Talibandages

Sunni extremists, aligned with their Taliban brethren, are blowing up Shiites (in mourning pictured above) in Quetta, Pakistan (in the ungovernable western province of Balochistan). Afghani President Hamid Karzai has banned any of his officers from requesting a NATO airstrike (drone or aircraft) against any local neighborhood to cut back on civilian collateral casualties. Green-on-blue attacks are fresh in NATO commanders’ memories, and the official Afghan army is still woefully ill-prepared for future governance without massive NATO support.

Pakistan likewise has condemned allied drone-strikes in the Taliban’s favored “safe harbor” in that same general ungovernable region in the Western Tribal District… even as Taliban extremists blow up local Pakistani targets. The Taliban are gloating at the chaos, the inconsistency and are reaping the benefits of their exceptionally close ties to the Pakistani intelligence community and the army. With a withdrawal date for NATO force in 2014, they have little to do but wait.

Afghan Sunni extremists have been here before. They out-waited the Soviets in the 1980s in an unsustainable war that drained USSR’s economy, the straw that literally broke Moscow’s back and collapsed that communist government. They know that no occupying power has the willpower to deploy sufficient forces and remain indefinitely to counter their inevitable power. Occupying Afghanistan is a nation destroyer. But indefinite occupation is the only viable option if the goal is to contain local tribal war lords and crush the cruel and rather unpopular Taliban from surging back.

The locals are uneducated, torn apart by regional and linguistic differences, deeply suspicious of foreign invaders and profoundly skeptical at the Western-imposed Karzai government that has achieved unprecedented levels of corruption and cronyism, even for this part of the world. The people just want to be left alone to continue their relatively simple lives.

This is the context of the American-led effort to leave Afghanistan. These factors are the barriers to the short-term American goal to get the Taliban and Afghanistan, perhaps along with the regional powers necessary to generate some semblance of stability, to the bargaining table. There’s little to gain by such meetings for the Taliban who have always known that this was never more than a waiting game. One year. Ten years. Twenty years. One day, the invaders would leave.

“The latest push came early [February] at Chequers, the country residence of the British prime minister, David Cameron, who joined President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan in calling for fast-track peace talks. Weeks earlier in Washington, Mr. Karzai met with President Obama and committed publicly to have his representatives meet a Taliban delegation in Doha, Qatar, to start the process. 

“Yet so far the energized reach for peace has achieved little, officials say, except to cement a growing consensus that regional stability demands some sort of political settlement with the Taliban, after a war that cost tens of thousands of Afghan and Western lives and nearly a trillion dollars failed to put down the insurgency... Interviews with more than two dozen officials involved in the effort suggest a fast-spinning process that has yet to gain real traction and seems to have little chance of achieving even its most limited goal: bringing the Afghan government and Taliban leadership together at the table before the bulk of the American fighting force leaves Afghanistan in 2014.” New York Times, February 16^th.

With the Shiite majority in Iraq now solidly behind their government’s rather unambiguous movement into Shiite Iran’s sphere of influence (and away from policies favored by its purported liberator, the United States), Afghanistan represents the second colossal military failure of recent U.S. regional wars. For those seeking to justify the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars we spent in the efforts, there were literally no real benefits to America and its NATO allies from the effort. We just lie to each other about the subject.

Aside from the momentary triumphs of bringing down a tyrant (with no weapons of mass destruction) and momentarily toppling a regime that had supported the training of the 9/11 al Qaeda attackers, our side of the balance sheet is empty. Once we brought down the Taliban well over a decade ago, there was little for Americans to gain by occupying this distant land. We sent the right message but didn’t know “when enough was enough.”

Our obsession with conquest and boots on the ground did us in. We needed to respond to the Taliban support, strong and hard. We didn’t need to invade. The wisdom of President George H.R. Bush, restoring Kuwait and crippling its Iraqi attacker without regime change in the first Gulf war, was hardly the process his successors, including his own son, were willing to follow in the second. “W” made the error of invasion, and President Obama compounded that mistake by not pulling out quickly and for staying another six further years in Afghanistan.

The resulting U.S. budget deficits, the rising tide of regional anti-Western, anti-American sentiments, the necessity of upgrading an expensive Homeland Security, compounded with a recession that applied a multiplier to those original deficits have undermined our own stability, creating polarization in our land that we have not seen since our Civil War. The big question remains: is the United States able to learn from its mistakes? So far, our record is not particularly strong in this arena, but time will tell... if our mistakes don’t do us in first.

I’m Peter Dekom, and dwelling on this subject underlies my strong belief that the United States needs to learn from this mistakes of history, especially our own.