Story Comments

This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »

Neither our religion or our social/political customs can be imposed in Afghanistan

‘Democracy at Gunpoint’Strategy Guarantees US Defeat

An account from the Taliban side of the Afghanistan war, which was published in the New York Times on May 5, provides devastating evidence of the failure that almost certainly will eventually overtake the United States and NATO. It is a long interview with a young Taliban "logistics tactician" who has been speaking with Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah of the Times for many months about the Taliban view of the war, and about what he sees as their inevitable victory.

It amounts to an implicit challenge to the "democracy development" strategy adopted by the Pentagon and the Bush administration, and that now seems the policy of the Obama government as well. It is a strategy that assures a very "long war."

This strategy, overall, is described by one of its American critics as "to install democracy at gunpoint inside failed or backward societies, along with unrealistic security guarantees to states and people of marginal strategic interest to the U.S." (The critic is Douglas MacGregor, a retired army officer, in an article entitled "Refusing Battle," in the April Armed Forces Journal. It’s to be recommended.)

"Refusing battle" simply means not fighting battles and wars you know you will lose. This is what the Times article confirms that the United States has again done, in Afghanistan as it did in Vietnam. In Afghanistan it is fighting a guerilla war in which it has left to the enemy the choice, timing, and location of battle, as well as a permanent option of withdrawal and dispersion....

.... But it will ultimately rest – as in Iraq – upon an extremely doubtful long-term reliance on democracy development, of which we have heard much and seen little, since it assumes that a democratic society can be supplied by foreign military intervention. It is the recipe not for a long war, but for an unending one. The people of Afghanistan and Pakistan will in the end settle it, but only after the foreigners have gone home.

http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/05/06/lsquodem...

0 Replies