Afghans might prevail once again
After watching tonight the Charlies Wilson’s War on DVD, a wonderful technicolor piece of whitewashing US propaganda about the heroic stud Charlie Wilson bringing the missile launchers to the Afghans to shoot down the Soviet Mi-24 Hind helicopters during the 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan, I began to ask myself a question.
Will the different factions of the Taleban, Al-Qaida and Pakistani and Afghani tribesmen fighting the Brits and the Americans eventually prevail and drive the invaders out of their country once again as they did to the Brits in the early 1900s and to the Soviets in the 1980s?
After all the Brits themselves seem to be getting cold feet: Brigadier Mark Calerton the outgoing British commander “told The Times that in his opinion, a military victory over the Taleban was “neither feasible nor supportable”. Furthermore in the same article a
leaked cable by François Fitou, the deputy French Ambassador in Kabul, claiming that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador, had told him the strategy for Afghanistan was “doomed to failure”.
But perhaps all is not lost. With President elect Obama intent on sending more troops from Iraq to Afghanistan in an effort to surge and drive out the Taliban. Perhaps, though, he should listen to history and heed the lessons the the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR Gorbachev who:
If that sounds familiar then it could be bad omens for the American forces. I predict, in as much as I do not want further Afghans civilian casualties inflicted by indiscriminate US air strikes , that by the end of Obama’s first term, US will substantially withdraw from Afghanistan or reduce its presence to a base in Kabul.
