Posts tagged as “Afghanistan”

Why Does the West Embrace Ukraine, but Not Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan?

Why Does the West Embrace Ukraine, but Not Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan?

By John R Guardiano on April 9, 2022

Politics and culture, not race and ethnicity, explain why we in the West feel a real sense of kinship with Ukrainians.

Does racism or ethnocentrism explain why we in the West identify with Ukrainians to a far greater extent than we ever did Syrians, Afghans, or Iraqis? That’s what many commentators would have us believe.

“We care more about Ukraine because the victims are white,” declares Newsweek columnist Michael Shank.

“The alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a [racist] dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us,” argues Nikole-Hannah-Jones, founder of the hugely influential 1619 Project.

‘The coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to Western media compared to their browner and blacker counterparts,” adds MSNBC host Joy Reed.

The Racial Prism. Of course, it is not surprising that American and European leftists have fabricated a racial angle through which to view Russia’s war on Ukraine and thereby bash the West.

The Left, after all, has a deep-seated antipathy for the West and has long used racism, real and imagined, as a cudgel to try and delegitimize the West.

As usual, though, they are wrong, because they conflate race and ethnicity with politics and culture. They mistake a distinctive Western outlook or attitude with a determinative racial identity.

But the truth is that the West is not defined by race; it is multiethnic and multiracial; and it includes people of all hues, complexions, and colors.

True, most Westerners are caucasian and Christian, and the determinative political and cultural ideas that gave rise to the West originated in Christian Europe.

But that does not mean—and historically, it has not meant—that only European Christians can be Westerners or Western in their outlook.

To the contrary: Israel, Japan and South Korea, for instance, must now be considered part of the West; and these countries have relatively few Christians and few Europeans. But their commitment to liberal democracy and democratic civic engagement places them squarely in the Western camp.

America, likewise, cannot be well understood or appreciated without acknowledging the important contributions to our nation’s history made by Jews and African Americans.

And so, while it is undeniably true that we in the West identify with Ukrainians to a far greater extent than we ever did Syrians, Afghans, or Iraqis, the reason for this has nothing to do with race and ethnicity and everything to do with politics and culture.

Indeed, it is not because Ukrainians “look like us,” but rather because they think and act like us, that we feel a sense of kinship with them.

Ukraine, after all, clearly yearns to be part of the West—something that could never be said about Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

That’s why Ukraine seeks membership in the European Union and NATO. And that’s why even Russian-speaking parts of Eastern Ukraine are manifestly anti-Russian and reject Putin’s attempt to subjugate their country within a new Russian empire.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, likewise, speaks in Churchillian tones, invokes Shakespeare, and cites critical milestones in American and Western history—Pearl Harbor, 9/11, World War II, Dunkirk, the Holocaust…

Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. No political leader in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan ever spoke so movingly or so compellingly, or in with such fluency in the Western political and cultural lexicon.

And whereas Afghan President Ashram Ghani fled Afghanistan as the Taliban descended upon Kabul, Zelensky refused to leave Kyiv when the Russians invaded.

In other words, there are very clear and obvious reasons why we in the West feel a real sense of kinship with the people of Ukraine, and these reasons have absolutely nothing to do with race and ethnicity.

Instead, what we in the West identify with is the Ukrainians’ fighting spirit, their desire for freedom and independence, their will to win, and their desire to become part of our political and cultural patrimony.

Indeed, if the Ukrainians were all black or brown, African or Middle Eastern, and exhibited precisely the same Western outlook and behavior, we would feel the same sense of kinship with them that we do now.

Our bond with Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Ukrainians “look like us” (meaning caucasian Americans and caucasian Europeans). This is a truly ludicrous and farcical notion that defies the empirical evidence which shows otherwise.

What draws us to Ukraine is the country’s political idealism, the Ukrainians’ manifest commitment to liberal democracy and civic engagement, and their overall (Western) cultural outlook. Race and ethnicity are obviously irrelevant.

Feature photo credit: The stark differences between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and former Afghan President Ashram Ghani (R) go a long way toward explaining why the West has embraced Ukraine much more so than Afghanistan. Courtesy of Khaama Press.

Why Has the West Been So Late to Arm Ukraine?

Why Has the West Been So Late to Arm Ukraine?

By John R Guardiano on March 5, 2022

America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan—two countries that seemed to lack the will to fight for themselves. They did not realize: Ukraine is very different.

“We must get aid to Ukraine NOW,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). “No half-measures.”

“Please NATO leaders, send all MIG fighter jets that we have—70 altogether, 27 alone in Poland—to Ukraine right now. NOW!” added Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia under President Obama and now a Professor of Political Science at Stanford.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must “put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor Monday for the U.S. to send desperately needed military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine now,” agreed Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

“Waiting on the congressional calendar is unacceptable when people are dying,” he tweeted.

Finally, albeit quite belatedly, America and NATO are arming the Ukrainians. What started out as a token gesture designed simply to show solidarity and friendship with Ukraine has morphed into a serious and sustained effort to enable the Ukrainians to fight off a brutal Russian invasion.

Will it be too little too late? Let us hope not. But it is instructive to understand why the West has been so tardy and myopic about the moral, military, and geo-strategic necessity of arming Ukraine early and earnestly.

The reason is Iraq and Afghanistan. Old generals sometimes mistakenly fight the last war. America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West’s two most recent wars required many American and NATO “boots on the ground” for more than a decade to achieve, ultimately, very little. Western policymakers feared that Ukraine would be another allegedly hopeless cause not worth the hassle and the expense.

The expectation was that, in the face of a vastly superior Russian military force, the Ukrainians would run, hide, and fold—just as, candidly, many Iraqis and many Afghans had abandoned the battlefield in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“Three U.S. officials have told Newsweek they expect Ukraine’s capital Kyiv to fall to incoming Russian forces within days, and the country’s resistance to be effectively neutralized soon thereafter…

“They expect Kyiv to be taken within 96 hours, and then the leadership of Ukraine to follow in about a week’s time.”

That was written Feb. 24, in the early hours of the Russian invasion. Today, 10 days later, March 5, retired Army four-star General Jack Keane says that Russian military forces are “not even close” to Kyiv.

Ukrainians Fight. “They have not been able to encircle the city, which is their plan,” Keane told Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on Fox News.

The Ukrainians have held them up… You just can’t give them enough credit… They’re standing off a formidable force in the north [of Ukraine], and that force has stalled.

The [Russians] have lost their operational momentum, and there’s nobody behind them.

I mean, there’s not 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 troops that they’re [the Russians] gonna be able to bring up here. They [the Russians] have committed their forces…

So when Zelensky’s screaming [that] he needs arms and ammunition, and the rest of it, we better be getting it to him.

Because he has real opportunity here to do some serious damage to the Russians, and it certainly, [will] impact what an occupation would look like.

Volodymyr Zelensky. Western policymakers, obviously, did not know or understand Ukraine. They did not know Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and they did not understand the Ukrainian people.

Far from running, hiding, and folding, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have been profiles in courage, tenacity and determination.

“I need ammunition, not a ride,” said Zelensky when the United States offered to evacuate him from the country, warning that Russian mercenaries had been sent to find and assassinate him.

France 24 reports from Kyiv:

“Our fighting spirit is 120 percent. We’re ready to defend our country. “We’re not going to surrender. Never,” says Mikhail, a military engineer.

“Eight years of war in Donbas and still Putin hasn’t admitted his troops were there. But in those eight years, the Ukrainian military has learned how to fight its vile enemy. And now the Russians are suffering heavy losses.”

Another soldier says, “We’re not afraid. We’ve grown tired of fear. We have no other choice but to defend our country. We have to win for our next generation of children—for our future and our freedom.”

The New York Times reports:

In a matter of days, Kyiv went from a busy, cosmopolitan European capital to a war zone—with many citizens abandoning their day jobs and taking up the arms being shipped in en masse.

Now, the newly armed civilians and members of various paramilitary groups are fighting under the loose command of the military in an organization called the Territorial Defense Forces.

“The national call to arms and the mobilization of ordinary citizens to repel the Russian invader does not have any obvious parallels in recent global conflicts,”Mats Berdal, a professor of conflict and security studies at King’s College London, said.

Indeed, Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan, and Western policymakers should have known this. Iraq and Afghanistan were, in many ways, civil wars within existing countries. Ukraine, by contrast, is being invaded by a foreign country, Russia, that seeks to conquer and subjugate it.

Ukrainians recall the horrid brutality of life under Soviet occupation during the Cold War, notes Eugene Bondarenko, a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.

Thus they see Russia’s latest attempt to subjugate them “as nothing less than an existential threat… Putin has come to destroy Ukrainian culture, language, society and statehood. That’s why Ukraine fights,” Bondarenko explains.

Cohen and Clausewitz. “Why did so many highly intelligent and educated observers get so much wrong?” asks Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

In large part because of the conventional Western “focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war.” Cohen references Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War to understand why Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan.

“War,” Cohen writes, echoing Clausewitz,

is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear.

Patriotic fervor, hatred of the invader, and knowledge of place and home weigh a great deal, and thus far so they have.

But a passionate desire for freedom and independence, coupled with an indomitable will to win, can carry a people on so far.

Brute Russian force and a clear Russian willingness to commit war crimes ultimately will prevail—unless America and NATO can rush arms and equipment to Ukraine fast enough to alter the political and military equation.

Will the West succeed or will it be a day late and a dollar short, as they say? We don’t know. Time will tell. Stay tuned.

What we do know is that the war in Ukraine is very different from the recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the West needs to respond accordingly.

Feature photo credit: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (R), courtesy of Newsweek.

The Critical Military Strategy to Stop Putin and Save Ukraine

The Critical Military Strategy to Stop Putin and Save Ukraine

By John R Guardiano on February 13, 2022

Economic sanctions are not enough. Russians must be killed on a daily basis in a sustained insurgency financed and supported by America and NATO.

According to the Daily Mail, one prominent Russian official said yesterday that Vladimir Putin “doesn’t give a s**t” about the risk of Western economic sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine.

That official, Viktor Tatarintsev, Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, told the Aftonbladet newspaper: “The more the West pushes Russia, the stronger the Russian response will be.”

That’s probably true, especially since the economic sanctions that would hurt Russia’s ruling oligarchic elite the most are off the table.

Economic Sanctions. The West, for instance, could bar Russia from the global banking system by denying it access to SWIFT, the international network of financial institutions that underlie cross-border trade and investment worldwide.

Such a move would devastate the Russian economy, but also hurt the West Europeans, who depend on Russian gas and commodities. Which is why, sadly, Russian SWIFT denial is off the table.

President Biden has unwisely ruled out the use of American ground troops in Ukraine. However, this doesn’t mean he necessarily has precluded any and all military options.

In fact, any deterrence strategy that is designed to stop Russian subjugation of Ukraine must have a military component. And that military component must be widely telegraphed and loudly trumpeted to have a full deterrent effect.

The West’s military strategy must be to maximize the number of invading Russians killed, maimed, and crippled on a daily basis over a period of years. To bleed Russia in an asymmetric war of attrition.

To wage a guerrilla war that saps the Russian will to fight and to occupy foreign lands. To send Russians home in body bags each and every day. To make their occupation of Ukraine, or any other free and independent state, a living hell.

This is eminently doable—especially with American military aid and assistance.

Russian, after all, was utterly incapable of subduing Afghanistan in the 1980s. American military aid to the Afghan mujahideen made the Russian occupation there untenable.

Too many Russian boys were coming home in body bags; and so, the Soviets gave up and abjectly withdrew. The price of occupation was too high; the cost too great.

A similar stiff-armed resistance to any Russian occupation would form in western Ukraine. Ukrainians there despise Putin’s Russia. They seek Ukrainian independence and to align their country with the West.

Ukrainian Insurgency. A “Russian invasion would be deeply unpopular and Kremlin forces would find themselves operating in a hostile environment ideal for asymmetric warfare,” writes Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian minister of defense who left office in 2020.

In fact, armed and capable militias already exist in western Ukraine and would eagerly take the fight to the Russians. American military advisers should work with these militias and other remnants of the Ukrainian military, so that Ukraine can wage an effective guerrilla war against Russia.

Of course, no one expects Ukraine to defeat Russia militarily, because it can’t. Ukraine is overmatched. But success in a guerrilla war depends on political success, not outright military victory.

Politically, Ukraine can win by ensuring that Russia pays a high, exorbitant, and ongoing price for invading and occupying their country.

The key to success lies in ensuring that, each and every day, Russians are killed, maimed, and crippled. The casualty and death toll matters, not battlefield victories.

Russia cannot sustain an unceasing daily death toll. Putin may be a dictator, but his legitimacy as the Russian ruler, and the legitimacy of his government, still requires popular acquiescence.

This acquiescence will quickly dissipate if Russians come home each and every day for months on end in body bags: dead, maimed, and crippled.

American Support. The good news is that, according to press reports, American Green Berets and other U.S. Special Forces have been working closely with their Ukrainian counterparts to prepare them for a guerrilla war against Russia.

The U.S. Sun reports:

Behind the scenes, several hundred US Green Beret special forces have been working with the Ukrainians to ensure Russia faces a bloodbath in the country.

The CIA has also been working on secret training that has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians”, a former agency official has said.

And Ukrainian forces are already being equipped with anti-tank weapons by the UK, which guerrilla forces would use to create killing zones for massed Russian armoured forces.

“By combining serving military units with combat veterans, reservists, territorial defense units and large numbers of volunteers,”Zagorodnyuk writes,

Ukraine can create tens of thousands of small and highly mobile groups capable of attacking Russian forces. This will make it virtually impossible for the Kremlin to establish any kind of administration over occupied areas or secure its lines of supply.

Of course, the success of any Ukrainian insurgency depends in large measure on how much material support it receives from the United States and other NATO countries.

And the deterrent effect of any potential Ukrainian insurgency depends on how well that insurgency is trained and resourced, and how real or credible it appears to Putin and his generals.

The bottom line: the economic sanctions that America and NATO have conjured up likely will do little to stop or stymie Russian efforts to subjugate Ukraine.

But what might well cause Putin to say “nyet” is the possibility of a real and sustained insurgency financed and supported indefinitely by America and NATO.

We haven’t heard much about it, unfortunately; but let’s hope and pray that Putin and his generals have. It may be Ukraine’s only chance to retain its independence—and it may be Europe’s only chance for peace.

Feature photo credit: The U.S. Sun.

America First—In Ukraine, Asia, and Elsewhere

America First—In Ukraine, Asia, and Elsewhere

By John R Guardiano on February 6, 2022

Some on the Right have learned the wrong military lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly believe the United States should support Ukraine and check Russian imperialism. However, there are a few noisy pols, egged on by a small contingent of conservative journalists, who beg to differ. Why?

Because they are isolationists or non-interventionists who recall the Iraq War and vow “never again.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for instance, told the New York Times that his skepticism about U.S. efforts to support Ukraine stem largely from “regrets about his own role in promoting the Iraq War.”

The American Conservative’s Helen Andrews, likewise, laments “seeing a lot of the good-old neocons, like, the same folks from the Iraq War, coming back and getting back in the saddle again, and saying exactly the same things that they did last time.”

Their rhetoric now, she warns, “is not that different from what it was in the Iraq War.”

This skepticism of U.S. military intervention is understandable given the unsatisfactory conclusion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What, then, ought to be the lessons learned from these two most recent conflicts and how do they apply to the situation now unfolding in Ukraine?

Nation-Building. First, nation-building is difficult and laborious and ought not be undertaken unless we are prepared for many years, and perhaps decades, of military and diplomatic engagement.

But here’s the thing: Ukraine is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It is far more advanced and developed.

A functioning nation-state and a legitimate government already exist. These do not need to be built from scratch. We are not trying to create something new and unique; we are trying to assist something old and established.

Military Occupation. Second, military occupation of a country can precipitate adverse political repercussions, which can be self-defeating—especially if the ultimate goal is simply to eliminate a threat and leave.

But here’s the thing: no one is proposing that the United States invade or occupy Ukraine.

U.S. Military Advisers. Third, small numbers of U.S. military advisers embedded with indigenous forces are a decisive force multiplier. They can dramatically improve indigenous military capabilities and strengthen their will to fight and win.

Afghanistan. The most vivid and memorable example of this, of course, was the initial war in Afghanistan (2001), where small numbers of CIA officers worked closely with the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban from power.

The Afghanis did most of the fighting and dying; but their military capabilities and will to fight were immeasurably strengthened by the presence of U.S. military advisers.

This same dynamic played out at the end of the war in Afghanistan.

By President Trump’s final year in office, the United States had withdrawn just about all of its troops from Afghanistan, but crucially, retained a small contingent of advisers who helped to buck up the Afghan national military.

Again, the Afghans did almost all of the fighting and dying.

True, this did not result in a classic military victory; however, it did achieve a modus vivendi that kept the Taliban at bay. And many informed military observers, such as Bing West, believe this modus vivendi could have been sustained indefinitely at minimal cost.

The defeat of ISIS, likewise, was achieved with U.S. military airpower and U.S. military advisers playing a crucial support role for Kurdish and Iraqi forces, who did almost all of the fighting and dying.

Since at least 2015, the United States and its NATO allies have advised and trained with Ukraine’s military, albeit on a very limited and circumscribed basis, and far removed from the front lines of combat.

A more robust and strategic military advisory role could be a decisive force multiplier, just as it was in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This does not mean, obviously, that the United States should invade or occupy Ukraine. Nor does it mean that the United States should wage war on Russia.

What it does mean is that the United States should forward deploy to Ukraine and Eastern Europe critical military personnel and weapons systems to buck up our allies and strengthen their military capabilities.

This is the essence of deterrence. It is what Ronald Reagan meant by “peace through strength.”

Lessons Learned. So yes, there are important lessons to be learned from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, they are not the lessons of isolationism and non-interventionism that some on the Right seem to have internalized.

Instead, the lesson is this: while the United States can be too heavy-handed militarily, it also can be too averse to military engagement, and neither extreme is wise or good.

For without American military engagement, nothing good in the world ever happens. Our enemies take advantage of our absence to promote a world order that harms our interests and benefits them.

Middle Course. For this reason, we must steer a middle course between isolationism or non-interventionism and military invasion and occupation.

We must remain militarily engaged on the frontiers of freedom—in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the South China Sea—to keep our enemies, the enemies of freedom, on their heels, at bay, and on the defensive.

America: first, last, and always.

Feature photo credit: Tucker Carlson, courtesy of The Independent, and Helen Andrews, courtesy of HerAndrews.com.

Why Is Russia Now Threatening Ukraine?

Why Is Russia Now Threatening Ukraine?

By John R Guardiano on January 14, 2022

Biden’s weakness gave license to Putin’s aggression.

When, last August, Joe Biden abjectly surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, he and his administration said this was necessary because the United States has no strategic interests there and must pivot, instead, to confront a rising China.

Never mind that, as William Lloyd Stearman points out, Bagram Air Base is strategically located “about 400 miles west of China and 500 miles east of Iran.” This, Stearman writes, is obviously “a good place to have American assets.”

U.S. Surrender in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the President opted to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and abandon Bagram to the Taliban. Mr. Biden pretended that his decision to surrender would not have deleterious and far-reaching strategic consequences.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has proven Joe Biden wrong. The Russian dictator has amassed more than 100,000 troops and advanced military equipment along the Russian-Ukraine border, while demanding hegemonic control over Ukraine and other neighboring countries.

“We are concerned,” says White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, “that the Russian government is preparing for an invasion in Ukraine that may result in widespread human rights violations and war crimes should diplomacy fail to meet their objectives.”

Indeed, not since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 has the world seen such a brazen assault on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of an independent nation-state.

Why now? Because Putin has taken the measure of Joe Biden and realizes that our President is unwilling to protect the American national interest in Afghanistan or Europe.

In fact, Biden has pledged not to deploy U.S. ground troops or military advisers to Ukraine, and he has been reticent to arm the Ukrainian military for fear of provoking Putin.

As Bret Stephens observes, Putin and other anti-American dictators watched the American debacle in Afghanistan and concluded that “the United States is a feckless power.

“The current Ukraine crisis,” Stephens writes, “is as much the child of Biden’s Afghanistan debacle as the last Ukraine crisis [in 2014] was the child of Obama’s Syria debacle.”

In short, weakness is provocative. Weakness begets aggression. Weakness courts disaster. And weakness can have deleterious strategic consequences as we are now learning in Ukraine.

Featured photo credit: Joe Bidden and Vladimir Putin, courtesy of Fox News.