Assymetrical Peace

It's like rain on your weddin' day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
And who would've thought, it figures
--Ironic, Alanis Morissette

And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back
--If You Could Read My Mind,
Gordon Lightfoot

Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky
--Delta Dawn, Tanya Tucker
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We understand the concept of Assymetrical Warfare, but we are disingenuous about what amounts to our suing for an Assymetrical Peace (AP) with Afghanistan.

Yet as of May 1, Presidents Obama and Karzai's Strategic Agreement has achieved just that. Some historical consideration is in order.

In the 20th century the U.S. fought two World Wars and two major Cold Wars. World War I ended in an Armistice; World War II with the surrender of the bad guys, just before we transformed them into trusted allies indispensable to the security of the free world. In Vietnam we weaseled our way out of war by negotiating a "peace with honor", which was actually a less-than honorable withdrawal.

At the end of Vietnam, the main U.S. goal was to unstick the Velcro that had attached us to the Vietnamese people, but to make it seem like we would not then screw them to the wall in the face of all evidence to the contrary. To this end, all U.S. negotiations insisted they were brave and well-led, and that we would champion them until the end of time.

During that period Ranger was a Special Forces soldier assigned to the task of Vietnamizing the war, which was code for, it's over. When the 5th SF Group left country, all of us on those two C141's knew positively the war was lost; to the more sanguine, it was simply not won.

Truthfully, Ranger really did not care since he did what his Army told him to do, and that was to pull up stakes and move on. His loyalty was to the United States and not to the Republic of Vietnam.

2012, the same scenario presents in the Afghanistan disengagement, which is the same as with Iraq. Assymetrical Peace is simply the conclusion to a military engagement in a country in which our allies do not love us and have nothing to offer us for our efforts. We do not love them, either, and will be happy to be shed of them, except politesse demands we must pretend this is not the case.

The handover of security to the Afghan forces will be as successful as Vietnamization (not), except we will never get cheap quality underwear from them as we do now from Vietnam.

Although the trend to AP began in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq are the first engagements in which our allies are more disaffected by our policies than are our enemies. In fact, the concepts of enemy versus friend are difficult to draw. We now fear our allies more than the people we are supposedly fighting.

They know we just want out, and the U.S. will pay handsomely for the permission to extract ourselves from our self-imposed quagmire, but with a veneer of dignity. Another country has gotten the shaft of empty U.S. promises of democracy, freedom and nationhood.

The agreement itself is a sham; the U.S military can no longer raid homes, but the President says our country will keep troops on station for Counterterrorism operations (CT). How can we do CT if we cannot raid their safe houses? We should drop the pretense and pull a retrograde.

It is an odd agreement in that it disengages us from an ally, versus a warring enemy. This is an inversion of the concepts of allegiance and surrender. But there is more to this agreement than a move to disengage. This is a president exceeding his Constitutional limits and a legislature willing to allow for this.

Everything we thought we knew has become assymetrical and alien. After 10+ years of fighting, the U.S. has no definable enemy with whom to sign an armistice or peace treaty; now we sign them with the people we were there to democratize. Instead of planting democracy, we have radicalized the entire region while pretending otherwise.

The Strategic Agreement will not bring peace to the Afghan people.