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Getting us out of Voidstan (oops Afghanistan) |
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By John Freivalds
Minneapolis Star Tribune
In 1801 Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and our third President said this in his inaugural address: :” the US should consider its military alliances to be temporary arrangements of convenience and should freely abandon or revers them as indicated by the national interest.” Neither President Bush, Obama or Trump paid any attention to him and continued the US support of Afghanistan. Forget all that stuff about ‘staying the course”, “strategic posture” et.al. None of them wanted to look bad and weak in our supercharged political environment. President Biden didn’t buy into those fears and is taking Jefferson’s sage advice.
I worked in Afghanistan and quickly learned the term Afghanistan is a misnomer, it should really be renamed “Voidstan.” Merriam Webster dictionary defines void as an” empty space, emptiness, vacuum a feeling of want or hollowness.” Stan is Persian for land. For centuries there has been this mountainous desert surrounded by counties that could have easily conquered it but didn’t Voidstan was inhabited by different tribes many of which don’t speak the same language or even wear the same clothes and separated by huge distances- 600 miles east to west. Western countries imposed the need for a capital city which became Kabul and then Britain, Russia and the US tried to tame it to their culture. How did that work out? People identify themselves as a member of a tribe not as Afghans. It gets worse.
According to Newsweek” Among the most alarming developments: mounting evidence that Afghan government officials are spiriting millions of dollars in illicitly gained assets out of the country to the Persian Gulf. A special U.S. money-laundering task force, dubbed the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, is monitoring the movements. "It's very blatant—they are literally smuggling suitcases of bulk cash and moving them to Dubai," said one U.S. official familiar with the money movements as well as other recent investigations into Afghan corruption.”
Even worse, the Afghans who we trained and armed are unwilling to confront the Taliban who by Western standards are barbaric. The Taliban response” So is dropping phosphorous bombs on villages.” As Ahmad Asif Massoud a prominent warlord about the government soldiers in a story in the Wall Street Journal: “They are not fighting for the President. They haven’t been fed or paid properly. Why should they fight? For what? They are better off with the Taliban which is why they are switching sides like that.”
The original US justification of course was to get Osama Ben Laden who operated there and to prevent future terror attacks. Alas he fled to Pakistan. Then inertia took over and the US strived to find a reason for continuing to be there with Osama nowhere to be found. A new book The Afghanistan Papers akin to the Pentagon Papers which disclosed the fallacies of why Americans fought in Vietnam. The book is based on a Pentagon study which Wikipedia describes as: The Afghanistan Papers are a set of internal documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) The documents reveal that high-ranking officials were generally of the opinion that the war was unwinnable but kept this hidden from the public. Obama comes out looking bad. Yet after twenty years of trying, we are back to where we were twenty years ago.
Now President Biden is criticized for finally getting us out, “Too early” the critics say. And all this would have been avoided if the powers that be would have watched a 1971 movie The Horseman. It stared Omar Sharif and Jack Palance and was based on novel by Joseph Kessel
The book jacket says it all” The horseman is a story of today. The rigid and barbaric code by which these people live draws on basic human values that transcend time, physical courage, physical courage personal honor are close to the core of human existence than some moderns might suppose.”
Short version, we have been supporting an unliked corrupt government whose only influence is in Kabul “protected” by soldiers who are only interested in their paychecks facing an adversary which is willing to die for what it believes. And all this while the US faces huge problems closer to home. Go figure.