The illustration above is taken from the disastrous British First Afghan War of 1839-42, an imperial debacle and humiliating defeat for the army of Queen Victoria in which only one man from an expeditionary force of some 16,000 soldiers and civilians made it back alive through the Kyber Pass into what was then British India. Imperial Britain and her Queen did not give up on the idea of subjugating the Afghan tribes and dragging them into the 19th Century. They marched back into Afghanistan in 1878 and stayed for about three years. This time they were better led and considerably more successful, recapturing Kabul, winning a battle in which the Afghans were obliging enough to expose themselves to modern artillery and managing to march out with an intact army singing Gary Owen as they trekked back across the Kyber. The Afghan tribal region was a perrenial problem and kept the British and Indian army busy on the Northwest frontier for the next 50 years. A young Winston Churchill, a second Lieutenant only a few years out of Sandhurst, received his baptism of fire in fighting the Pashtuns on that frontier in 1897 and wrote a very good book about the experience called THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE, the first of many volumes that he would write over the next 55 years. Young Churchill might have had some good advice for America's political and military leaders in our never-ending war with the Taliban Pashtun tribes and he certainly would not have been shy about giving it, as indeed he did give it to Britain's political and military leaders back in 1900. They were, to put it mildly, not amused by Lieutenant Churchill's recommendations on Afghan policy. No wonder President Obama returned the Oval Office bust of Churchill to the British Embassy.

The American and NATO war in Afghanistan had entered its ninth year when President Obama announced at West Point his intention to send another 30,000 soldiers and Marines to give General Stanley McChrystal a total of 98,000 American and 30,000 NATO troops to win the war. Of course that brings up the question of how we shall define victory or in the President's immortal words "finishing the job" and winning his campaign described "war of necessity." Since the President also announced that a withdrawal from Afghanistan will begin in 18 months, maybe we are not really sure what it will mean to win the war. I have never heard President Obama use the word victory, perhaps because it is a politically incorrect term and insensitive to the people we are fighting against. No matter how you define it, defeating a large-scale insurgency is a long undertaking, the average successful counterinsurgency campaign being ten years. No one from the Romans in Iberia and Judea to the British in Kenya and Malaya has managed to do it within four years. Frankly, from my study of history, this 18-month surge strategy sounds like a formula for losing a war and losing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fine well-trained young men in uniform for nothing. It will also serve to boost the morale of all our enemies around the world and make it difficult for any future President to summon the national will for another conflict with radical Islamists.

Now I am not advocating a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. On the contrary, I supported the overthrow of the Taliban regime by a small U.S. special operations force and the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance in the fall of 2001. It was a masterpiece of unconventional warfare, which left al-Qaida and the Taliban in shock and awe over its audacity and stunning success. I also supported and continue to do so the Donald Rumsfeld strategy of keeping a light footprint in the country, holding Kabul, Kandahar and western part of the country and striking at selected targets in the Hindu Kush with raids and unmanned drones. This strategy kept casualty rates low, fewer than a thousand NATO dead since 2001, while keeping the Taliban and al-Qaida off balance. If necessary, and I suspect it will be so, we can maintain this low level war very nicely with around 50 or 60,000 U.S. and NATO troops for another decade without too much strain. In counterinsurgency warfare, the best way to win is to let someone else do the fighting for you. Whether Montagnards and Nung tribes in South Vietnam or Sunni tribes in the Anbar Province of Iraq, this is the most cost effective strategy for beating insurgents. Reward the Afghan tribes that will fight the Taliban with money, rifles, machine guns and Viagra and make sure they understand that it is their local war to win or lose. You also provide them equalizers denied to the enemy in the form of U.S. special ops advisors and the trump card of U.S. airpower. The last thing you do is take the war over from them and look very much like a foreign occupation army of unbelievers in their midst.

A lost war is like the old definition of pornography; it is hard to describe, but you know it when you see it..... as on the refugee-packed roads of France in May and June 1940 and on the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon back in April 1975. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps function as the best manuever army in history, capable of decisively defeating any army currently constituted on the planet. That is what they are good at and it was not something that came easily. In the hollow army years of the 1970s, the U.S. Army was widely known as the gang that couldn't shoot straight, a state of readiness that was exposed in blood and fire at Desert One in the Iranian desert in April 1980. The Reagan Defense budgets, a new generation of weapons and equipment and years of hard training transformed the U.S. Army into a war winning juggernaut. My fear is that a decade of war and nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan followed by inevitable Obama budget cuts will produce another hollow army and it is not an unfounded fear. It is time to get out of the nation building business, where we have never had much success as can be seen in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and even Iraq. The grand strategy of the United States has always been to keep adversaries away from our shore and prevent any adversary from establishing hegemony over too much of the Eurasian landmass. Well, the Taliban is not going to be marching into Islamabad or New Dehli any time soon and will have a tough enough time controlling the mountain region on the border with Pakistan. Predator drones and special ops forces can continue the hunt for the remnants of al-Qaida and the Taliban leaders and that is what they fear the most. The Taliban and al-Qaida can only win if they are able to come to grips at close quarters with their American enemy on their own terrain. Why give these insurgents, and they are masters of the art, exactly what they want? At the end of the day Afghanistan, a tribal region which has not been a nation as we understand the term since the 1960s, will remain a misgoverned cesspool no matter what happens and we already have enough misgoverned cesspools on our hands....... Detroit and New Orleans for example.

Yes, President Obama is indeed correct that we are at war with al-Qaida and they are no doubt hatching other mass murder plots on our soil as I type. Al-Qaida will find a home and refuge in any radicalized, failed states or communities where they can operate out in the open and train recruits coming in from around the world. Somalia, the Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon and even parts of Hamburg and London are already shaping up to be the next Afghanistans. The problem we have is that we possess neither the resources, military manpower or national will to chase al-Qaida and their local franchises from cesspool to cesspool in a frenzy of counterinsurgency and counter-terrorist operations. There is a far less expensive and infinitely more rational way to keep al-Qaida and its millions of sympathizers from our shores. However, it is also politically incorrect and hugely unpopular with the elites of both American political parties. Yes, I am talking about controlling our borders and keeping track of everyone who comes here and maybe, just maybe, saying that we do not want immigrants and visitors from countries that are infested with Islamic radicalism. Instead of sending 30,000 additional troops to the mountains of Afghanistan, why not send them instead to the southern border of the United States to put a stop once and for all to the illegal mass migration from nations that look upon us a social safety valve to dump their least productive and often criminal citizenry. The good old U.S.A. will need many things to remain the leading economic and military global power through the 21st century. One thing it will not need and will prove an intolerable burden are tens of millions of unskilled Third World laborers with grade school educations and high birth rates. Since we will not gather the political will do this until it is too late, it is probable that the U.S. will not remain the leading economic and military global power through the 21st Century.

When the terrorists come they will most likely hide their presence within that tide of Third World migration. One day, just as sure as God made little green apples, a truck load of processed U-235 or weapons grade plutonium will be driven across or smuggled under our border and used to detonate a terrorist nuclear device in an American city. The people who assemble the nuclear device may be nominal American citizens, radicalized to violent Jihadism in the local Mosque, or legal residents on student visas, sent as sleeper agents, as were most of the 9/11 hijackers, six of whom were even registered to vote. If we are fortunate, the death toll from the low-yield atomic fireball and subsequent fallout will be fewer than a hundred thousand with economic consequences that will be unimaginable. Then and only then will a significant number of Americans, those living here who are not of the hyphenated variety, rise up like a howling mob and demand that the gates be closed and the walls guarded. Obama can send a million soldiers and Marines, not that we have a million soldiers and Marines, to Aghanistan for 18 months and it will still leave us vulnerable to catastrophic attack without border security, and we mean the American border.