Sometimes an Afghan is Really a Hound

When our missiles slammed into Afghanistan after the 9/11/2001 al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towards and the Pentagon, after our troops successfully invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban, we had a splendid opportunity to continue to deploy or forces, concentrated on rooting out the pro-al Qaeda Taliban while they were still on their heels, struggling to stay alive. They were totally on the run, defensive without an ability to counter attack in any meaningful way… Ending Taliban rule forever was in our grasp.

Unfortunately, in what may turn out to be this nation’s most disastrous military decision, the United States made up a reason to attack Iraq – a false effort since admitted by high level officials who were present when the decisions were made – in order to rally Congressional and popular support against a mythical tyrant with weapons of mass destruction poised against us simply to get the post-Vietnam era restrictions on Presidential war power lifted. It was Dick Cheney’s infamous “unitary executive” vision of the Presidency – vestiges of how the ancient Romans selected one of their own to be the Caesar to battle their foes –  to be  able to act swiftly without Congressional approval or oversight in crisis situations.

We pulled a whole lot of troops out of Afghanistan to fight the Iraq War. The Taliban were amazed that the Americans not only let them live by reducing the military that had set out to eradicate them, but that the U.S. has installed a mega-corrupt government to run the country that was ever-so-easy to turn locals against. By the time we slowed down in Iraq (today a clearly failing state) and realized what was going on in Afghanistan, there was a harsh new reality there, now requiring many more troops than the NATA allies were willing to deploy.

Slowly, the Taliban had regrouped, found new financing from fundamentalist Islamic nations in the region, and had begun infiltrating back into towns and villages all over the country. They also deployed further into Pakistan, with plenty of local support, building safe areas and forcing the Pakistanis to treat them with respect and to expand the resentment of the United States as a drone-killing bully. They were powerful once again. The Taliban may be the real bullies, and they are truly not loved by those who fall under their grip.

Now we are pulling out of Afghanistan. A few warlords have set their claims to their traditional strongholds. Some have negotiated with the relevant local Taliban, some didn’t have to. Leaving future “security” in the hands of the “legitimate government,” the United States is claiming a victory here that truly does not exist. Author/analyst Graeme Smith writes this in the January 16^th New York Times: “ ‘The Taliban are still here,’ a pharmacist who sells medicine to remote villages in the southeast told me last month in this shabby frontier town. ‘People are anxious about 2014 because the troops are leaving.’

“After his customers started to understand recently that the United States and its allies will pull out most of their forces this year, he said, his sales of medication for anxiety, depression and insomnia increased 30-fold. Fear of a Taliban resurgence is so widespread that it is hurting property prices and the value of Afghanistan’s currency, scaring investors away and impelling Afghans to seek foreign asylum. Worries about the year ahead are a kind of pathology here.

“Yet if Afghans are too scared about the withdrawal of American troops, the United States government may not be scared enough. In its latest report to Congress, the Pentagon said that fighting had eased in 2013, reporting a 12 percent drop in security incidents over the previous summer…. The United Nations, by contrast, found an 11 percent increase between May to August 2013, compared with the same period in 2012. During my visits to seven Afghan provinces over the last year, I saw no sign of the war cooling down.

“In the short term, the Taliban are very unlikely to take over the country, or even march on major cities, but trouble should be expected in smaller outposts. Peace negotiations with the Taliban have stalled. This, combined with the imminent pullout of foreign forces, has given insurgents renewed confidence that the military balance of power will shift in their favor. In Kandahar last summer, one Taliban supporter (and sometime participant) confidently predicted that the insurgents would soon capture Kabul, repeating the northward sweep that brought them to power in 1996.

“He didn’t seem to grasp the obstacles: Even if international forces are reduced, as anticipated, to less than one-fifth of the 84,000 troops now deployed, Afghan security forces still number roughly 350,000. That’s a lot of firepower standing on the road to Kabul. The capital itself, despite a few spectacular attacks, has enjoyed some respite.”

On January 17^th, this was the lead on a BBC story: “At least 14 people have been killed in a suicide bomb and gun attack on a restaurant popular with foreigners in the Afghan capital…” The Taliban took credit for that attack. There is no place in the entire country where peace and stability should be expected, not even in the incumbent government most securely-held city. It seems that this war-weary nation will face a long, constant and unpredictable civil war for a long time to come… kind of like Iraq. It seems that’s the way we leave countries we have invaded these days.

We have introduced the potential of long-standing instability into this desolate region, allowed the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies to regroup, re-fund and choose new cadres of leaders to haunt our regional priorities for decades to come, sacrificing thousands of American soldiers, sapping our nation and adding trillions of dollars to our deficit. The laws of unintended consequences and the inability of American policy-makers and our own Congress to appreciate the regional complexities have decimated our country. Are we going to learn anything from this debacle? Will we be unwilling to deploy force when we really should? Or are we now hamstrung by a loss of confidence, because we really don’t understand these distant cultures well enough to deal with the issues we must face?

I’m Peter Dekom, and for a country with citizens from every ethnic and national background imaginable, we are profoundly ignorant of regional realities in distant lands.