COMMENT POSTED TO AN OBSERVER EDITORIAL
"If we do not
have a reasonably competent, friendly government in Kabul, nothing the west
achieves will last. Ignoring the Afghan nation’s needs is not an option"
Truly, an incomprehensible statement.
The statement begs so many questions, it is hard to know
where to begin.
"Nothing the West achieves"? But in fact,
"the West," as you put it, has achieved nothing, nothing but a lot of
misery and deaths of innocent people.
When anyone uses the term, "the West" in this
context, it is very telling.
It is a term trying to suggest another era - much like
calling today’s American army of well-paid professional killers “GIs” with all
its glow of association with amateur soldiers recruited to go off to fight bad
guys, something indeed the New York Times tried doing for a while until they
were laughed out of it. It is a term that provides, or should provide, a kind
of warning signal to readers in the contemporary world.
Afghanistan was an American project entirely from the
beginning, and the rest of "the West" was dragged along for the ride.
How do I know that? Not one Western country put a rally
serious contingent of troops there, and many kept their small number of troops
back from all the ugliness, doing duties varying from supplies to traffic work.
When a war is as truly important as the hyperbole claimed,
and still claims here, major countries do not commit numbers like 500 or 1,500
or 2,000 soldiers. That is on the face of it, a dark joke. NATO countries each
put in as few as they could possibly get away with, keeping “the boss” (America)
happy.
Hardly, the character of a desperately important war.
NATO countries were dragged along by the United States for
the now-usual reason of giving the somewhat plausible appearance of an
international campaign to what in fact was one country's determined effort at
revenge and control, just one more instance of Captain Ahab desperately seeking
to kill the White Whale.
The Taliban are unpleasant but are not terrorists, at least
not any more than the United States is when it is at war. You don’t invade a
country because a part of its population is unpleasant. Otherwise, you would be
invading countries all over the planet for there are some really nasty groups
and movements in all the far corners of the world.
The Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11.
The United States has given us an ugly 15-year long
performance in pointless brutality there, trying to control a basic
social-religious division in the population of this ancient, hardscrabble
society. It would have made immensely more progress dropping dollar bills than
bombs, but the Pentagon is incapable of thinking that way.
No, the Pentagon destroys the “bad guys” and “remodels
countries,” goals, which if looked at critically are absurd, almost literally
the stuff of comic books. But killing tens of thousands of real people is not
funny like a comic book.
