Disaster in Afghanistan

The Small Wars Journal describes the growing violence in Afghanistan -- which is now more deadly to American troops than Iraq -- and the seemingly insurmountable problems facing an American military that is fighting two wars. Lost in a flurry of presidential campaign headlines and financial worries, the story of Afghanistan is not inspiring:

The next president of the United States will inherit a foreign policy nightmare: wars on two fronts, an overstretched military, a resurgent Taliban and a reconstituted Al Qaeda based far from America's reach.

“The next president will face a situation where, in the next year or two, he will have to make the decision that faced the Soviets in 1988--either to massively reinforce and to wage a war very aggressively, or to get out,” says Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit. “That's the inheritance of the next president.”

But the next president's options in Afghanistan will be limited by a depleted military, with some units already on their fifth deployment. “The next president will be told: 'You need to spend more money on training troops. You need to recapitalize the military in equipment. And you might have to think about increasing the size of the military, especially ground forces,'” says Tom Ricks, author of Fiasco. “As one officer at the Pentagon put it to me: 'We're out of Schlitz. There are no extra troops left on the shelf. We're at our limit.'”

Even with more troops, any progress in Afghanistan will be hostage to developments just across the border. As long as the Taliban and Al Qaeda are able to launch attacks from their sanctuaries in the lawless tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan, any policy is likely to fail. But cracking down on the insurgent safe havens in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas presents enormous challenges of its own.

The "Forgotten War" may well become central to America's foreign policy decisions in the near future, and will present a massive challenge to the incoming president. The stakes of this battle, as described above, are high -- nothing less than the reputation of the United States' military is at stake. A forced withdrawal from Afghanistan at the hands of the same Taliban forces that were defeated in the early stages of the war would be humiliating and encourage extremists all over the world.