Avoiding an Afghan Quagmire

With the eyes of the world focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, and the recent suicide bombing in Iraq, it is easy to lose track of America's war in Afghanistan.

It's a war that is going badly by many accounts. According to the BBC, the Taleban is planning to fight a 20-year war. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert laid out the dire prospects in a Jan. 5 editorial aptly entitled "The Afghan Quagmire" Herbert quotes retired U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bracevich as saying

“Afghanistan will be a sinkhole,” he said, “consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.”

As the American participation in the war in Iraq is being reduced, America is on the verge of increasing its committment of troops and resources in Afghanistan. We are very close to attempting what the Soviet Union attempted to do when it invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, enter into a war which may be impossible to "win" in a conventional sense.

President Obama's task in this conflict is difficult. As Herbert points out our interests are simple and the current Karzai government is corrupt, incompetent and rapidly becoming upopular.

Our interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists bent on attacking us. That does not require the scale of military operations that the incoming administration is contemplating. It does not require a wholesale occupation. It does not require the endless funneling of human treasure and countless billions of taxpayer dollars to the Afghan government at the expense of rebuilding the United States, which is falling apart before our very eyes.

The government we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels whose customary salute is the upturned palm.

In the next few weeks, President Obama will have develop a new strategy for Afghanistan and educate and inform the American people the cost and consequences of the continuing Afghan conflict. Hopefully he will present a plan that does not force the United States to spend the next 20 years fighting the Taleban.

Capitano Tedeschi

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