Lost to a vague purpose in Afghanistan

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http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/opnOPN53101607.htm

Lost to a vague purpose in Afghanistan

After almost six years of American and NATO deployments in Afghanistan, $126 billion in American taxpayer dollars spent on the war and reconstruction, 707 American and other NATO soldiers killed, and several thousand Afghans killed, what has been gained there?

When 19-year-old Asa Quinn of Orange City was killed by a roadside bomb on Oct. 6, he became the 191st coalition fatality of the year, matching last year's record. With 11 weeks left in the year, 2007 is likely to be the deadliest year yet for the war effort in Afghanistan, with only deterioration in sight. The American death tally, at 92, is seven short of the record in 2005 (98 Americans died there last year). Afghanistan is frequently referred to as the forgotten war. For Floridians, it shouldn't be: Even though the state is the fourth-most populous, it has the second-worst casualty rate in Afghanistan, after California. Thirty-five soldiers from Florida have died there (compared with 39 Californians).

For what?

The week Quinn was killed, The Pakistani army and the Taliban engaged in a raging battle just across the border from Afghanistan. Up to 250 soldiers, militants and civilians were killed. The battle was barely reported in the United States, but it wasn't a surprise along the Afghan-Pakistan border, where the border itself has disappeared in a maze of warlord fiefdoms no single army can control. Among those warlords: reconstituted units of al-Qaida and the Taliban the American campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 was supposed to have demolished.

The CIA had a direct hand in birthing al-Qaida when the CIA helped bankroll, with Saudi Arabia, the secret war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Some of the "mujahideen" the CIA funded, among them Osama bin Laden, became al-Qaida once the Soviets were defeated. Similarly, Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency known as ISI, had a direct hand in birthing the Taliban when it paid for -- and trained -- fundamentalist Muslim militants to fight Pakistan's proxy war against India in Kashmir, the northern Indian province India and Pakistan have been disputing for decades. Those militants formed the military backbone of the Taliban. Al-Qaida and the Taliban, opportunistic creations of the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, are now those three nation's Frankenstein monsters.

There may have been a time, in 2001 and 2002, when American intervention had a chance to end the cycle of violence terrorizing Afghanistan since 1979, the year of the Soviet invasion. In 2001, American intervention had the backing of most Afghans and the world. The representative Afghan government set up in 2002 looked promising. But it couldn't survive effectively without sustained American and western involvement. That involvement diminished in 2002 when President Bush shifted his attention -- and military and intelligence resources -- away from Afghanistan, to Iraq. That decision was fatal to Afghanistan's renewal.

Afghanistan is now another Iraq. It's a broken nation where the American military is at best holding an uncertain line against an insurgency rather than imposing its authority to allow for political progress. Troop deployments in Afghanistan are still relatively low (26,000 American and 15,000 soldiers from other NATO countries). So are casualty rates. But sooner or later the same question being asked about Iraq will be asked about Afghanistan: How long an occupation, and to what end?