Bacevich Advocates a Cold War For Afghanistan

This plan, an alternative to all-out or all-in, sounds like the best plan yet:

The counterinsurgency campaign proposed in Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's strategic assessment will prolong the war for an additional five or 10 years. The war's most ardent proponents insist that President Obama has no choice: It's either fight on or invite another 9/11.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to a global counterinsurgency campaign. Instead of fighting an endless hot war in a vain effort to eliminate the jihadist threat, the United States should wage a cold war to keep the threat at bay. Such a strategy worked before. It can work again.

At the dawn of what the Bush administration came to call the Long War, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told U.S. military personnel: "We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter." In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the work of changing the way they live has turned out to be difficult, costly and problematic. After years of exertions, $1 trillion expended and more than 5,000 American troops lost, U.S. forces have yet to win a decisive victory. The high-tech American way of war developed during the 1990s (once celebrated in phrases such as "shock and awe" and "speed kills") stands thoroughly discredited.

Changing the way they live -- where "they" are the people of the Islamic world -- qualifies as mission impossible. The Long War is a losing proposition; it will break the bank and break the force.

Bacevich hits the nail on the head. We can't change the way they live. Only they can change the way they live. The Cold approach:

As during the Cold War, a strategy of containment should include comprehensive export controls and the monitoring of international financial transactions. Without money and access to weapons, the jihadist threat shrinks to insignificance: All that remains is hatred. Ideally, this approach should include strenuous efforts to reduce the West's dependence on Middle Eastern oil, which serves to funnel many billions of dollars into the hands of people who may not wish us well.

During the Cold War, containment did not preclude engagement, and it shouldn't today. To the extent that the United States can encourage liberalizing tendencies in the Islamic world, it should do so -- albeit with modest expectations. Sending jazz musicians deep into the Eastern Bloc in the old days was commendable, but Louis Armstrong's trumpet didn't topple the Soviet empire.

Finally, there is the matter of competition. Again, the Cold War offers an instructive analogy. During the long twilight struggle with the Soviets, competition centered on demonstrating scientific superiority (putting a man on the moon) and material superiority (providing cars, refrigerators and TVs for the masses). The West won. Read it all at WaPo

McCain's War On Russia

His age is showing and not in a good way. McCain is nostalgic for the Cold War, when Russia was an enemy the U.S. loved to hate.

Politico: Obama, Bush and others made their shifts in tone as the brutal, disproportional nature of Russia’s response began to become clear. But McCain’s confrontational stance on the Caucasus crisis stems from a long, personal skepticism of Russian intentions, one that dates back to the Cold War and which eased only briefly in the early 1990s.

Indeed, McCain, who publicly confronted Putin in Munich last year, may be the most visible — and now potentially influential — American antagonist of Russia. What remains to be seen is whether the endgame to the Georgia crisis makes McCain seem prophetic or headstrong and whether his muscular rhetoric plays a role in defining for voters the kind of commander in chief he would be.

What is not in doubt is McCain’s view of Russia. His belief that Moscow harbors dangerous aspirations goes back a long way, as does his fervent view that the only way to quiet the Russian bear is through tough talk and threat of real consequences — and certainly not through accommodation.
McCain has suggested he sees Russia’s danger to its neighbors through a long historical lens. As far back as 1996, when Russia was near economic ruin and governed by an erratic Boris Yeltsin, he warned of the danger of “Russian nostalgia for empire.”

That belief has not changed. “I think it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian empire," McCain told local reporters on his bus in Pennsylvania on Monday. "Not the Soviet Union, but the Russian empire."

Even if he is right and Russia has sinister ambitions, McCain shouldn't be poking and prodding because it makes the situation worse. It's Bush all over. Axis of evil. 

“This is a guy who grew up in the Cold War, was a military person and an honorable man, but has not changed his ways of thinking about Russia,” said Jonathan Elkind, a Democrat who served on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. The U.S. should be “explaining with precision what we don't like about their behavior, rather than saying he ‘looked into Putin’s eyes and saw KGB.’ That has an adolescent quality that gets us exactly nowhere.”

"Speaking directly to the Russians as opposed to in some pugnacious Cold War-fashion is what this modern challenge needs," said Mark Brzezinski, an informal foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign. "What Russia needs to know is that it will be globally ostracized — and Barack Obama's global approach is different from the state-to-state balance of power approach that is visible in the McCain talking points."

McCain is not alone, pundits are out in force talking about the conflict.
Here's a sampling:
Russia on the march
Russia was right
Russia heading for a fall
The great game