generalspeaking

Whose War Is This?

We're in it for the long haul. As responsible countries, responsive to the need of another, failed country. Whose current government, in the name of its repressed, horribly oppressed people, urges our continued presence. The name of this particular game is to resolutely hold back the determined advance of the Taliban, intent on returning to their previous role as tormentors of the ordinary people, the women, the children.

First, the clutch of the Taliban on the geography must be driven from its current reality. Concurrently, the need for civil and government infrastructure is paramount, along with outreach to the population. We are ourselves enormously encouraged, we comfort ourselves, that our sacrifices in lost lives of our armed forces personnel, our countries' monetary contribution, has resulted in the enablement of little girls and boys to attend school.

Peace and security of Afghanistan is the order of the day, the hour, the months, the years gone by. Eight years now, and counting, although Canada, for example, intends to withdraw its troops by 2011. While maintaining a commitment toward supporting the country in other ways. Borrowed expertise in all manner of civil authority, from policing, to the judiciary, to health care services.

Entreating subsistence farmers to eschew the growing of poppies for sustainable grains, while the Taliban threaten those same farmers, profiting handsomely from the hundreds of thousands of hectares under poppy cultivation. Currently drug dealing in the country amounts to 50% of the country's GDP. Farmers themselves are reluctant to give up poppy growing, an assured source of income.

Concomitantly a source of income for the Taliban - the former mujahadeen who faced a Russian invasion, and before that a British one, and before that through time immemorial others, none of which resulted in a conclusive victory for the invader - who resolve to retake the country and submit it once again to their totalitarian rule, just as the NATO troops resolve to deny them that opportunity.

Foreign troops, their governments and their delegations of dignitaries and foreign aid workers face the imponderables of deep-seated situational and cultural realities; the untameable tribal areas in Pakistan, the domination of drug kingpins whose tentacles reach into the national police and the national government, and the total incompetence and corruption of society and government at every level.

Those Russians who know from the first-hand experience of their own invasion - that the world deplored and the United States attempted to undercut by encouraging, training, supplying the mujahadeen - view what is unfolding in Afghanistan with a familiar air, recognizing that history does doom humans to commit the same useless and ultimately failing initiatives over and over again.

Those mujahadeen now transformed into the Taliban, operating within Afghanistan and in Pakistan, those fundamentalist Islamists intent on turning both countries into their vision of pure Islam, are merely responding as tradition and recent history has impelled them to. They have realized such a degree of success, despite the presence of foreign troops fending off their advances, that they now dominate the geography.

In the space of one short year, from 2007 to 2008, they have transmuted themselves from a dim presence to an overwhelming one; from a 57% presence to 72% of the country's geography, leaving only Kabul and a few other highly populated and defended urban areas relatively free of their presence. Which hasn't dreadfully impeded the Taliban ability to mount suicide attacks there, as well.

"There is no mistake made by the Soviet Union that was not repeated by the international community here in Afghanistan", claimed Zamir Kabulov, Kabul-based KGB station chief during the Soviet occupation. "They have already repeated all our mistakes. Now, they are making mistakes of their own." The Soviet occupation of 110,000 troops lost 15,000 of their own, cost a million Afghan lives. Accomplishment: withdrawal and swift ascent of the Taliban.

Now, foreign troops are committed to training the Afghanistan national police, (whose level of corruption and ineptitude is legendary), and the national armed forces with a greater degree of success. And while Hamid Karzai appealed to the international community to continue its commitment to freeing Afghanistan from the threat of the Taliban, his own crooked and failed government contributes little.

His own brother is involved as a drug trafficker. Many of his parliamentarians are former war lords, gain wealth from drug trafficking, and are responsible for human rights abuses. There is little willingness evidenced that the government of the country will be prepared any time soon to become self-sustaining and capable of operating its own defence. Yet Mr. Karzai agonizes over the heavy-handed assaults of U.S. forces against civilian enclaves in the mountainous areas that house the Taliban.

"Afghan leadership is not some distant aspiration - it's something that we need as soon as possible and on which we must insist. The basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban; it's too little good governance", NATO Secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer wrote recently for a Washington Post piece. The U.S. State Department questions the Afghan president's commitment to halting corruption, improving law and order and confronting the country's opium trade problem.

U.S. President Barack Obama's envoy to the area has expressed his opinion that the "central government has shown that it is simply not up to the job". President Karzai has returned the compliment, in spades, angrily denying the accusations and mounting his own indignation about Western interference in Afghanistan's state affairs.

The people of Afghanistan themselves are becoming increasingly jaded about the potential for any meaningful change in their lives, any true hope for the future, and the future of their children. An increased presence of NATO troops will remain window dressing; too few NATO member-countries are interested in anything remotely resembling combat and insist on installing themselves for reconstruction and training only.

It is therefore, left to a handful of countries, like Canada, Britain and Holland, to take up the slack in the most dangerous areas of the country. Where the United States has committed itself to a 'surge', similar to that which succeeded in Iraq, but will not, it has been pointed out, succeed in Afghanistan where the situation is completely different.

It's quite one thing to enunciate priorities and determination to establish security, build a basic and legitimate government, bring in popular support from the citizenry, and create economic opportunity - and to actually accomplish all of that while fighting a more confident insurgency, drawing greater support from the population through intimidation or promises and in the process successfully absorbing greater swaths of territory.

Until Afghanistan is itself capable of producing a governing hierarchy determined to fashion for themselves a reasonable facsimile of democratic process without the endemic corruption, and the Afghan National Police eschew the temptation to take bribes from the insurgents, there will be no reason to anticipate that the presence of foreign troops, aid workers and diplomats will stand any chance of success.

Then the hydra-headed monster of Islamist jihad which has surged through Pakistan, and bleeds over into Afghanistan, threatening India as well, will continue its unstoppable infiltration and domination of the entire volatile area. And one shudders to think where that will bring the world, teetering as it is, on the cusp of perpetual confrontation.

Labels: Political Realities, Religion, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 15, 2009