Originally Posted by
Stavros
Afghanastan was won....the Taliban routed and sent scurrying like the dogs they are. It took the Russians a decade to pack up and leave as losers, and in months we had won a decisive victory. It was one of the most stunning military victories in a century, and done by a handful of special forces, air support in combination with Afghan tribesman. Then we lost our focus and turned to Iraq, and the dogs returned.
I can't agree with this -the point of contention being the definition of victory. If you mean that the government by the Taliban was routed, you are correct even though by 2001 the Taliban was still not in control of the whole country. It was also the case that even before 9/11 local Afghans were fed up with the 'Arabi' Mujahideen who never went home after 1992, and even Mullah Omar after 9/11 considered handing in Osama bin Laden, so the argument that Afghanistan was always going to be a base for international terrorism was a weak one.
The problem is that the Taliban was not defeated as a social and political movement, after 2001 its members either remained in Afghanistan or migrated to the lawless frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan to re-group. The inability of the successors to the Taliban to provide stable government, and even a sense of economic improvement plus increasingly outrageous corruption and the destuction of poppy fields was one cause of the resurgence of the Taliban -the corruption has been so bad it has created support for the Taliban where it did not exist before, some of whom want nothing to do with Mulla Omar and the 'diehards' and seek an accommodation with Karzai, some of whom reject it. Another cause has been the need that Pakistan has to prolong the conflict to maintain the flow of US dollars/aid and maintain pressure on India for its own regional interests, indeed the role that Pakistan played in creating the Taliban and maintaining it has re-bounded on its own politics with devastating effect.
The nub of the problem is that none of the governmental stuctures that have been in power since the revolution of 1974 have created statehood or a sense of citizenship; a fundamental weakness in both Soviet and Western Capitalist strategy has been the belief that such a thing can be created if you 'win hearts and minds' with stable government, elections, economic development projects, education and so on, most of which has not materialised anyway because so much of the money advanced for it has disappeared into deep pockets and foreign bank accounts-what you have left is a collection of tribes and other structures, some religious, some regionally based, most of whom despise the Karzai government and foreign armies. Afghanistan has played by its own rules since the British Empire first dug a hole for itself in the 1830s, it beggars belief that we could now be into the Fourth Anglo-Afghan war since then without learning a single lesson -Tony Blair, a man with a mission truly believed he could achieve what no other politician or soldier (including Alexander the Great) could achieve, the kind of pomposity and ill-conceived strategy that has filled too many graves and emptied too many wallets. The point being that in their hearts the diplomats and soldiers know that Afghanistan is lost, they just cant bring themselves to admit it in public, Manning's leaks or no. I don't necessarilly despair of the place, but I dont see any progress taking place in the near future.