Ten Years On - It's Time to Win

As the Afghan War surpasses its first decade, it is imperative that we require more from our political leadership - and more from ourselves - so as to mitigate another decade of conflict.  Over six thousand service members have died since September 11, 2001, including tens of thousands wounded.  We are still deeply involved in Iraq following the aftermath of that invasion and we're overtly and covertly engaged in conflicts throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa.  This has the look of a world war - only longer.

Ten years after the devastating attacks on September 11th, we have killed Bin Laden and prevented a major attack on U.S. soil, but we have yet to muster the political will to win this global conflict.  Not the will to send more kids overseas to fight an ongoing war, but the will back home to win.

While teenage and 20-something Marines patrol remote villages in Afghanistan, while Raymond Davis and dozens more CIA officers like him hunt terrorist networks across Central Asia at great personal risk, the American public, media and political class fret over Donald Trump's claims that the President doesn't have a valid birth certificate.

It is not good enough for us to rely on the overwhelmingly disproportionate sacrifices from the all-volunteer military and intelligence communities and their families who bear the brunt of this war.  Our reliance on military "surges" as our only policy tool deepens their sacrifice - without end.

It's unconscionable to me that a ten year global war still rages and we have yet to mobilize our country to win it.  From the uneasy days after 9/11 to today, Americans are urged by their leaders and encouraged by each other to go about their business.  It started when President Bush famously told people to keep shopping after 9/11 and it continues today with the public's obsession over who will be on the ticket a year from now to challenge President Obama.

But what of the ten year war?

History can be instructive.  Below is an excerpt from an interview on the NPR program Fresh Air with Lester Brown, Founder of the World Watch Institute.  It's worth reading in its entirety, which is why I pasted it below.  It tells a story of how the political leadership responded to a seemingly insurmountable challenge and rapidly mobilized a nation to win.

President Roosevelt didn't exactly ask Americans to just keep shopping.

"Sometimes you're asked if you're an optimist or a pessimist, and someone answered that question recently and said it's too late to be a pessimist. And I think that sums it up well. But one of the things I do is go back and look at the economic history of World War II, and realize that we totally restructured the U.S. industrial economy almost overnight.

The attack on Pearl Harbor came on December 7th, 1941. It was extraordinarily successful in military terms, sinking, you know, sinking a large part of the U.S. Pacific fleet that happened to be at anchor there.

But then a month later, January 6th, 1942, President Roosevelt gave his State of the Union address in which he laid out arms production goals. He said we're going to produce 45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes, thousands of ships. And people just couldn't relate to that because we were still in a Depression mode economy at the time.

But what Roosevelt and his colleagues knew was that the largest concentration of industrial power in the world at the time was in the U.S. automobile industry. So after his State of the Union address, he called in the leaders of the industry and said because you guys represent such a large share of our industrial capacity, we are going to rely heavily on you to help us reach these arms production goals.

And they said well Mr. President, we're going to do whatever we can. But it's going to be a stretch producing cars and all these arms too. He said you don't understand. We're going to ban the sale of automobiles in the United States. And that's exactly what we did. And we'd been producing three million a year even during the Depression.

We banned the sale of automobiles. So from early 1942 until the end of 1944, there were essentially no cars produced in the United States and we exceeded every one of those arms production goals. In the end, we didn't produce 60,000 planes, we produced 229,000 planes.

I mean, even today, it's difficult to visualize how we could do that. But the encouraging thing is that we did that and it didn't take decades to restructure the U.S. industrial economy, it didn't take years. We did it in a matter of months. And if we did that then, then certainly we can restructure the energy economy much more rapidly than most people think and thus, be able to stabilize climate before it spirals out of control."

While voters and the media debate which clown should be on the ticket in 2012 to challenge President Obama, I would like to first know who is going to marshal US policy through the prism of winning this war.

Where is a comprehensive energy policy that truly mitigates the use of oil, one of the central political and economic destabilizing factors in our current war.  Countless energy targets have been called for in speech after speech, with little result.

Similarly, good economic policies strengthen the American economy and provide it flexibility to support transformative events like the so-called "Arab Spring", which could be the single most important long-term victory in our war against radical Islam - if it can be sustained.  To strengthen democratization efforts, we need to offer aid packages, infrastructure development, political and civil society support and economic trade packages.  That's how we bring the troops home.

The U.S. was attacked on December 7, 1941 and Roosevelt wanted 60,000 planes to fight back.  He got 229,000 of them.  Where are our planes?

He or she who can mobilize that kind of success - whether or not they have a verifiable birth certificate - gets my vote.