What the heck, this is starting to turn into another Hundred Years' War. The Afghan War going beyond 2015? Why, of course it will! How about another 40 years? No problem!
You have to admire the candid honesty of the UK's General Sir David Richards.
But Punditman has heard all this before: politicians and generals going on about how you can't defeat an idea militarily, that you also need to "nation-build." Even Stevie Harper intuited such brilliance awhile back.
But punditman detects a vast disconnect between word and action amongst those who on the one hand recognize the futility of an occupying force trying to achieve military victory against an insurgency but nevertheless keep trying to do just that. Or something like it. It's the old winning people's hearts and minds argument while you cut off their limbs.
We keep hearing how we are just about to "turn the corner," maybe this year, or next year, or 2014. But these clowns need to stop channeling the ghost of LBJ because there really is no light at the end of this tunnel any more than there was in the Mekong Delta, circa 1968. At least not as long as long as they keep creating new enemies with each air strike, while simultaneously mumbling about including moderate Taliban and Pashtuns in some sort of Afghan power sharing arrangement. Imagine how perplexing this must seem to many an Afghan villager:
"Yeah, these NATO guys are smart. They blew away those drug lords and bandits who kept harrasing my niece and stealing from my uncle's orchard. But then their air strike killed my entire clan including my wife! Fuck 'em, I am starting my own militia. Local Taliban said they'd train me up and promised me a new wife too."Not to sound glib, but this can't be far from the reality. Ninety percent of the people NATO is fighting are part of a tribal, localized insurgency. Only 10% are hardcore fundamentalist jihadis who profess loyalty to the Taliban. In fact those Taliban who harboured al Qaeda before 9-11 are involved in a very small share of attacks against Western forces, mostly in southern Afghanistan.
The point is that the only hope for a lessening of violence amongst the many social and tribal groupings that comprise the Afghan enigma is through negotiation, integration and accomodation. Obama and NATO have clearly chosen a military "surge" instead. And now Western forces are planning on sticking around indefinitely in a "non-combat" role to train people how to use guns in a country that has been awash in guns for generations. Brilliant.
Punditman says the only way out of this morass for the West is troop withdrawal. And the only way out of it for Afghanis is through negotiation because the only people that can solve Afghanistan are Afghanis. We may not like what they come up with. But we don't have much choice and the truth is, many realists inside government agree; they readily admit there is no exit strategy in place and probably no plausible one that can be invented.
Punditman is suspicious of even the realists in government. The fact is, a permanent "low-level conflict" fought with modern technology fits in nicely with a permanent war economy which benefits the high tech defense sector. It is very profitable to fight jihadism with drones and highly equipped, occupying armies. And as long as the West retains volunteer armies and Western casualties don't get too out of hand, elites have much to gain. Of course it is not so low level for those on the receiving end of the bombs and bullets—but that never stopped them.
Do the idealists and ideologues who continue to prosecute this depressing war understand Afghan history? Or history in general? It is naive to think they do not. Maybe that is precisely the point. Punditman says that is a scary thought.
