Foreign policy, Nolan Finley style

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 20, 2012 at 09:39:37 AM EST

From the same people who brought you the invasion of Iraq while not knowing the two major schools of Muslim thought.

But he stood out in this one for reminding the Obama administration that Taliban sensibilities weren't nearly as tender when they videotaped their beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, or when they hung the butchered remains of American contractors from an overpass.

Not to get all pointy-headed on you, but...

A) The Taliban is a political and religious movement whose ideology is drawn from a violent interpretation of Sharia blended with local, Pashtun tribal codes. It is rooted regionally, confined to the wilderness areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

B) Daniel Pearl was killed by al-Qaida in urban Karachi, Pakistan while tracking down the link between shoe bomber Richard Reid and al-Qaida. That one dude, who looked like he fresh off a five-day bender when photographed after his capture, says he did the deed personally. Al-Qaida, while hostile to Shiia, the other school of Islam, is neither confined to region nor necessarily steeped in the tribal codes of what the British once referred to as the Northwest Frontier. That is, the Taliban and al-Qaida are different things.

C) The four Blackwater contracters killed and maimed in Fallujah were not killed by the Taliban, since the Taliban has never operated in Iraq. They were killed by Iraqi insurgents, although it is unclear whether those responsible were locals enraged by a hamhanded American occupation or foreign fighters fighting under the banner "al-Qaida in Iraq" (an entirely different organization from al-Qaida the terrorist organization) who were encouraged by that. What is certain, however, is that the Taliban weren't involved.

Now, like Finley, I've never actually fought a battle. I did serve in the military, which does give some insight into the thought processes of military commanders, and I can tell you that desecrating the bodies of your enemy isn't something the military chain of command is likely to take any more lightly than have members of the Obama administration who Finley thinks are overreacting. Why? Because if there's anything that military commanders dislike, it is things that unnecessary complicate their mission.

Every four years, we hear about the horrors of negotiating with your enemies from whatever Republican is trying to throw red meat to his party's base. These people are so damned dumb, they not only can't learn from their failures they can't learn from their successes. The Surge in Iraq wasn't just successful because we flooded the country with a bunch of troops. There were intense negotiations and bribes floated to bring war-weary but also wary tribes from under the influence of factionalization and into the fold of a peaceful resolution. That is, they were encouraged by money and the perception of security to come to the negotiating table and settle differences there rather than with car bombs. This is a simple principle that has been at work with every insurgency in the modern time (the notable exception was the British put-down of an insurgency of isolated Chinese communists in Malaysia).

In other words, the same negotiating table that the Republican field regularly holds in contempt for the sake of mollifying their own base of ignorant, xenophobic bigots is a critical tool in ending conflicts and allowing trapped superpowers to extract themselves as painlessly as possible. That makes anything that complicates that, like desecrating the bodies of your enemies, a threat to national security threat. Certainly not as bad as selling secrets about America's military communications system to the Israelis, but anyone who thinks to comment on this kind of stuff ought to at least be expected to recognize that it's not in the nation's best interest to pass this sort of stuff off with a "boys will be boys" attitude.