What a terribly sad paragraph to read about the failures of one's own country. Not in the US but in the Times Online. The first paragraph is striking.
The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, flies to Britain this week to meet a crisis entirely of London and Washington’s creation. They have no strategy for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan. They are hanging on for dear life and praying for something to turn up. Britain is repeating the experience of Gordon in Khartoum, of the Dardanelles, Singapore and Crete, of politicians who no longer read history expecting others to die for their dreams of glory.
Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never winMore from the article. I have noticed we hear almost nothing about Iraq and even less about Afghanistan. I guess the media here is playing the "we won" game, and everything will be ok. It
won't be ok. It never will.
Every independent report on the Nato-led operation in Afghanistan cries the same message: watch out, disaster beckons. Last week America’s Afghanistan Study Group, led by generals and diplomats of impeccable credentials, reported on “a weakening international resolve and a growing lack of confidence”. An Atlantic Council report was more curt: “Make no mistake, Nato is not winning in Afghanistan.” The country was in imminent danger of becoming a failed state.
A clearly exasperated Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, has broken ranks with the official optimism and committed an extra 3,000 marines to the field, while sending an “unusually stern” note to Germany demanding that its 3,200 troops meet enemy fire. Germany, like France, has rejected that plea. Yet it is urgent since the Canadians have threatened to withdraw from the south if not relieved. An equally desperate Britain is proposing to send half-trained territorials to the front, after its commanders ignored every warning that the Taliban were the toughest fighters on earth.
Meanwhile Nato is doing what it does best, squabbling. Gates has criticised Britain for not taking the war against the insurgents with sufficient vigour. Britain is furious at America’s obsession with spraying the Helmand poppy crop and thus destroying all hope of winning hearts and minds. Most of the 37,000 soldiers wandering round Kabul were sent on the understanding that they would do no fighting. No army was ever assembled on so daft a premise.
The ending paragraph is equally as compelling as the first one.
To have set one of the world’s most ancient and ferocious people on the warpath against both Kabul and Islamabad takes some doing. But western diplomacy has done it. Now must begin the agonising process of escaping that appalling mistake.
The
Down With Tyranny website has more on this topic today.
But the U.S. military, stretched thin by the Iraq war, is hard-pressed to send more than the 3,200 additional Marines the Bush administration is dispatching to Afghanistan. The growing insurgency there is fueling rifts within the NATO alliance as Germany and other nations refuse to allow their troops to participate in offensive operations in Afghanistan. The Afghan army is making progress but cannot operate independently.
"Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan," an Atlantic Council of the United States report warned last week. The report was directed by retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, the former top NATO commander. "What is happening in Afghanistan and beyond its borders can have even greater strategic long-term consequences than the struggle in Iraq."
That vote on October 10, 2002, caused world wide turmoil. Our party leaders have to start talking about what we have done and how to fix it. But beyond talking,
there must be something done.