Thinking Outside the Box
Whoa, Nellie! Let's just take a deep breath and think about this for a minute. The claim is that if we don't "pacify" Afghanistan it will become a base of operations for our enemies, who will attack us again in "the homeland." In all our speculative reasoning we seem to be forgetting exactly what it was that previously had been so wrong with Afghanistan. That's the real problem.
The Taliban ran Afghanistan from Kabul. In addition to their other offenses they'd given Osama Bin Laden sanctuary, which he used to run several terrorist training camps. The U.S. didn't like the situation, but we tolerated it. Occasionally we talked with Taliban officials. Occasionally they talked with us, even sending a delegation to Washington. The Taliban flew jets; they negotiated with Bill Richardson and Strobe Talbot; they seriously annoyed the Iranians to the point of both sides having large scale troop "exercises" along their border; Taliban officials popped up regularly in Pakistan. In short, the Taliban were running a country. They were a regional player.
So, if what we want now is for the Taliban not to run Afghanistan, or perhaps not to run it in a way that we don't like, we have a much greater range of options than either running Afghanistan ourselves or through a puppet government. I kind of hate to point this out, because I don't entirely approve, but if we wanted to, through bombing we could easily prevent the Taliban from ever again setting up government ministries anywhere in Afghanistan, especially not in Kabul, or from offering sanctuary for terrorist training camps. Sure, they could try to run the country out of caves along the 2,430 kilometer border with Pakistan, but how much fun is that? And any "terrorist training camps" they set up or allowed to be set up would quickly become grease spots on the map. The anti-Taliban Afghan factions would just duke it out, the country would descend (further) into loosely affiliated regions, you wouldn't have Taliban diplomats running around, and nobody outside Afghanistan would give a damn. Honestly, is that an intolerable situation for the U.S.? To put it differently, is it worth spending countless lives and over a trillion dollars in order to try to achieve an outcome that's somewhat better?
I'm just stating the obvious, but I haven't seen anybody else point this out and I think a "stand-off" option should be part of the mix.
Posted by George Kenney on October 8, 2009 2:23 PM 
« Two Links | Main | A Podcast Technical Note »
Comments
We have certainly stepped into an enormous and long-steaming pile in Afghanistan, not to mention Pakistan.
I continue to wonder whether it is possible (although politically impossible it seems) for us to stop doing the things that cause terrorists to target us. Removing the world of terrorism is simply not possible, and the more we try with our current methods, the more terrorists we create.
Posted by: Charles D
|
October 8, 2009 6:47 PM