Afghanistan is looking a lot like Somalia with the media having been on the ground since days before the US bombing campaign began.
In Somalia, the Rangers quickly learned that nobody–not women, not children–could be trusted. When the going got tough, the Rangers realized that the only way out would be to kill anything that moves. Mogadishu was urban blight times a million. The terrain and the fact that women and children were shooting at them, dictated their no-holds-barred survival strategy.
Read the real Blackhawk Down, not the bastardized, watered-down MSNBC documentary. Everyone, they learned, is a military target.
It’s hard to believe that the Rangers will make the same mistake twice. When they engage Taliban towns, they will assume everyone is the enemy. The mountains and weather in Afghanistan, along with the reportedly small troop deployment makes it a safe guess that 11 Bravo is a standing order.
For those unfamiliar with military parlance, 11 Bravo means “kill, kill, kill.”
Nobody will fault the Rangers for following such orders. They didn’t make the orders and being in the middle of BF Afghanistan doesn’t afford the luxury of debating the issue.
Our Commander-in-chief, Dubya, ultimately sends these men into harm’s way. Nobody denies evil. Nobody denies bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. The question is whether or not Afghanistan has any real control over anything that happens within its borders.
Everyone rushed to hold Afghanistan responsible for terrorist acts that might have been funded by our regional ally, Pakistan. People don’t live in Afghanistan. They struggle, they starve, they die. While they are struggling and starving, they watch their children die or get conscripted to the Taliban.
It’s entirely possible that Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al-Queda have had nothing to do with each other until mid-September. It’s entirely possible that the Taliban and Al-Queda were not allied until the Taliban realized that they were in the middle of nowhere with Uncle Sam out to get them.
The result is an awful lot of people–with the obvious exception of Al-Queda–that never asked for this quagmire.
Our President needs to meet the military objectives quickly. Bring Al-Queda to justice–no assassinations. Kill as few people as reasonably possible. Secure Afghanistan. Move the UN in. Get the US out.
That is probably the best deal we can get out of an administration that has been repeatedly screwing the region for 20 years through government and business operations.
Ideally, the US should setup a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. The Japanese and Germans did quite well under forced democracy, economic restructuring and reduced military focus. The Japanese didn’t give up their religion to become a civilized nation that serves its people rather than despotic military rulers. Few could argue that the Germans aren’t more powerful than they would have been under Hitler’s ideology.
Like the American South, Germany and Japan won by losing. If we’re going to destroy Afghanistan like we destroyed Dresden and Hiroshima, let’s not leave them for dead. The US should pull Afghanistan out of its historical vicious cycle of ignorance, despair and violence by giving infrastructure, education and representative government.
It’s the dreaded “nation building” concept that Bush campaigned against but he will put the security of the US at risk forever if he doesn’t embrace the concept for Afghanistan.
