Caught Between Two Extremes

Despite the apparent failure of the armed approach taken by Washington in Afghanistan, both presidential candidates and the majority of Congress support not merely continuing this approach but intensifying it. McCain and Obama are not only in agreement that the Pentagon needs to send more troops into Afghanistan, they are also in agreement that it is the war that the US must win. Operating under the pretext that killing more Afghanis is somehow going to end the desire of Washington's Islamist enemies to attack it has not only created the current stalemate in Afghanistan, it has also spread the anti-American resistance into the tribal areas of Pakistan and threatens to engulf the Pakistani city of Peshawar. The recent killings of civilians by US and NATO forces only adds to the resistance, especially when the US denies the killings ever happened. -Why Afghanistan is Not the Good War



Individuals interested in thinking more deeply about the vexing question of whether or not Mr. Obama ought to escalate what has become an ugly guerrilla war in Afghanistan can entertain themselves here with a thought experiment I dreamed up using Colonel John R. Boyd's legendary briefing of the philosophy and conduct of war, Patterns of Conflict. It is designed to let you frame the issues at the heart of a successful counter-guerrilla operation and determine for yourself if adding a small number of boots on the ground in Afghanistan will bring light to the end of a tunnel created by an inept President and incompetent neocon henchmen. The danger of allowing sound-bite politics to define military strategy looms large for Obama and our nation. This bullet train for redeployment would do well to assess whether it's on the right track. -Afghanistan: Good War or Quagmire?

It was less than a month after September 11th, 2001 that the United States launched its attack, Operation Enduring Freedom on Afghanistan, defeating the Taliban. After the bombing expedition, the US refused to allow the expansion of peacekeeping troops from Kabul to the rest of the country, claiming it would interfere with the hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda. Consequently, it re-empowered misogynist and fundamentalist warlords in the northern part of the country and allowed them to take part in government.



On paper, women are more equal to men than they were before, but in practical terms very little has actually changed in Afghanistan for women. There's increased sexual and domestic violence against women. Women parliamentarians are harassed and threatened.






Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a "war on terror."



Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.



Yes, Al Qaeda - a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics - was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. "We had to do something," you heard people say.



Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 - exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.



Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: "He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner." The doctor attending him said: "The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?" -Howard Zinn



I think even the diehard Obama supporters have come to realize that the US will be leaving troops in Iraq but will shift its attention to Afghanistan (similar in the way the our attentions were shifted away from Afghanistan to Iraq), thus causing the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate.



In my opinion, the deterioration is not due to the lack of "boots on the ground", but the occupation itself. Is it unreasonable of me to wonder if Iraq will suffer a similar fate of deterioration after the redeployment of troops. Considering US troops will remain in Iraq, but our renewed focus on the "War On Terror" will be in Afghanistan once AGAIN?