Afghanistan and Obama's Delusions

Afghanistan: What Are These People Thinking?
by Conn Hallinan, September 14, 2009

One of the oddest – indeed, surreal – encounters around the war in Afghanistan has to be a telephone call this past July 27. On one end of the line was historian Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, on the other, State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke and the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The question: How can Washington avoid the kind of defeat it suffered in Southeast Asia 40 years ago?

Karnow did not divulge what he said to the two men, but he told the Associated Press that the “lesson” of Vietnam “was that we shouldn’t have been there,” and that, while “Obama and everybody else seems to want to be in Afghanistan,” he, Karnow, was opposed to the war.

It is hardly surprising that Washington should see parallels to the Vietnam debacle. The enemy is elusive. The local population is neutral, if not hostile. And the governing regime is corrupt, with virtually no support outside of the nation’s capital.

But in many ways Afghanistan is worse than Vietnam. So it is increasingly hard to fathom why a seemingly intelligent American administration seems determined to hitch itself to this disaster in the making. It is almost as if there is something about that hard-edged Central Asian country that deranges its occupiers.

Delusion #1

In his address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Obama characterized Afghanistan as “a war of necessity” against international terrorism. But the reality is that the Taliban is a polyglot collection of conflicting political currents whose goals are local, not universal jihad.

“The insurgency is far from monolithic,” says Anand Gopal, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor based in Afghanistan. “There are shadowy, kohl-eyed mullahs and head-bobbing religious students, of course, but there are also erudite university students, poor, illiterate farmers, and veteran anti-Soviet commanders. The movement is a mélange of nationalists, Islamists, and bandits … made up of competing commanders and differing ideologies and strategies who nonetheless agree on one essential goal: kicking out the foreigners.”

Taliban spokesman Yousef Ahmadi told Gopal, “We are fighting to free our country from foreign domination,” adding, “Even the Americans once waged an insurgency to free their country.”

Besides the Taliban, there are at least two other insurgent groups. Hizb-I-Islami is led by former U.S. ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The Haqqani group, meanwhile, has close ties to al-Qaeda.

The White House’s rationale of “international terrorism” parallels the Southeast Asian tragedy. The U.S. characterized Vietnam as part of an international Communist conspiracy, while the conflict was essentially a homegrown war of national liberation.

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