verging_on_random

Afghanistan

August 12, 2007 on 5:01 pm | In Uncategorized |

I was always ambivalent about the war in Afghanistan. On the one hand the USA clearly had the right (and arguably the obligation) to respond to the September 11 atrocities. On the other hand, the response needed to be directed at the right target, to be proportionate, and to avoid as far as possible the creation of new problems for the US and its supporters.

Apart from a few diehards, it seems to be generally accepted that the September 11 attacks were the work of al Qaeda, a group of people based in Afghanistan. It was therefore reasonable for the USA to go after al Qaeda. If the Taliban tried to shelter al Qaeda, it was reasonable to use deadly force to overcome whoever got in the way of capturing or killing bin Laden and his accomplices. So far, so good.

After that, unfortunately, things get murky. There are stories that the Taliban was prepared to surrender bin Laden as long as they were given convincing evidence that he was behind the atrocities but the Bush Administration decided it was going to take down the Taliban regardless. Maybe a handful of terrorist lives seemed inadequate compensation for 3,000 American ones, or maybe other considerations related to pipelines and so on intervened.

It soon became apparent that the invading forces did not know how to capture their target. In the end, after dropping lots of bombs and saying “We might have got him … can’t be sure”, someone decided to invade Iraq and we all know what happened after that.

Since then the signs have turned increasingly ugly. If the appropriate term to describe Iraq is ‘occupation’, it’s still apt to refer to a ‘war’ in Afghanistan: one which seems to be increasingly going in favour of the Taliban. In short, the situation in the ‘forgotten war’ is a mess which shares at least one thing with the mess in Iraq: nobody has come up with a plausible scenario in which the mess will be sorted out any time soon.

Two recent feature stories have painted a gloomy picture of the situation. The first is from The Guardian – here’s a taste:

In the provinces, the Americans are running a guerrilla army out of Bagram, trying to kill as many “Taliban” or “al-Qaida” as possible, while the British heroically re-enact the Zulu wars down in Helmand. Neither takes any notice of President Hamid Karzai, whose deals with warlords, druglords, Iranians and Taliban collaborators are probably the best hope of stabilising Afghanistan when the foreign occupation is over. But since that is claimed by Britain to be virtually never, the only certainty is a rising tempo of insurgency.

The New York Times takes a more measured tone but is also far from optimistic:

They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care, education and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”

In short, there appears little reason for optimism that things are going to turn out happily. Indeed if The Guardian is correct, things seem close to anarchy:

A reputed 10,000 NGO staff have turned Kabul into Klondike during the goldrush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves.

People in all the nations with forces in Afghanistan deserve more than mindless pap about The War on Terror and ‘if we lose there, they’ll follow us to the homeland!’ scaremongering. We deserve a carefully researched, evidence-based explanation of the mission, the strategy, the chances of success and the contingency plans. I sincerely doubt that such things exist anywhere on the planet. Hopefully Kevin Rudd as prime minister would demand that they be prepared as a matter of urgency.