qaeda as possible, and punish the Taliban for giving sanctuary to this organization. We supported the invasion because we were striking back at the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, and those who harbored them.

But now the mission is no longer clear, and the nation-building we thought we were attempting with Mr. Karzai’s support is being undermined by the very people we’re trying to help. We need to refocus on the original mission, but with a different strategy. To return to the campfire metaphor, we need to extinguish the “flames” of our overt military presence in Afghanistan – pull out all conventional and even special operations forces. Let the world think that the United States has had enough and is going to give in to the prevailing opinion that any military engagement in Afghanistan is unwinnable. Let our enemies think they have won.

Let the flames be smothered, but let the embers continue to burn deep underground. We should begin to wage a covert campaign against Al Qaeda similar to the patient but brutally effective campaign the Israelis launched to seek out and assassinate every member of the Black September organization that attacked the Israeli Olympic team in 1972. Such a strategy would be so low key and secretive that no one in the US government would even know enough to take credit for any success or place any blame for failure. The strategy would have to be plausibly deniable at the highest levels of government. Sure, it would be of questionable legality, but the Bush administration was accused all the time of waging an “illegal” war.

Such a strategy is effective because it is efficient: it will only take the disappearance and/or death of one or two key individuals to begin to frighten and confuse the remaining organization. A frightened and confused organization is an ineffective one. The military has known for years how effective and efficient a good sniper can be at demoralizing the enemy.

Just as the smoldering embers of a smothered campfire send out fingers of fire below the soil, a covert operation, based on the highest quality intelligence and meticulous analysis, will systematically spread fear and destruction among our enemies and achieve the results the flames never could.