This issue’s topic is going to be the war in Afghanistan but before I get into it, I’d like to touch briefly on a topic from a few issues back about getting what we vote for.
Last Sunday, listening to Joe Barton, Republican Senator from Texas rant about Obama being an extortionist because he wanted BP to pay for the oil spill, I had the feeling that the heavens had opened up and God had reached out his hand and said to me, “Here ole buddy, this one’s for you. ” Here was a Senator from Texas, telling his constituents that their taxes should be paying for the cleanup, not the company that caused it.
I bet all those good ole boys who voted for Oil Spill Joe are really hoisting a cold one to him now. I bet they’d like to shove one of those long necks right down his ignorant throat.
But on to the topic of the day, Afghanistan. Why are we there and should we stay there?
Well, we’re there because Bush and Cheney decided that the best way to kill off a few hundred Al Queda, was to invade a country. Then they got so busy starting a war for the oil we never got out of Iraq that they forgot they had troops in a war one country over. So now we’ve been there nine years and despite Obama’s November 2011 promise, there’s really no end in sight. Why is this?
Well, for one thing we’ve invaded a country that isn’t really a country. What it actually is, is an accumulation of little fiefdoms, each run by its own chief with no connection to any of the other fiefdoms except if they happen to be made up of members of the same tribe. With a 10% literacy rate, most of the people of Afghanistan don’t even know that they live in Afghanistan. For most of these people the limits of their world is the valley in which they reside. They care nothing and know less about national borders or aims. They are only interested in what happens in their village because that’s all that directly affects them and their families.
Most of the country is made up of Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribesmen all of whom have been at war with each other for centuries. Hamid Karzai, the president of the country is Pashtun and interestingly enough all of the Taliban are too. So when Karzai begins talks with the Taliban leaders, as they’ve hinted at this last week, maybe our government shouldn’t be too surprised.
I watched John McCain, a man for whom I have lost a great deal of respect make the most cogent comments aired on the firing of General McCrystal this week. Among those comments, he said that by putting a time frame on our pullout from Afghanistan all we were doing was letting the Taliban know that if they just sat around and didn’t cause too much trouble for the next year the country would be theirs. This makes too much sense for Obama to not understand it. So why did he make such a tactically terrible promise? Politics. The far left was screaming its head off to get out. There is a significant political faction on the left that has stated that you must have a stop date for a war. That may be one of the stupidest concepts ever promulgated. The stop date is when you win the war or when you lose it. You can’t establish it ahead of time because you never know when it’s going to happen. The stop date for WWII was when we beat the living crap out of Germany and when we dropped the big one on Japan. In Korea and Vietnam there was no stop date. We just faded away. Nor will there be a stop date for either Iraq or Afghanistan. Stop dates are ridiculous and Obama has only set one because he promised the radical left that he would get out of Afghanistan and then the press started asking when?
So where does that leave us? Well, the Pashtun make up about 50% of the population with the rest divided up into Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara. The Hazara were almost made extinct by the Taliban during the five-year civil war that followed the fourteen-year Russian war but was before the nine-year American war. Are you beginning to get the picture? Various estimates run from 100,000 to 300,000 Hazara being massacred by the Taliban so the Hazara are in no mood to see the Taliban get back in power. Neither are the Uzbeks or the Tajiks.
Our current solution seems to be involved with teaching the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara to fight. It’s ridiculous. These people have been fighting for centuries. They’re great fighters. Our goal should be to encourage them to fight on our side, which they would already be willing to do if we weren’t backing Karzai, a Pashtun who they hate because they think he stole the election and everything else in the country that isn’t nailed down.
So what’s the answer? Well, nobody really knows if there is one, but we can’t just hang around for another ten years hoping one will pop out of the woodwork, so maybe we should be a little proactive and try something new.
As stated above the Pashtuns make up 50% of the country and 100% of the Taliban, which means there are too many of them to kill so we obviously have to find a way to deal with them. In this, Karzai is right. This is a war that can never really be won so it must be negotiated but right now the Taliban has no incentive to negotiate. Obama has already told them that if they just wait, we’ll leave. So maybe the first thing he should do is revoke the exit date. This will make all the left and many other peace loving people very upset but maybe they should learn to live with the realities of the world. We are in this war because of Bush but that doesn’t mean we should just stay in it forever the way Bush would. If we just walk away we will have betrayed every person in Afghanistan that backed us and we will leave them to face an enemy that has already been guilty of mass extermination.
The traditional way to win a war was always to occupy the territory of the vanquished and to subjugate all the vanquished peoples. This was never a great idea as even the Romans eventually discovered but with the advent of modern weaponry it has become an impossibility. We should have learned this lesson in Vietnam. Obviously our policy makers didn’t.
What has happened is that in our pursuit of a few hundred Al Queda terrorists we have inherited a war against hundreds of thousands of religious fanatics. There is no practical way to beat these guys. It’s their country. What we can do is create a negotiated stalemate. We have to get the Taliban, the Pastuns, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks and the Hazara to sit down and negotiate a peace. Everyone except the Taliban seems to be willing to do that. So how do you get the Taliban to sit down and talk? Not by saying that we’ll be leaving in a year but by saying that we are going to spend the foreseeable future inflicting the greatest number of casualties possible on their forces. That means forgetting about nation building until after there’s a peace and forgetting about holding the fort at all and attacking with everything we have so that we can inflict the greatest number of casualties possible and maybe force the Taliban to negotiate.
If we can get them to the table, the next step is to make sure that each faction is included and that each is given something that will allow it to see the attractions of peace. We are dealing here, not with a nation, but with a conglomeration of medieval tribesman whose only civilized asset is their ability to use modern weaponry. We must provide each little fiefdom with its own reward and threaten each with the consequences of continued war. This means that the Taliban will always be there, an itch in the side of every free thinking human being in the region but maybe that’s better than this unending killing. Basically what I am promoting here is the same strategy that ended the war with Japan minus the atomic alternative.
Considering the history of the region, this may or may not work but we really don’t have many alternatives. So far nothing has worked. There is no conventional victory in this war. A win in Afghanistan is defined as a cessation of the killing. Nothing more. Any attempt at nation building must come after the shooting has stopped not as it is currently being conducted, as a possible solution to the fighting.
There was never a legitimate reason to be in Afghanistan. We have always had the ability to kill bad guys without committing troops. That’s what we should have done about the camps that bred the 911 attack. But now even that reason is gone. Intelligence sources put the Al Queda numbers in the country at about a hundred men. A joke number considering that we have about 130,000 troops trying to kill them and it’s costing is a billion bucks a day to do it. There are more Al Queda in Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia than in Afghanistan. Hell, there’s probably more in this country. Why aren’t we attacking all these countries? Maybe because modern warfare isn’t the way to deal with them. It’s like killing a fly with a hand grenade. It gets the fly but it also destroys your house. That’s what we’re doing now. Bleeding our country to death to win a war that we shouldn’t be fighting.