My Man on Afghanistan

Here's my boy who wrote Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies Eyes in a super long interview. I couldn't stop reading it.

The truth is scary:

"To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing and, yes, by body counts. Not the fatuous body counts of Vietnam, but precise counts that will run to extremely large numbers. The piles of dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies wear no uniforms.

"Killing large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land mines, moreover, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and mountain passes too long, high, or numerous to close with U.S. soldiers. As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world."

And then there's this:

The fact is that any other terrorist group that America has ever thought would have been destroyed if it had as much damage visited on it as the directorate of operations at CIA has visited on al Qaeda. The president says we've destroyed two thirds of their leadership and arrested or killed 4,000 of them. And out of the next breath, he's saying they can detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. The plain fact is we, as a country, look at terrorists as criminals and arresting them is the answer. As long as we do that against al Qaeda and its allies, we're going to get licked every time, because it won't work.