So...bombs kind of suck

On last night's Bill Moyers' Journal, the two guests for the first half of his program were Marilyn Young, a history professor at NYU with an upcoming book titled Bombing Civilians: a Twentieth Century History, and Pierre Sprey, ex-Pentagon official and former underling to Robert "strict adherence to rationality is itself a form of insanity" McNamara. Sprey is a controversial figure in military circles after his "defection" in the late 70s when he dared to suggest that the defense budgets were maybe a bit too high and that we were spending our money on ineffective weapons anyway.

They start off the discussion by stating how disappointed they were with the January 22nd air strikes in Pakistan, advocating that the new administration should reconsider the effectiveness of an intensified military strategy in the region. No doubt plenty on the left were outraged: Democracy Now! and - a little less hysterically - Lionel Beehner of Huffington Post represented many people's fears that this could be the first indication of a lack of real change on Obama's part. Pakistanis, too, rushed to point out the counter productivity of such attacks.

They have a point. I think it's worthwhile to watch the whole clip, but the two most salient critiques against both the troop increase and an increased arial assault are that we are operating under a backwards assumption and that bombing campaigns, the implicit purposes of which are to avoid politically damaging heavy casualties on the bombers' side and also to dissuade others from fighting by seeing how devastating such resistance can be, don't work.

The backward assumption, what Sprey calls the Petraeus Doctrine, is that we have to deal with the security issue before we begin work on the political issue. That is, in fact, the most prevalent objection to the alternative of seeking a political solution to the problems in both Afghanistan and Pakistan: how, dissenters ask, can it be possible to forge a stable political system in the midst of a war? Well, I can think of one time when it worked out. Sure, it might not be a completely accurate parallel, but I think it's an indication that such a thing is possible

I think Sprey and Young's second point, that bombing campaigns don't work, is much more devastating. Young reminds us that neither the English government nor the German government buckled much under intense bombing. They go on to state that there really is little we can do about collateral damage. The US might not be deliberately targeting civilians, but civilians die nonetheless - just not in as great a number as in WWII. The result is that we are creating recruits for terrorist organizations.

Moyers goes on to ask his panel if they can think of any time when a bombing campaign was effective in ending a conflict. Neither can come up with an answer: it was ineffective in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, the first and second Iraq Wars, etc...

Well, it actually was effective in the Pacific Front of World War II. They seem to have forgotten the two atomic bombs. They forced the Japanese to surrender and saved the lives of "millions" who could have been lost in a land invasion.

So, it's clear then: if we are to assume that the only successful deterrent in the history of bombing was Hiroshima and Nagasaki then we have to nuke Afghanistan, and, probably, parts of Pakistan too if we don't want a politically unfeasible number of American soldiers killed.

This is obviously insane and nobody who does not belong on the villain side of a Batman comic would suggest it unless in the direst apocalypse-as-retaliation nightmare scenario.

And yet the alternative to heavy bombing - increased troop levels - doesn't seem that much better. Obama is increasing the number of troops, but by a ridiculously minimal amount. He would be hard pressed to find the political will necessary to send the hundreds of thousands of troops into the region to stabilize it. Even then, that didn't work for the 100,000 or so Soviet troops and the 350,000 Afghanistan troops who were fighting the Mujahideen.

Let me go on a brief tangent here to say how utterly fucking ridiculous our inability to learn from history is. Vietnam didn't work so well for us. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan it didn't work for them either. The break up of the USSR shortly after that war ended led people to call it the Russians' Vietnam. Now we are back in Afghanistan, fighting the very same rebels whom an insane drunkard congressman bravely exploited the loopholes in our defense spending laws to arm. Not only did we not learn the lessons from our own past we didn't learn them from our former enemy in the same goddamn country.

It's depressing, immensely and utterly depressing, that in the one area where we needed change the most, Obama seems to be pursuing the same failed strategies that have plagued both parties for decades. Vietnam ruined LBJ's chance to more stringently fight for social change in the US. We are in the midst of a serious economic crisis and it would be disastrous if Afghanistan consumed the Obama administration in the ways in which Young and, particular, Sprey fear. I'm optimistic that we can change course, if solely because Obama has the refreshing tendency to surround himself with people who aren't carbon copies of his ideological bent and actually listening to them. We'll see.

(Related: see Robert Farley's takes on abolishing the Air Force.)