Afghanistan - a rock and a hard place

We've written on several occasions that the war in Afghanistan is not winnable. All one needs to do is read the history of Afghanistan.

Joe Klein, writing in the March 16 issue of Time magazine reiterates (more or less) that notion. "Afghanistan," he says, along with Pakistan, "are teetering on the brink. And Obama's margin for error is minuscule."

One of the major problems is that we have not yet defined our goals in Afghanistan. That's why Obama has ordered another "policy review" in an attempt to gain further insight and direction.

One study suggests we need to "shut down the al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens on the Pakistan side of the border. If that can be accomplished, then the insurgency in Afghanistan becomes manageable."

But, as Klein notes, while "That sounds reasonable enough ... historically it has proved to be impossible."

The British were not able to subdue Afghanistan, nor were the Soviets. In our case at this time, Afghanistan and Pakistan are wound tightly together and Pakistan is a disaster -- unable and unreliable in terms of completing the necessary tasks that would make our task viable.


So, we send more troops into what has become a larger and more dangerous killing zone. Without a clear purpose. Without a strategy.

And now, according to McClatchy, some old Soviet veterans have weighed in. There is no way, says Fikryat Tabeyev, who served as the Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986, that increasing the number of our troops will bring lasting peace.

The Soviets have been there; done that. At the end, they had thrown more than 100,000 troops into the Afghanistan killing machine, but still couldn't defeat the "vicious tribal rivalries, a weak central government, radical Islamists, power-hungry warlords, incompetent or corrupt local military commanders, failing infrastructure and the complexity of fighting guerrilla groups."

It didn't help, of course, that the U.S. was supplying weapons and supplies to the Afghanistan fighters, including Osama bin Laden! [Which, as we have noted elsewhere, led to the rise of al-Qaeda!]

Retired Soviet Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev, who served two tours in Afghanistan, said that the basic problem is Afghanistan isn't a country like we think of other countries. "There has never been any real centralized state in Afghanistan. There is no such nation as Afghanistan. There are [ethnic groups of] Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Tajiks, and they all have different tribal policies."

Another retired Soviet general, Viktor Yermakov, said when it came to Afghanistan, there was no military solution.


So, what are we doing there? Nobody seems to know. We are killing people, often noncombatants, which raises the ire of the locals. Occasionally, we kill some bad guys.

But we're no closer to bin Laden than we ever were and we've not been able to
shut down al-Qaeda.

Perhaps this new policy review will give President Obama and his military commanders a new vision.

But maybe we don't need any more policy reviews. Maybe, before we end up with our forces decimated and billions more dollars wasted, we should leave now and let the Afghanistan people do what they've always done: raise poppies and fight each other.

It would be a shame to crawl home with our tail between our legs like the Soviets did.

History can be a great teacher if we're willing to learn its lessons.