There have always been only one truth and one an inevitable conclusion to the ground war in Afghanistan: If you aren't willing to go all Genghis Khan, you will leave like defeated Brits and Russians. There was a reason that the Turks went around the tribal lands of Afghanistan as much as they could during the 600 years of the Ottoman Empire. The West's hubris was never going to turn a bunch of Neanderthals from a misogynistic,
homophobic, child-abusing, maniacal, homicidal, suicidal, totalitarian, 7th
century death cult into a functioning democracy in the middle of Fred Flintstone-land.
As Hồ Chí Minh said in Vietnam, “You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.” Afghanistan makes Minh's Vietnam look like the Skypad Apartments in Orbit City. Unless we were willing to kill on a "shock and awe" level and occupy Afghanistan (and, let's face it, we weren't), the result was always going to be preordained.
Bush should have given Kabul an ultimatum after 09.11.01, "You have x-amount of hours to turn over Osama bin Laden & Co. before hellfire, brimstone, and neutrons start raining down upon you and your people. Period. Oh, and fuck the U.N. -- China and Russia obviously don't care about "brown-skinned Muslims." See their treatment of their own Muslim people and their votes on Syria.
Obama doubled down on Bush's mistake and then went one step further with asinine ROE that make the "Workbook for the Girl Guides" look like something out of the Era of Vlad the Impaler. So, he can't blame Bush for the "good war" that he "inherited."
This has always been my problem with the ground war in Afghanistan and why I opposed it. During its occupation, the Soviets built over 100,000 factories, apartment buildings, office complexes and other structures in Afghanistan. I'm not championing the Soviets, but infrastructure is infrastructure and apartment buildings aren't mudhuts. After the Soviets withdrew in defeat, those buildings and accompanying infrastructure were reduced to rubble. Nose. Spite. Face. PDQ.
Steyn is right. The United States (and Britain, too - again) will leave Afghanistan. The world will not be better off and the Afghans will revert to executing women in soccer stadiums. The dog always returns to its vomit.
You can take the barbarians and goat herders kicking and screaming out of the Stone Age, but you can't take the Stone Age out of the barbarians and goat herders ... even if you spend $1 trillion.
Wabble back to the fire and continue to be burned. - Sophie
Pakistani protesters burn representations of U.S. flags to condemn the
reported burning of Qurans in Afghanistan by U.S. troops, in Lahore,
Pakistan, on Monday, 27 February 2012.
Say what you like about Afghans, but they're admirably
straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest
Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities
couldn't put it any plainer:
"Die, die, foreigners!"
And foreigners do die. U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Loftis, 44, and
Army Maj. Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission
out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in
the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a "secure room" that
required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan
"intelligence officer." Who then departed the scene of the crime
unimpeded by any of his colleagues.
Some news outlets reported the event as a "security breach." But what
exactly was breached? The murderer was by all accounts an employee of
the Afghan government, with legitimate rights of access to the building
and its secure room, and "liaising" with his U.S. advisers and "mentors"
was part of the job. In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands
of the locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners,
paid by Westerners and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have
the easiest opportunity to kill them. It is sufficiently non-unusual
that the Pentagon, as is the wont with bureaucracies, already has a term
for it: "green-on-blue incidents," in which a uniformed Afghan turns
his gun on his Western "allies."
So we have a convenient label for what's happening; what we don't
have is a strategy to stop it – other than more money, more "hearts and
minds" for people who seem notably lacking in both, and more bulk orders
of the bestselling book "Three Cups Of Tea," an Oprahfied heap of
drivel extensively exposed as an utter fraud but which a delusional
Washington insists on sticking in the kit bag of its Afghan-bound
officer class.
Don't fancy the tea? A U.S. base in southern Afghanistan was recently
stricken by food poisoning due to mysteriously high amounts of chlorine
in the coffee. As Navy Capt. John Kirby explained, "We don't know if it
was deliberate or something in the cleaning process."
Oh, dear. You could chisel that on the tombstones of any number of
expeditionary forces over the centuries: "Afghanistan. It's something in
the cleaning process."
In the past couple of months, two prominent politicians of different
nations visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to
me for Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the
fortifications, a mini-West has been built in a cheerless land: There
are Coke machines and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the
gates, a man can climb out of the full RoboCop and stop pretending he
enjoys three cups of tea with the duplicitous warlords, drug barons and
pederasts who pass for Afghanistan's ruling class. The visiting Western
dignitary is cautiously shuttled through outer and inner perimeters, and
reminded that, even here, there are areas he would be ill-advised to
venture unaccompanied, and tries to banish memories of his first tour
all those years ago when aides still twittered optimistically about the
possibility of a photo-op at a girls' schoolroom in Jalalabad or an
Internet start-up in Kabul.
The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few
years ago. It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt
there will be any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium
hence. Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will
be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York
Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in
identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked
on Sept. 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America's longest
war will leave nothing behind.
They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs – the vast
impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pushtun
mind resides. Someone accidentally burned a Quran your pals had already
defaced with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the
United States issues a groveling and characteristically clueless
apology for it? Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has
trained you and hired you and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die,
die, foreigners! And those are the Afghans who know us best. To the
upcountry village headmen, the fellows descending from the skies in full
body armor are as alien as were the space invaders to Americans in the
film "Independence Day."
The Rumsfeld strategy that toppled the Taliban over a decade ago was
brilliant and innovative: special forces on horseback using GPS to call
in unmanned drones. They will analyze it in staff colleges around the
world for decades. But what we ought to be analyzing instead is the sad,
aimless, bloated, arthritic, transnationalized folly of what followed.
The United States is an historical anomaly: the nonimperial superpower.
Colonialism is not in its DNA, and in some ways that speaks well for it,
and in other ways, in a hostile and fast-changing world of predators
and opportunists, it does not. But even nations of an unimperialist bent
have roused themselves to great transformative "cleaning processes"
within living memory: The Ottawa Citizen's David Warren wrote this week
that he had "conferred the benefit of the doubt" on "the grand
bureaucratic project of 'nation building'... predicated on post-War
successes in Germany and Japan."
It wasn't that long ago, was it? Except that, as Warren says, the
times are "so utterly changed." It seems certain that, waging World War
II today, the RAF would not carpet-bomb Dresden, and the U.S. would not
nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, lacking the will to inflict massive,
total defeat, would we also lack the will to inflict that top-to-toe
"cleaning process"?
Ah, well. Kabul is not Berlin or Tokyo. As long as wily
mischief-makers are not using it as a base for global mayhem, who cares?
To modify Bismarck, the Hindu Kush is not worth the bones of a single
Pennsylvanian grenadier, or "training officer." Afghanistan is about
Afghanistan – if you're Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you're Russian or
Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America. And too
much about the Afghan campaign is too emblematic. As much as any
bailed-out corporation, the U.S. is "too big to fail": In Afghanistan as
in the stimulus, it was money no object. The combined Western
military/aid presence accounts for 98 percent of that benighted land's
GDP. We carpet-bomb with dollar bills; we have the most advanced
technology known to man; we have everything except strategic purpose.
That "crusader fort" image has a broader symbolism. The post-American
world is arising before our eyes. According to the IMF, China will
become the dominant economic power by 2016. Putin is on course to return
to the Kremlin corner office. In Tehran, the mullahs nuclearize with
impunity. New spheres of influence are being established in North
Africa, in Central Europe, in the once-reliably "American lake" of the
Pacific. Can America itself be a crusader fort? A fortress secure behind
the interminable checkpoints of Code Orange TSA bureaucratic torpor
while beyond the moat the mob jeers "Die, die, foreigners"? Or, in the
end, will it prove as effortlessly penetrable as the "secure room" of
the Afghan Interior Ministry?
©MARK STEYN
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