Let’s start off the boring way, with a couple of definitions.

A protectorate, in international law, is an autonomous territory that is protected diplomatically or militarily against third parties by a stronger state or entity. In exchange for this, the protectorate usually accepts specified obligations, which may vary greatly, depending on the real nature of their relationship. However, it retains sufficient measure of sovereignty and remains a state under international law.

A Colonial protection, on the other hand, is when Conditions are generally much less generous for areas of colonial protection. The protectorate was often reduced to a de facto condition similar to a colony, but using the pre-existing native state as an agent of indirect rule.

Got all that? It’s from Wikipedia; so argue with them if you have problems with these definitions. The fact is that they are waffle words anyway for the control of a weaker nation by a stronger. The soviets just called them Satellite States and let academics laboring in Siberia worry over the nitpicking definitions in their spare time between turning large rocks into gravel piles.

What’s any of this got to do with Afghanistan? Yesterday our Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates said something to the effect that <link> “The Obama administration needs to decide on a war strategy for Afghanistan without waiting for a government there to be widely accepted as legitimate.” Gates pointed out elsewhere that the approaching winter in Afghanistan might force Obama’s hand. If troops are going to be sent in at all – and be effective once they get there – then they need to be sent sooner rather than later.

Protectorate Gatewood. What about the protectorate? Hold your horses. I’m getting there.

Last night the wife and I were mulling over the situation in Afghanistan and Obama’s options. We came to the conclusion that what the Obama Administration was facing – and therefore balking over establishing – was a colonial style protectorate in Afghanistan. A more gentle protectorate relationship already exists as de facto. It simply hasn’t been announced as official and open ended U.S. policy where Afghanistan is concerned and the more stringent protectorate form hasn’t been mentioned in public.

We all know the options by now; pour in the troops [if we can find enough] and win the damn thing [for a given definition of ‘win’] or give it up as a lost cause steadily consuming lives and treasure and pull out or establish an unending stalemate situation like the one created for the two Koreas [North and South].

The problem with doing the popular thing [according to the polls] and bringing our troops home is that Afghanistan will immediately fall to the Taliban and then to the resurgent Al Qaeda organization and then they will turn their hungry eyes on the NUCLEAR armed Pakistani government and control of that nation. Holy crud!

If we win then we have to hold what we won and then spend at least a decade nation building so that the Afghanistan people [with their average 3rd grade education] can grow up enough to both govern themselves and stay the hell out of international trouble. Can you say expensive?

A protectorate is also expensive, but at least some of the financial burden is shared with the partner/victim as they are brought up to self-rule speed with all the accessories demanded by contemporary Western Culture from flush toilets to electrical outlets and government above the cave man level.

The problem with this scenario is that it’s more likely to take at least twenty years. Thus the Colonial Protectorate concept. We are talking extremely long term here and obscenely expensive and we are talking about angry European powers that had to give up THEIR colonies many decades ago. So Obama is looking square in the face the high probability that the very Europeans who currently praise him as the Great Peacemaker will soon be calling him Bush Junior AND an evil Empire Builder . . . and the politician in the man occupying the Oval Office balks at that shift in political image.

But regardless of political image consideration it’s time for our baby brand new president to poop or get off the pot where Afghanistan is concerned. Further conferencing with military and government experts is only going to tell him what he already does not want to hear; that there are no politically palatable options in regards to Afghanistan and that meanwhile his dithering [that’s what he’s doing and Robert Gates as good as said so] is only putting our military personnel at additional unnecessary risk.

Is Obama a leader or merely a politician who got wildly lucky many years before he was ready to handle a wartime presidential load? So far, it’s not looking good for him, but the unforgiving Afghanistan winter conditions are going to force his hand in the near future one way or the other.

So? Win the damn thing? Pull out our troops? Establish a colonial protectorate and then dig in for a very long haul?

there is a fast and slippery slope (historically) between being a protectorate and treating the subordinate state as a colony.

colonial treatment involves influencing the laws, declaring certain candidates ineligible for office, and exempting your own citizens from prosecution under colonial courts.

elements of this are already in place in iraq and afghanistan

i'm an old fashioned girl. if we're going to fight a war, i like it to be fast, brutal, and result in uncondtional surrender by the enemy.

we've spent twice as long in afghanistan and iraq as we did to win world war 2 - which required beating germany and japan simultaenously - much more formidable foes.

don't play the game if you're not committed to winning.

is precisely why democracies [democratic republics] make lousy empires. Democracies are too subject to periodic shifts in public opinion which results in politically based international policy switches that, in turn, frequently reverse directions entirely. Talk about giving the poor protectorate state officials and population a migraine headache!

As a U.S. citizen I would like us to admit that both Afghanistan and Iraq are as good now as we can make them considering what we are willing to invest in blood and resources and money, and then get the Hades out of both hell holes now.

We are scheduled to do so in Iraq and – I have no doubt – that nation will soon [in relative terms] degenerate into a theocracy based dictatorship and/or a state of long term civil war. That will be bad but it probably won’t be ‘immediately bite us on the behind’ bad.

Afghanistan, however, falling to the Taliban and then being taken over almost immediately thereafter by Al Qaeda would bite us hard because not only would there be an entire nation that serves as a safe haven and training base for an internationally based terrorist organization but then they would begin working to subvert and conquer nuclear armed Pakistan . . . which has a chronically corrupt and unstable government itself. In relative terms, they would be easy pickings.

A nuclear armed Al Qaeda in control of two entire nations would be very bad indeed for the entire world.

There are no easy answers here and no options that are going to leave us clean and unscathed as a nation.

Good job Gatewood. Maybe we have a little more time to decide:

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Washington - President Hamid Karzai's decision to yield to U.S. pressure and accept an election runoff has opened the way for the Obama administration to settle on a strategy for dealing with Afghanistan, including whether to approve the Pentagon's request to send thousands more troops to the fight.

Gatewood: There are no easy answers here and no options that are going to leave us clean and unscathed as a nation.

At this point in time, I find your statement hard to disagree with.

leads us back around to the reality of winter conditions in Afghanistan. If I understand things as they stand today, we either move to reinforce some of our isolated and understaffed forward outposts or we close them down and pull back where sheer numbers of well armed military personnel offer one another a much better degree of protection.

So there is the international situation itself and cold hard troops-related factors to take into account. It's not an enviable situation for Obama, but it is one that he fought and clawed up the political ladder to get put in charge of. Very soon now, he MUST make a set of vital decisions. They will dramatically effect what sort of nation we will be from that point onward.

Interesting times. Interesting times.

To repeat what I wrote yesterday, it is already too late to mount an effective ground campaign in the eastern mountains. We're already pulling back and the base that was hit last week was clear indication that we don't know how to do that correctly.

I don't really care what you call Afghanistan. Words are words. Afghanistan has been a proxy playground for military adventurism and religious extremism preying on an isolated and mostly forgotten tribal culture since the times of Alexander the Great. It took Alexander only six months to conquer Persia. He spent three years in Afghanistan and never did quite get it done. Only hubris makes us think that somehow we could do better.

But, now so engaged and with Pakistan under similar stress, we are inextricably bound to avoid failure - if only because we cannot define success.

Such is the way with words. Afghanistan is neither a colony nor a protectorate. If it needs a name, then it is a tar baby, Br'er Gatewood.

We can probably manage to secure our single identifiable current objective for Afghanistan with even fewer resources than we have there now. However, recent events have taken a(n ironic) turn that suggests it might be worth ramping up our presence there, at least for the short term.

For a combination of reasons, Pakistan finally seems to have discovered sufficient motivation to mount what appears to be a serious (if probably short-lived) campaign against the Taliban presence there. To the extent that the opportunity isn't already past, it would be of some benefit to have at least some of the enemies assets between a rock and a hard place while the planets of Pakistani military and Pakistani public opinion are still somewhat in alignment.

So maybe there is a possibility of achieving something slightly more than an occasional remote-control assassination with accompanying collateral damage.