[I normally avoid Kaplan with extreme prejudice. He takes geostrategy to a whole new level of fairy-tale chess. Not to mention hysteria; the man seems never to have met a country that wasn't tottering on the edge of collapse. But still and all, his comments at the end of this article about how empires collapse seems right on the money about both the dynamics and (somewhat inadvertantly) about the ideology: that even when they can see its a mug's game they feel compelled to go on because a non-imperial world order is literally inconceivable to them.]
[And lastly because even from an hysterical imperialist's point of view, more troops in Afghanistan seems crazy.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/opinion/07kaplan.html
The New York Times
October 7, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Beijings Afghan Gamble
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
<snip>
Bottom line: China will find a way to benefit no matter what the United
States does in Afghanistan. But it probably benefits more if we stay
and add troops to the fight. The same goes for Russia. Because of
continuing unrest in the Islamic southern tier of the former Soviet
Union, Moscow has an interest in America stabilizing Afghanistan
(though it would take a certain psychological pleasure from a
humiliating American withdrawal).
In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually
succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India
and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to
Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages
from any stability our armed forces would make possible.
Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military
finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to
empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling
in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the
fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other
rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on
the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by
allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.
Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious
withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our
decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends
worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our
enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice
in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.
But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets
for the "long war," history would suggest that over time we can more
easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power
from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very
last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal
Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and
others.
Robert D. Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American
Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic.