I get 11 points for the word 'quagmire'" — The Beastie Boys
Among the more feeble-minded responses to September 11 was an obsession with the numerology of the date and the fact that the twin towers in outline constituted the number 11. To adherents of this absurd science, however, the association between 11 points in Boggle and the word "quagmire" may be truly spooky.
After all, the Q-word has been popping up with increasing frequency as the war in Afghanistan drags on without any bankable signs of progress. Webster's Collegiate dictionary defines a quagmire as "soft miry land that shakes or yields under the foot" and as "a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position." It has been part of the U.S. political lexicon ever since it seemed an apt description of the U.S. experience in Vietnam. In the last week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has had to devote a considerable amount of his time to explaining why it's a misnomer for the current situation in Afghanistan. He was responding to the steady rumble from the media, politicians, Afghanistan experts and even some U.S. allies that the operation has the hallmarks of a classic military-political quagmire — unclear goals, no visible victory post and no convincing exit strategy.
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This may take longer than we thought
Still, the pundits' concern may be understandable. Last week, Rumsfeld told USA Today that the military could not be certain that Osama bin Laden would be captured or killed, but that the Taliban would certainly fall. (In a later corrective, he emphasized that the U.S. expects to get its man.) What was significant in those remarks was that toppling the Taliban appears to have become the primary goal and the snaring of bin Laden a bonus. And it has become clear after almost a month of bombing that the Taliban may be able to survive the current level of U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan.
The bombing thus far has not dislodged the Taliban even where they're at their most vulnerable — in the former Northern Alliance stronghold of Mazari al-Sharif — let alone from Kabul. The Northern Alliance have not proved to be quite as fearsome a force as the Pentagon may have hoped, while the Taliban have proved far more so, as Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem admitted last week. And the bombing thus far has failed to provoke the mass defections from the Taliban in the south for which U.S. planners had clearly hoped. Indeed, most reports from inside Afghanistan suggest the bombing has had the opposite effect, rallying many uncommitted Afghan groups behind the Taliban.
Conservative columnists such as Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol have warned against fighting a war by half measures, and Senator John McCain has echoed their calls for a far greater U.S. military commitment. Theirs is a compelling logic: Once a superpower commits to a war, it has to prevail or else it won't be taken seriously as a superpower.
Looking for a clear mission
The idea of an expanding U.S. commitment, however, is precisely what raises the specter of quagmire for critics, raising ghosts of Vietnam. The Taliban plainly are unlikely to be destroyed from the air, but Afghanistan is a wild and untamable land, and there is little reason to believe that U.S. ground troops would have greater success in subduing it than the Soviets had. Moscow, remember, was willing to sustain a far higher level of casualties than Washington might — indeed, for years the U.S. media referred to Afghanistan as the "Soviets' Vietnam."
The mission, too, is not entirely clear. The U.S. wants to get rid of the Taliban because the ruling militia has provided sanctuary for an organization waging a vicious war of terrorism against America. But in order to achieve this, Washington wants the Taliban to be replaced by a broad-based government comprising all of Afghanistan's querulous tribes (including moderate breakaway Taliban elements) and the country's possessive neighbors. And that goal has partly governed the conduct of the war, for example discouraging the Northern Alliance from seizing Kabul for fear this would simply antagonize most Pashtuns. A broad post-Taliban consensus, however, remains as elusive today as it was four weeks ago.
Nobody's particularly optimistic that the Afghan civil war that began almost a decade ago is going to end any time soon. That makes the definition of victory for the U.S. that much more difficult, particularly as long as bin Laden remains at large, and it makes exit something of a conundrum.
The media may soon get over its four-week impatience, and settle in for a winter of low-key combat. President Bush and his cabinet members and generals have been at pains to remind us, all along, that this is a new type of war against a non-state actor, in which the definitions, strategies and yardsticks of all previous conflicts no longer apply. Still, if that puts U.S. ground troops into a long-term deployment in Afghanistan, expect to hear a lot more discussion of the Q-word on the Sunday talk shows.