The War That Needs To End

Read an excellent piece by my idol Fareed Zakaria tonight on the gap between American hopes in Afghanistan, and the reality of the situation there. Zakaria argues that the US's approach in Afghanistan and other Asian countries we've gone to war in over the past several decades (Iraq and Vietnam, for instance), is fundamentally flawed, and based on the premise that we can force modernity on a country that is simply not ready or able to adopt it:

"We need to come to terms with Afghanistan’s realities rather than attempting to impose our fantasies on it. That means recognizing that the Afghan government will not magically become effective and legitimate — no matter how many cellphones we buy or power lines we install. Because they represent many Pashtuns, the Taliban will inevitably hold some sway in southern and eastern Afghanistan. More crucially, we will not be able to stop Pakistan’s government from maintaining sanctuaries for Taliban militants. And no guerrilla movement that has had a set of sanctuaries — let alone the active help of a powerful military like Pakistan’s — has ever been eliminated."

To me, there really seems to be no legitimate excuse for America's continued involvement in Afghanistan, particularly in the wake of the controversy over American soldiers' accidental burning of Qurans, which has resulted in the deaths of four American soldiers, two of whom were killed in Afghan government offices. Though I understand and am sympathetic to President Obama's reasoning behind apologizing for the Quran burning, given his primary objective of preventing the loss of further American lives, I also can't help but find myself in some agreement with the sentiment expressed by Newt Gingrich over the past week, that the controversy over what is really a very trivial and unimportant event has been far overblown by Islamic fanatics in Afghanistan, who have been shamelessly pandered to by a corrupt Afghan President in Hamid Karzai that owes his government's very existence to the same US military whom he now scapegoats. I argue this point endlessly with my fellow leftists, but it irritates me to no end that so many people (particularly on the left) are so willing to be understanding rather than outraged by such bad behavior on the part of the fundamentalists. If the US military burnt some Bibles because they had become a means of communication between terrorist POW's who were writing secret messages in them, and some Christian fundamentalists reacted to this by killing American soldiers, would the big story be the Bible-burning, or the soldier-killing? Which offense is really graver- carrying out your duty as a soldier by halting communication between prisoners via their sacred text (it is a violation of Sharia law to write in a Quran, by the way), or murdering innocents in cold blood because one of their comrades incidentally had to burn a Quran to carry out their aforementioned duty? It's a no-brainer. Afghanistan is not going to enter modernity any time soon. Al-Qaeda is effectively dead, and as long as that remains the case, let the Taliban have Afghanistan. In the era of drones, there is no reason for our men and women in uniform to be getting killed for such trivial offenses, when the Taliban in and of itself poses no threat to American security, and the organization that its fostering of motivated our invasion in the first place is on life support. Bring the troops home, President Obama. 11 years is quite enough.