The Obama-administration is dithering about Afghanistan and with good reason. The US has been up to its eyeballs in spent cartridge cases ever since it abandoned isolationism.
Bush’s administration was happy to act on “known knowns... things we know that we know... known unknowns... things that we now know we don’t know... unknown unknowns... things we don’t know we don’t know” but life’s more complicated than that. Obama has inherited an absolute Karzai – and he knows it. He got a serious known here and he probably knows that is he’s about to go into a seriously open-ended unknown.
It’s not like the old days when you could blanket-bomb parts of Cambodia with impunity. The world is wary – not to say weary - of Uncle Sam carrying a big stick and forgetting to talk softly. The policy has made enemies and it hasn’t worked. The new enemies are not the easy ones of the past – democratically elected governments in Latin America and Africa who had the temerity to want to run their own affairs in their own way – they are fanatics.
The Taliban provide a salutary lesson on the dubious adage that your ‘enemy’s enemy is your friend’. Tooled up with the latest hardware, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, six months prior to the Soviet invasion in December 1979, they’ve been a menace ever since. We – that is the British and Americans –supported the incipient Taliban in the belief that anything was better than a Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and current Secretary of State for Defense, admits as much in his beautifully ironic memoir, From the Shadows.
The US set the Soviet Union up in Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of Defense in the Carter administration, quoted in the French magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, in 1998, said: “We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would...That secret operation [Operation Cyclone] was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap ... The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.’”
When the Soviets left in 1989 there were 83,000 dead and Afghanistan was still a feudal, Islamic, lawless basket case. Aside from being very good at producing heroin and offering a 24hr rifle copying service, there wasn’t much going on in Afghanistan and there still isn’t. NATO forces are being hoisted on an Anglo-American petard, which was first wheeled out by Charlie Wilson’s generous CIA-instigated bankrolling and equipping of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s mujaheedin - now a key component of the Taliban and an ally of al-Qaeda. The trap that Brzezinski was so pleased to set for the Soviet Union is now ensnaring America and its NATO allies.
Hamid Karzai’s regime follows a long Afghan tradition. It’s feudal, Islamic, illegitimate and unpopular and - even if Obama agrees to a troop surge, which seems likely – in the long run it will do nothing but deliver a Taliban administration by default. The futile agonizing about troop numbers and equipment will go on but it will do nothing to address the fundamental question: Why are we there? The idea that you can bomb the Taliban out of the political equation is disingenuous and absurd – they are part of the fabric of Afghan culture. This charade - masquerading as a foreign policy - will continue to devour the lives of NATO soldiers and Afghan civilians for a futile and unachievable end.
Ed Hart is a finalist in stv.tv's Write Factor competition. The views expressed are not necessarily those of STV plc. If you would like to read more from this writer, use our comment system below.
Last updated: 13 November 2009, 13:50
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