USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011113.1405 (On Screen): In their continuing effort to find something bad to say about the war, some anti-war activists are focusing on the fact that the US doesn't seem to be fighting its own war. Why aren't our own troops in there? Are we cowards?

They're missing the point that the goal of a war is to accomplish a political objective. In this case, this particular war has several. First, to make it impossible for al Qaeda to continue to use Afghanistan as a base of operations, especially for training purposes by shutting down their terrorist universities. Second, to remove the Taliban from power. Third, to establish a stable, peaceful government in Afghanistan to end 30 years of warfare there. That last one is the trickiest part.

The one thing that is clear from an analysis of recent history of Afghanistan is that the only thing that the tribes of Afghanistan hate more than each other is outside invaders. Any attempt to establish a government there using an external army, as the Russians tried to do, is a prescription for civil war. The best guess is that the only way a real national government can be created in Afghanistan is if the Afghans do it themselves.

The Taliban actually were such a government but obviously not acceptable to us. The Northern Alliance would have been better, at least as part of a coalition government, but didn't have the military capability to handle it; they'd been trying for years and weren't successful. The quite subtle strategy we've followed was to provide enough extra support for the Northern Alliance, especially in the form of air-based bombing, to make it possible for them to defeat the Taliban. The reason wasn't to avoid risking the lives of American servicemen, though that is a positive aspect of it, the reason was that now the Afghans will say "We did it ourselves." That is critical; the new government won't be seen as having been imposed on them by foreigners. Yes, the US helped (and helped a hell of a lot), but it was Afghans themselves who kicked out the Taliban, and it will be Afghans themselves who are heavily involved in creating the new government -- and this substantially increases the chance that the resulting government will be stable, because it won't be seen as a puppet created by foreign invaders. (discuss)