A Time for War?

Norman Solomon at CommonDreams:

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.

For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.

Read the whole thing here

We need to  get out of Afghanistan.  Instead, Barack Obama’s going inwith his own version of a “surge”, also known as counterinsurgency.  So there’s an insurgency in Afghanistan – as always.  Afghanistan will be Obama’s war.

I don’t like to harp on the number of Canadian soldiers who have died for the US in Afghanistan.  After all, many more Afghans have died.  Still.  108.

Sean Greenfield

Age: 25 years

UPDATE:  From Jim Lobe at CommonDreams –

In a new report released Tuesday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Gilles Dorronsoro, a French expert on South Asia, argued that adding troops would actually be counter-productive because the mere presence of foreign soldiers in Pashtun areas has fueled the Taliban’s resurgence and that the best way to weaken it is to reduce military confrontations. In that respect, “the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency’s momentum is to start withdrawing troops.”

Indeed, Dorronsoro argues, as do other critics, that most effective way to ensure that Afghan territory is not used as a base to attack the U.S. is to “de-link” the Taliban from al Qaeda, “which is based mostly in Pakistan.”

“We will be in a much better position to fight al Qaeda if we don’t have to fight the Afghans,” he said. “We have to stop fighting the Taliban because it is the wrong enemy.”

 

Has anyone noticed that the terms of US engagement in Afghanistan as endorsed by the UN specify fighting al Qaeda and not the Taliban?  The Taliban isn’t just “the wrong enemy”, it’s not the legal enemy.  The Taliban did not attack America.

… the Taliban appears to be evolving from a creation of the U.S., Saudi Arabian, and Pakistani intelligence agencies during Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union, to a polyglot collection of dedicated Islamists to nationalists. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar told the Agence France Presse early this year, “We’re fighting to free our country. We are not a threat to the world.”

Those are words that should give Obama, The New York Times, and NATO pause.

The initial invasion in 2001 was easy because the Taliban had alienated itself from the vast majority of Afghans. But the weight of occupation, and the rising number of civilian deaths, is shifting the resistance toward a war of national liberation. 

No foreign power has ever won that battle in Afghanistan.