What do you think our goals or mission should be in Afghanistan? And, even if you think we should have no mission and should pull the international forces out, what steps do you think we should take on the way out?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
i think the time for asking those questions was back in 2001-2002, when we invaded.
that would have been nice. However, the administration is currently doing a review, so it seems like a good time to think about it again.
I think we need to launch an educational charm offensive there, sans weapons. We need to offer a hand in terms of education and medical aid.
We need to rescue any of our troops who are trapped there. We need to provide assistance to any genuinely democratic leaders who emerge there who require specific, targeted assistance.
What we do NOT want to do is launch another Vietnam. I really fear that may be where we are headed.
We blew it with Afghanistan. Our goals should be limited to eliminating Al Qaeda, and for that we will need an accommodation with the Taliban. Throwing more troops at the problem will not help. It sure didn’t help the Russians.
And to secure a negotiated power sharing settlement with the Taliban (or some portion of it) we will need Pakistan and Iran actively involved.
I honestly hope there’s a third way – one that doesn’t involve us being in bed with either Al Qaeda OR the Taliban. Neither is a great solution. I’d like to see a new coalition formed from somewhere. But that will require education, and Internet access, in a place where some days just getting food and water is your primary goal. Really sad.
I assume that leaving pallets of shrinkwrapped cash is out of the question.
Seriously, is there really anything we can do at this point?
“I assume that leaving pallets of shrinkwrapped cash is out of the question.”
Actually, no. I’ve heard that part of the plan there is to do exactly that: spread money around as an inducement to keep people from joining the Taliban.
So, what I hope to see: kill OBL, diminish the Taliban, stabilize the gvt, provide some security for the country and build some goodwill.
I guess the question should be what do we want to leave behind us?
The current state of affairs of a goverment in Kabul that really doesn’t cover anywhere else?
The vietnam analogy applies with a vengence here with the majority ethnic group( Pashtu wahabi sunni) / tribe virulently against us. If we can’t win them over its game over, why bother. They will wait us out and thats it.
How to win them over, they are the Taliban. So somehow the Taliban and everything they stand for has to be involved. This is a seriously bad thing for us do to the actual connection with Al Qaida ( as opposed to Saddam’s bs Cheney connection. )
Without a sea port to resupply us, how are we supposed to actually suppress the Taliban. Trucking through Pakistani Pashtu territory isn’t going to work for ever especially with Predator strikes going on. Also, what ever happened to our allies the Northern Alliance. Are they just off make drug money? Dostrum anyone?
This is an intractable problem without a military solution. We must win over the hearts and minds of the Pashtu people and simultaneously break theie attraction for the Taliban/Al Qaida. Afghanistan has been a “failed” country for so long that doesn’t seem possible. We should, like in Iraq, just cut and run and be as remorseful as possible to the servivors.
i think they should destroy the poppy fields and send an agricultural mission to plant the whole country in oranges and kiwi.
im in florida!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
its hot here.
hot and peaceful and quiet and roomy.
my house is huge and reminds me of a cross between gilligans island and sanford and son.
Pomegranates, baby, pomegranates..
We should master the Opium Trade from production to distribution in Western Markets through the long-established routes via Kosovo that Clinton took for us and pocket the huge mark-up such production-to-market domination provides – then spend the money on ‘black ops’ aka payola for US pols, local crazies and anyone who needs some slush – eventually buying our way to the promised land of Western Controlled Central Asian resource pipelines.
Oh, wait.. too late.
You mean like the CIA’s Air America Airlines flew opium out of the Golden Triangle while the war raged on in Indochina? Or how Southern Air Transport, another CIA airline, flew weapons into Latin America and cocaine north during the Iran-contra, while arms dealer-drug smuggler Monzer al-Kassar worked both directions at the Iran end? Or how back in the fifties, after the Guerini Gang in Marseilles got a protected heroin smuggling op into the U.S. (the infamous French Connection) after they beat up and murdered French Communists trying to organize the docks?
Or did you mean something else?
As with most international policy of the last decade or more, the real question parses out to, “How do we put Humpty together again?” The answer is obvious. The hard part is seriously facing up to the question.
We started out in Afghanistan with a certain reservoir of good will left over from our perceived help in defeating the Soviet occupation. We would have had some leverage if we’d quietly used our pathetic excuses for “intelligence” agencies to encourage widespread local resistance to the Taliban and schism between the Taliban and al Qaida. But no, we had to bigfoot, just like in Iraq, and turn natural allies and resistors into sworn enemies.
Now the best we can do is get out, offer reparations as best we can to the non-Taliban sectors of the power structures, and support NGOs in their efforts at education, healht, economic self-sufficiency, and any other specific needs that credible Afghan sources identify. But that would require Americans to acknowledge our stupidity, humble ourselves before our collaterally damaged, and actually listen to the people we’re “helping”. Which would be unprecedented. If anybody could pull something like this off, if would be Obama, but I think it’s too much to expect from anybody.
Like a doctor treating a patient we should first do no harm. At this point our intervention, as in Iraq is causing more pain and suffering than the pain and suffering the patient was suffering from the disease in 2001. And yes the patient was suffering in 2001. But our treatment was not for the patient but for our own good and not the patient’s and thus has not treated the original disease. Or in the case of Iraq we removed one illness cause but our cure was worse that the disease that we cured. Sort of like relieving cocaine addiction with a heroin addiction.
Iraq can be left to it’s own at this point. I think we can just exit. The sectarian violence has run it’s course and there is enough oil for the current govt to defend itself.
Afghanistan is a bit different. Our exit will result in a very swift fall of the Karzi govt. The patient will then return to the ills of Taliban/Warlord rule. The situation where we came in. Women will then lose the few remaining gains that came with Soviet rule. But it’s a necessary condition to resort too. We need to see what the patients condition is without our mistaken course of treatment. We need to see the patient free of the therapies that we have imposed. After stabilization then we could see what new approaches to take, keeping in mind that we should be doing no harm.
If we’re going to break out the medical imagery, I’d suggest another that’s fundamental to any kind of successful outcome in Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world: Doctor, cure thyself.
Admit defeat and the fact that we can non longer afford the fiasco in Irag, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pull our soldiers home right now, acknowledge that the Empire is running out of money and while there is still time, try to restore the Republic.
When the world, sinking into the greatest depression of all time, rejects the US monetary system as its reserve currency, we will no longer be able to keep our troops in the field. Then, our guys and gals will come back to a society lost in the throes of runaway inflation and crushed hopes for the good life. Best to prepare now and hang on to what we can salvage of the American dream, tattered though it may be.
Regrettably the good times are over; if we are wise, we may retain a resemblance. If we are stupid, we will lose everything.
Thanks, Don.
These wars are for, surprise, oil. Or more specifically, for the oil companies, since the oil will still be there and we’ll still have to pay whatever the market price of oil is. Or more specifically, for the profits of the oil companies.
That is, our post-WWII foreign policy has been pretty much run by the oil companies, the military, and the scumbags who make money from war and oil.
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Swap our George W. Bush for their Osama Bin Laden and get it over with. No need to let the innocent suffer more.
Osama Bin Bush"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."we need to more or less beg NATO to take over in Afghanistan, and get the hell out.
I just heard on the news that two Illinois reservists were killed by a roadside bomb today. F—, he we go again.
it’s more than a bit disingenuous for Obama to point out how he’s reducing troop levels in Iraq, only to send those same troops to the hellhole called Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is a lost cause. we don’t have the 5-10 years and $10 Billion per month needed to straighten the mess out.
we have 4-5 million unemployed, fifty million uninsured. it’s time to care of US now.
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French president Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to boycott the April NATO summit celebrating the 60th anniversary of the organisation, unless he is allowed to choose where he sits at the conference table.
The president appears not to want to follow the established rules whereby seating is arranged by alphabetical order. Instead, he has insisted he should be seated next to NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, according to a report in German Spiegel Online.
Under a compromise deal, Mr Sarkozy would sit on Mr de Hoop Scheffer’s right whenever TV cameras are in the room, while German chancellor Angela Merkel would sit to the left of the NATO chief.
NATO SG: “the basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban, it’s too little good governance”.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Options, from left to right:
Downside: We have over a hundred years of comeuppance stored up…
Downside: Some debts are only paid eye-for-eye…
Down Side: No end game; option has proven to be splendiforous for Israel.
Down Side: Global condemnation; domestic insurrection.
I see no good or workable options – it’s just a matter of which downside you can live with.
I vote for option 1 with this caveat. Liberal use political refugee visas for any woman and her children that has done things that the Taliban would retaliate on, such as teaching girls to read, uncovering their face, et cetera, and liberal use of these visas for men and their families that have cooperated with the US. Let’s not repeat our betrayal of the South Vietnamese who worked for the US military and embassy.
This probably would make virtually every woman in Afghanistan eligible for a visa, some 16 million, but I don’t know what else to do. I wouldn’t leave any woman to the tender mercies of those religious crazies who would kill someone for teaching someone else to read.
We won’t leave Afghanistan to Taliban/War Lord rule when the Karzai government officially fails. That’s who is in charge now. If there are enough sane elements in the country to work with, we should help them rebuild & establish a civil order. If there are not, they must be left to their own devices.
Opium poppy destruction should cease. We’re destroying wheat and watermelons and vegetable gardens along with the damn poppies and beggaring and enraging farmers in the process. Nobody’s getting any benefit that’s worth the cost.
I am speaking from a position of total ignorance on this issue, as I think most people are. In that ignorance, I don’t think we have a chance there, and the best we can do is leave without too much egg on our face. I’d like to be persuaded that there is a better alternative. It will take someone really in the know to make that case.
I think soft core politics would be more beneficial in Afghanistan. Construction, education, building and re-building, diplomacy-an improvement in the standard of living. Conflict solving skills. Remediation.