WASHINGTON -- While the Democrats are meeting this week in Charlotte to ponder the last four years of their party's version of "change," the principles behind the wars we wage will surely NOT be among the major policy questions convention-goers will spend much time considering.
From the Republican convention, a traveler from Mars would not have had the faintest idea that the United States, after 10 long years, was still involved in a futile war in a faraway land. Yet in the few days between the two party conventions, something revealing was occurring in Afghanistan.
The Washington Post headlined it in a story out of Kabul: "The senior commander for Special Operations forces in Afghanistan has suspended training for all new Afghan recruits until the more than 27,000 Afghan troops working with his command can be re-vetted for ties to the insurgency."
In short, so many deadly attacks by our supposed "allies" on Americans and other NATO forces are now occurring -- 45 have been killed this year alone -- that NATO is looking for reasons other than the obvious one: Afghans just ... don't ... like us. Officials have now come up with the face-saving idea that they did not "vet" the Afghans enough to see if they were already members of the Taliban or al-Qaida before they joined the army or the police.
We have acted too hastily, NATO commanders soon were repeating to the few foreign journalists still interested in that nation's labyrinthine alliances. We didn't want to slow down the development of home-grown security forces that would keep the country safe from radical insurgency after we left (perhaps better-said, SO we could leave). We didn't want to say it couldn't be done, no matter how long we endured.
Because, if we said those things openly, it would mean essentially that we were training a service that, far from fighting the Taliban, might actually BE the Taliban!
In Afghanistan, Western military commanders and men tend to think like this: If you continue plucking out the Taliban members or sympathizers from the Afghan military and police, you will at some unknown time have gotten rid of them. Their numbers are static.
But this is not true. Afghanistan is similar to many of the developing world's populations in that Afghans can change political and military masks with quick and deadly precision according to the demands of the moment. Fighting Soviets one day, members of the Taliban the next day and NATO troops after that. What does it really matter?
We Americans, particularly, should know this better than others. Before the Soviet evacuation from THEIR Afghan war in 1989, we had trained the mujahedeen to fight against the hated Russians. Then we abandoned them, and the very next minute they became radical Islamist and brutal Taliban. The one thing they ALL have in common is they want to fight unrelentingly against foreign invaders, even better with the invaders' own weapons, as with these attacks in Afghanistan today.
One Afghan soldier, at his graduation ceremony, had just been handed his gun when he grasped it and turned it upon his American teachers.
At this point in the argument, many Americans will ask irritably, "But why was it different in World War II, when Germany and Japan were so totally transformed?" The answer is exaggeratedly simple: We had waged wars and won unconditional surrender. This gave us the power to dictate the new terms.
When we talk about wars not related to the World War II experience, we see similarity in what I like to call the "hypothetical" wars, or wars based upon unprovable hypotheses. These conflicts have stretched from Vietnam, to Somalia, to Lebanon, to Iraq, and now to Afghanistan, with many other smaller conflicts in between.
It is these wars -- "small wars" with uncertain results -- that are draining our blood and our treasure, which are destroying the confidence in America around the world, and which are really at the heart of all the talk about American "decline."
We know the Republicans' uninterest in opposing them. Gov. Mitt Romney has shown himself all too eager to follow the Israelis against Iran, even considering getting involved in Syria. The Democrats have been better, and the Obama administration has at least gotten American troops out of Iraq. Yet, with Afghanistan, after much studying and to-and-froing, the president announced two years ago that he would send more troops at the same time he announced the date of their removal.
One wonders.
And one wishes that the American people would recognize this. Once troops are sent in, reconsidering the policy becomes nearly impossible. Patriotism raises its multifaceted demands.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-war-left-convention-rhetoric-230206477.html
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