We are now ten years into a war in Afghanistan that by any definition of victory is unwinnable. So what are we doing there and how do we get out?
Bush, who started the war, was going to kill Osama bin Laden. He failed. Obama, who inherited the war, doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. He speaks of driving out the Taliban and eliminating Al Qaeda but instead he has managed to create a serious number of American casualties, a horrendous number of civilian casualties, and a Taliban that’s about as strong as it was a decade ago, when we stuck our nose into their country. How about Al Qaeda? Well, yes, they have mostly been driven out. According to our military commanders and intelligence sources there are currently about one hundred Al Qaeda terrorists still in Afghanistan. To defend against or possibly attack this scourge we have deployed one hundred and sixty thousand American troops. Don’t you wish these hundred guys were on our side? Of course, they aren’t the problem. The Taliban is the problem and the Taliban is really none of our business. But that’s another story. Or is it the only story?
So if there are only one hundred Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan, where did the other ones, the ones who inspired our invasion, go? Are they dead? No such luck. When things got hot, they picked up their prayer rugs and bomb kits and moved on. Now they’re in Pakistan, Malaysia, Yemen, Iraq, Indonesia, and many other Muslim countries, where they can blend into the population. Some of these countries are ambivalent about their presence but some are very angry with us for driving them out of Afghanistan and across their borders.
So to get back to the main question, what do we do about this war that seems to have no upside? Do we walk away or do we keep fighting?
Neither is a viable solution but one, at least, can be made to appear viable even if it’s not. That’s the one we will probably take even though it is not the best solution.
The problem we are facing, the real problem, has nothing to do with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. The problem has to do with the whole of the Middle East and the kind of people who inhabit it. For centuries the Middle East has been a quagmire of greed and immorality, a place where the death of ethics is celebrated over the graves of honest men. The current leaders are models of the cliché. Into this we are trying to insert a peace process based on some kind of moral or ethical structure, supported by trust. The concept is a joke in an area where the leaders are known more for their ability to steal with both hands than for the veracity of their word.
I have never been a great fan of Ronald Reagan. I never felt that being a bad actor was sufficient qualification for being a president but in 1983 we had a contingent of our forces deployed in Lebanon and terrorists blew up our barracks. Reagan’s reaction was not to start a war with Lebanon but to realize that those people are all crazy and that we had nothing to gain by remaining in a place where we weren’t wanted. So he brought our troops home. This was the most rational foreign policy move by any president in the last twenty-seven years. We should learn something from it.
We are currently trying to support the president of a country, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who would steal the eyeballs out of his mother’s sockets. We are also depending on the president of Pakistan, the country next door, to rout the Taliban when it’s in his best interest to support them or remain neutral. How stupid are we? In expecting these people to change their ways, we are only demonstrating that we have not yet understood the definition of insanity. These people have been acting like this for thousands of years. They are not going to change their ways just to make us feel all warm and cozy.
Everybody says we can’t just pack up and leave Afghanistan but no one says why. Nothing will change. They are a people who thrive on war. If no one is invading them, they will fight each other, just as they have done since time immemorial. It seems that the only Afghans who can’t fight are the ones we recruited for the police force and army. Does that tell you something? Maybe it’s because they will only fight for personal honor or personal gain. They have no national loyalty, mostly because they have no idea that they are part of a nation. An interview last year turned up the improbable fact that 80 percent of those interviewed did not know they were in Afghanistan. They knew what village they lived in and what tribe they belonged to but they just didn’t grasp the concept of a whole country out there of which they were a part. Absent that concept, why should they fight for something they don’t even understand? And if they won’t fight for themselves, why are we losing our kids to fight for them?
So we have two choices, one for Afghanistan and the other for Pakistan. In Afghanistan we must abandon Karzai and deal exclusively with the local chieftains, all of whom have different agendas based on local needs and personal greed. We must give each one what he wants as long as he does what we say. If he fails to keep his end of the bargain, we dump him and support his chief rival. This is an unwieldy task because there are hundreds of these little fiefdoms in Afghanistan but it is better than supporting a man who doesn’t have the support of his own people.
In Pakistan a much more draconian approach is needed. There are three problems in Pakistan. First, the government is unstable. Second, Pakistan has nuclear capability. Third, the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency supports the Taliban.
One solution lies in the removal of the existing government by whatever means necessary. This would create chaos and allow the U.S., Russia, Britain, and India to step in order to prevent Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear weapons from falling into terrorist hands. The alliance would strip away Pakistan’s nuclear capability and thereby reduce the country to what it actually is, a third world tribal culture, barely one step above Afghanistan, that has not managed to enter the community of civilized nations in the sixty years since it achieved independence from India.
Of course, none of this will happen. We will continue to play games in a part of the world we would have abandoned years ago except for the fact that we want their oil. We have allowed a bunch of semi-civilized tribal chieftains to push us around because we have not had the initiative to get our country off the petroleum tit. Why is this? Because our Republican politicians, once again more interested in their own rich friends than in the country to which they profess allegiance, will fight to the death to stop any project that threatens the oil interests.
What this country needs is a Manhattan Project to eliminate the need for fossil fuels. Only when this is successful will we be able to get out of the Middle East and leave the Muslims to fight among themselves.