Afghanistan: Enough is enough
Osama bin Laden is presumably still on the loose, the one-eyed Taleban leader Mullah Omar is without doubt still riding around on his motorbike, the opium poppies have never bloomed as bright, corruption is rife, women are still being oppressed by fundamentalists and the country’s infrastructure still has not been rebuilt.
Even Washington’s boast that due to its efforts Afghanistan has morphed into a functioning democracy is flawed when the last election returning Hamid Karzai to power was suspect, to say the least.
If anything, the situation there is worse than ever. Almost 1,800 allied soldiers have lost their lives on Afghan soil since the beginning of the conflict as well as untold numbers of Afghan civilians, written off by the US as “collateral damage.” June this year was the worst month ever in terms of coalition casualties while Britain’s new Prime Minister David Cameron is warning of an escalation in violence as the summer progresses.
This war was badly thought out by members of the Bush administration who didn’t have a clue about tribal societies in a country that over the decades had garnered a reputation of being “the Graveyard of Empires.” It was waged as a knee-jerk response to the 9/11 attacks in order to show grieving Americans that something was being done in retaliation.
Never mind that 99.9 percent of Afghans had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or even knew where the World Trade Center twin towers were. They were warned by the Pentagon that their country would be bombed back to the Stone Age.
In truth, it’s been a fiasco from the start. Those gung-ho US politicians and generals who planned it failed to do their homework. They said they would eradicate the Taleban without understanding who these people are. They don’t go around with “Taleban” tattooed on their foreheads and black turbans can be removed at will. These are ordinary Afghans who follow an extremely conservative ideology, which isn’t something tangible or recognizable. Going after the Taleban is rather like Britain deciding to hunt down Methodists or Presbyterians.
Link:
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6056.shtml
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