The past few weeks have not been good ones for the Bush administration’s project of establishing firm, pro-western beach-heads in a broad swathe of western Asia from Gaza to Afghanistan. Afghanistan, which since late 2001 has been ruled by the US-installed and heavily US-dependent Hamid Karzai, is probably the country where the situation seems most dire– for both the pro-Washington political order and the Afghan citizens themselves.
Afghanistan is, by some hard-to-fathom quirk of fate (okay, make that Bushist political necessity), a central part of the mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, despite its great distance from the Atlantic ocean. The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was probably representing the views of many NATO leaders when she wrote yesterday,
- Nato’s members know they cannot afford to fail now. All sides are aware that stabilising Afghanistan is the mission Nato has staked its reputation on.
That means that the alliance will have to pull together rapidly, for the sake of its own credibility as well as for the future of Afghanistan…
One question: given that Afghanistan is so important to NATO, and given that the Bush administration has pushed so hard with its plan to deploy an ABM system right next to the Russian border in Poland, why would Russia– or, come to that, China– feel any urgent desire to help NATO pull its chestnuts out of the Afghan fire as that fire burns on?
(Russia and China are both a lot closer to Afghanistan than the USA or any other NATO country. They have their own strong interests in not seeing the return of the Taleban order there. But short of that, I expect they are both quite happy to see NATO’s troops getting ground down there– and in Iraq, as well.)
And talking of Iraq… all that cock-a-hoop talk we heard from the Bushites a month or two ago, about how the surge was “working” and life in Iraq has been slowly returning to normal, has been shown to be a flash-in-the-pan. The US’s own casualty rates rose again in January; and yesterday Iraqi suicide bombers performed two more truly gruesome acts against crowded civilian markets.
And in Gaza, the US-Israeli attempt to besiege Gaza’s entire 1.5 million-strong population back into the Stone Age received a notable blow when the Gazans and their Hamas leaders simply walked en masse back to some form of a new, life-saving economic connection with Egypt.
Today, it is ten days since that bust-out occurred. On most of those days, Egyptian officials have sworn that they were “just about” to re-close the border– but guess what, it hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, US puppet Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has steadfastly refused to respond to the invitations issued by both Egypt and Hamas that he join a tripartite discussion on how to restore order at the Gaza-Egypt border. Abbas has lost considerable political popularity by maintaining a stance that looks suspiciously like one that seeks to uphold Israel’s ability to strangle Gaza’s economy whenever it pleases.
Hamas’s leaders actually seem to be taking some interesting leaves out of the Israeli playbook. Firstly, they want to proceed with their social reconstruction project in Gaza unilaterally, mirroring the unilateralism (i.e., no negotiations!) policy steadfastly pursued toward Gaza by Sharon and Olmert. Secondly, Hamas is intent on creating “facts on the ground” along the Gaza-Egypt border, to which they hope the diplomats can subsequently find a solution. Hey, creating “facts on the ground” always– until recently– worked well for Israel! So why not for the Palestinians too?
As of today, the Egyptians are promising they’ll get the border re-sealed on Sunday. We’ll see about that. But even if it is re-sealed for some period of time, the Egyptians, Israelis, and everyone else in the region now understands that Hamas could bust across that border into Egypt any time it feels it needs to in the future. So (a) Israel’s plans to maintain a complete siege have lost much of their relevance, and (b) the incentive for the Egyptians to be able to restore some semblance of order and regulation to the border zone will continue to be huge; and for that, clearly, they need to work with Hamas.
Incidentally, this whole Gaza border issue now also puts the EU on the spot. Back in 2005 the EU rashly agreed to act as Israel’s puppet in policing the one single, people-only crossing point between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah. Basically, the scheme was that EU monitors– who lived in Israel— would sit in the Rafah crossing-point and check the documents of those small numbers of Gaza Palestinians who were allowed by Israel to cross in or out… and they had to transmit all the details of those travelers for prior approval to Israeli officials sitting a mile or two away, inside Israel. And whenever the Israelis wanted to close Rafah, all they needed to do was prevent the EU monitors from traveling to it. Which they have done, almost continuously over the past months.
Now, the Hamas people say (a) they want to have free passage for goods as well as people across the Gaza -Egypt border, and (b) they might agree to have European monitors there– but not if those monitors are beholden in any way to Israel.
How will the EU respond to these demands? Will it continue to kowtow to Washington and Israel? In which case, the Egyptians and Palestinians may well just go ahead and open their own borders. What is the EU’s standing under international law to have any role there, anyway?
A very bizarre arrangement. (Like NATO being in Afghanistan, you might say. More than a whiff of old-style colonialism?)
Anyway, I feel fairly hopeful that the Palestinians and Egyptians can sort out some workable regime for their mutual border. Both nations have a strong interest in the situation not being chaotic. There remains, of course, the not-small challenge of getting Abu Mazen to talk to the Hamas people. (Oh my! Maybe he would risk losing all the hefty amounts of money he and his followers have been getting from Washington and its allies! How could he deal with that blow!) But he’d probably better do it sooner rather than later, if he wants to retain any credibility as a national leader… Um, it’s not as he has done if anything else recently that has brought his people any tangible benefits?
Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan, and what it portends for this strange political animal called “NATO”, has attained new importance on the global scene.
NATO was founded back in the 1940s as the military alliance of the anti-Soviet powers of Western Europe and North America. You might think that after the collapse of not just the Warsaw Pact but also of the Soviet Union itself in the early 1990s, the NATO generals could all have folded up their general’s batons and their flags, and their strategic-planning Power Point presentations and gone home…
You’d be wrong.
NATO was pretty rapidly reborn at that point as, among other things, the main way the US, through its military, worked to hang onto a meaningful role in Europe. That, at a time when the eastward-moving growth of the European Union threatened to make Europe into something that was larger, stronger, non-American, and more self-sufficient. There were also some attempts to rebrand NATO as an alliance of the “democracies”, and in some way an agent of the democratic ideal. It always struck me as very muddle-headed, however– whether in Iraq or anywhere else– to imagine that the projection and use of military power had anything at all to do with being democratic. A commitment to democracy surely requires, above all, a commitment to working hard to resolve one’s political differences, however sharp, through nonviolent means? So the idea that any military alliance could be an agent of democracy, seems distinctly Orwellian.
But now– and this is what the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was referring to– the over-stretching of military capabilities (and the casualties) that several NATO nations have been experiencing in Afghanistan has sparked off a battle royal among some of the alliance’s leading members. With spring approaching and the Taleban reportedly better organized than ever, Germany’s Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung on Friday brusquely rejected a written plea from US Secdef Robert Gates that Germany send troops to the combat zones in southern Afghanistan. (A strange old world, eh, when an American leader is begging Germany to deploy troops into combat zones outside its own borders?)
NATO members France, Turkey, and Italy have also refused to send their troops to the Afghan combat zones, keeping them instead in provinces less plagued by the Taleban’s recent “surge.” Canada’s government, which has had (and lost) quite a lot of troops in the combat zone, has come under huge domestic pressure and announced it will pull them out in, I believe September.
Britain has had troops in the combat zone all along. But now, a plan to deploy 1,800 Scottish troops there has stirred some pushback from the increasingly independent-minded Scots. And in London, veteran political commentator Simon Jenkins has an anguished piece in the February 3 Sunday Times under the headline Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never win.
Jenkins writes,
- 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.
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…
Nato’s much-vaunted 2006 strategy has not worked…
Kabul is like Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. It swarms with refugees and corruption while an upper crust of well-heeled contractors, consultants and NGO groupies careers from party to party in bullet-proof Land Cruisers. Spin doctors fighting a daily battle with the truth have resorted to enemy kill-rates to imply victory, General Westmoreland’s ploy in Vietnam.
This is a far cry from Britain’s 2001 pledges of opium eradication, gender-awareness and civic-governance classes. After 87 deaths and two years of operations in Helmand, the British Army cannot even secure one dam. Aid successes such as a few new schools and roads in the north look ever more tenuous as the country detaches itself from Kabul and tribal elders struggle to make terms with Taliban commanders…
All of Jenkins’ piece is worth reading. It stands in stark contrast to this nonsense from the WaPo’s resident Bush-apologist, Jim Hoagland, whose main “argument” consists of whining that the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan are all Hamid Karzai’s and Pervez Musharraf’s fault.
I have argued for a long time now that invading Iraq was definitely “a bridge too far” for the projection of US military power into west-central Asia. (That is a purely “realist” argument. There were also, of course, weighty moral arguments against the venture, from the get-go.)
But I think what we can see now, as we survey the scene from Gaza, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, is that the major projects of the US-led “west” in the region are all in disarray. Partly, this is because of the arrogance with which the Bush administration pursued all its projects in the region (and partly because of the craven toadying to US power on behalf of too many other members of the “west”.) Partly it is because the Bushites always rejected using the UN’s legitimacy whenever they could, preferring to exercise their own “leadership”, as unfettered as possible, over their own self-assembled “coalition of the willing.” But in good part it has also been because of the west’s excessive reliance on the instruments of brute power, rather than consultation and diplomacy. From this point of view, Israel’s imposition of the crushing, anti-humane siege on all the population of Gaza was just as violent as the US’s use of massive air-launched missiles and bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan. (Israel has, of course, also used a lot of heavy ordnance against Gaza, as well as its attempts at siege.)
… So the Bush administration’s military planners are doubtless working late these days, trying to figure out what to do about Afghanistan, what to do about Iraq. Should they follow “the Dannatt rule” and work rapidly to redeploy forces from Iraq to Afghanistan?
Or the other way around?
Right now, they have no good choices. The Bushist conceit– that the US could maintain its “Uberpower” role in the world through the use of its own military power with the help only of those other powers ready to be be swirled along in its wake, and under Washington’s unquestioned leadership– is being revealed for what it has always been: imperial hubris. When will the non-US powers in the world step in and propose a better way forward? When will the US citizenry itself stand up and scream, “Enough! We need a better way!”
I have not been encouraged, frankly, by the calls that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made in the past for “an increase in the overall size of the US military”, as providing any kind of an answer to the problems Washington has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I am even less encouraged by the stress the Republican candidates have put on even more militaristic paths forwards.) But at least Barack Obama is saying the US President should talk to– and listen to– its opponents. He has put a lot more emphasis on diplomacy than Hillary; and he certainly doesn’t project the idea– as she does– that he feels he has “something to prove” in being commander-in-chief of the US’s 1.4 million-strong armed forces. He also stressed in Thursday’s debate that he sees the need to provide a clear contrast to the militaristic kinds of policies that the presumed GOP candidate, John McCain, has been advocating.
So Barack Obama may not– okay, he will not– solve all the problems in the US’s relationship with the rest of the world. But he sure looks a lot better than any of the rest of them.
And whoever is president on January 20, 2009, is going to be facing some truly massive challenges.
I suspect that the real failure in US strategy has been to underestimate the difficulty of enrolling the populations of other NATO countries in the phoney war on terror. The neo-cons, in their arrogance, assume that Canadians, Germans, Dutch etc are just like Americans ‘writ small” and are equally susceptible to the propaganda techniques which work so well in the USA. Having discovered that liberalism is a paper tiger in the States they assume that it is everywhere else where pale complexions prevail. Thus the assumption was that it would not be long before the people of Europe would insist that their governments contribute blood and treasure to the American led crusade.
This was certainly the way they read Canada: the Harper government, which harks back to pre-confederation days in its loyalty to the Imperial overlord, regards the opportunity of being allied with the US in Afghanistan as a real honour. When Iraq was invaded and it became clear that Canada would be uninvolved, Harper and his party held rallies to accuse the Liberal government of cowardice. They evidently believed that the population would support them. They still cannot grasp the fact that most Canadians see through the crude rationales for our involvement in Afghanistan : in fact the only people who do not are the government’s own core supporters in the oil patch and the crazier conventicles. Those who support the mission do so because they see it as a relatively cheap way of retaining US goodwill but most see it as a waste of lives, national dignity and money. And then there are the Afghan casualties, which count for something in a country which, not long ago, disbanded its Parachute Regiment for torturing a prisoner in Somalia.
The current “threat” by the government to withdraw from Afghanistan looks very much as if it was cleared in advance with Washington thus allowing Condoleeza Rice to rush around NATO capitals begging for help to keep Ottawa on side.
What gave the neo-cons confidence in their analysis was their feeling that the racism underlying their contempt for Arabs and muslims was widely shared and that Europe and white commonwealth colonies, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, would leap at the chance to spill some foreign blood, without much risk of reprisal. The truth is that most people really have grown out of crude imperialist attitudes: they’ve been there and done that. Only in the States and Israel, it seems, is there anything like majority enthusiasm for returning to the dark days of brutal colonialism. Europe, Australia and Canada ought to stand aside and let them get the nonsense knocked out of them in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. As they say in Yorkshire “they won’t be told..”
Barack Obama may not– okay, he will not– solve all the problems in the US’s relationship with the rest of the world. But he sure looks a lot better than any of the rest of them.
I’ll drink to that!
The Bushist conceit — that the US could maintain its “Uberpower” role in the world through the use of its own military power with the help only of those other powers ready to be be swirled along in its wake, and under Washington’s unquestioned leadership– is being revealed for what it has always been: imperial hubris.
Oh, but we are all Übermachtliebhaber nowadays, ma’am, it’s the fashion this season:
[A] Mrs. Clinton said that she opposed the amendment, sponsored by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, not because she favored going to war but because it would “subordinate” American national security decision-making to the United Nations Security Council. The vote on the Levin amendment came just hours before the Senate approved the resolution that President Bush later used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Mrs. Clinton voted for that resolution. Mrs. Clinton has been consistent …. In that [2002] floor statement, she said the United Nations was often incapable of backing up its words with action, that a single Security Council member could veto any resolution and that the body usually waited to act until it was too late. In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in January [2008], Mrs. Clinton said: “The Levin amendment, in my view, gave the Security Council of the United Nations a veto over American presidential power. I don’t believe that is an appropriate policy for the United States, no matter who is our president.”
[B] MR. BLITZER: All right. I’m going to let Senator Clinton respond. Senator Clinton, you always say if you knew then what you know now, you wouldn’t have voted like that. But why can’t you just say right now that that vote was a mistake?
SEN. CLINTON: Well, Wolf, I think that if you look at what was going on at the time, and certainly I did an enormous amount of investigation and due diligence to try to determine what, if any, threat could flow from the history of Saddam Hussein being both an owner of and a seeker of weapons of mass destruction. The idea of putting inspectors back in, that — that was a credible idea. I believe in coercive diplomacy. I think that you try to figure out how to move bad actors in a direction that you’d prefer in order to avoid more dire consequences. And what — if you took it on the face of it and if you took it on the basis of what we hope would happen with the inspectors going in, that in and of itself was a policy that we’ve used before. We have used the threat of force to try to make somebody try to change their behavior.
___
Happy days.
Helena,
Looks you are unhappy with Gaza Egypt busted out of the borders.
But Palestinians inside Gaza they living like big prison, so I sympathized with them as human looking for help from the sufferings, wishing that boarders demolished and the move freely to Egypt.
Dose the busted out of the borders bothering you?
I will spend the month of April in the Middle East, mainly in Syria. I have decided to add the following to my agenda:
1. By a house.
2. Hire servants.
3. Instruct them to prepare the house for November occupancy.
4. Go home and start packing.
5. Wait for November.
Helena, re Iraq: it might be wise not to put all your money on the Jan increase in US casualties given the increase has been apparently due to a military offensive against AlQI regrouping in northern Diyala and in Nineva provinces?
Re Gaza: While Bush and Rice are surely feeling set back as to realisation of their grand vision of a united Palestinian state living side-by-side-in-peace with Israel blah blah, surely, with your detailed knowledge of Israel, you can’t seriously imagine the permanent division of Gaza from West Bank is not in Israel’s strategic interests since its withdrawal from Gaza and the “siege” very likely a tactical manouvre to this end which Hamas is now accomplishing oy vey?
Re Afghanistan: On what possible rationale could any US Afmin allow the Taliban/AlQ back in there? How could Nato, without losing all credibility? The Chirac/Schroeder days have long passed.
Salah, I don’t know where you got the idea I was unhappy with the Palestinians breaking out of Gaza! I’ve written extensively and very supportively about them having done that, ever since it happened January 23.
The activities of militant religious fundamentalists are certainly undesirable, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, but the US doesn’t have the resources (chiefly boots on the ground) to eradicate them. Moreover, as we don’t have the political auspices or moral authority to act as the world’s policeman, our interventions have been counterproductive.
Helena,
With all due respect I felt that sense I might wrong in this sense.
On diffrent matter, Iraq different from Afghanistan:
…..
Another difference her Afghanistan war was against Extremists Terrorists and their training camps there, Iraq war was regime change, surprisingly we end in chaos that not meant to be in Iraq.
The only solemnities between Iraq and Afghanistan is that the citizens of both countries lost their jobs, public services with fails promises again and again with all those figures of billions we hear for so long that will build and developed these country for butter life the facts on the ground is not what said and promised.
Hi Helena, a couple of notes on Canada.
Canada is not pulling out of Afghanistan in September and I fear there is not ‘huge domestic pressure’ to pull out; I’m sad to report that there is virtual consensus on significant Canadian intervention in Afghanistan across the political and media spectrum.
Parliament approved Canada’s combat role in Kandahar through February 2009; a vote in the coming weeks will almost surely extend Canada’s participation well beyond – given that all four parties in parliament support deep Canadian intervention in Afghanistan, if not the (never-defined) combat role.
The media and pundits meticulously grieve every Canadian soldier killed, but now that the Marines are coming to do the fighting, Canadian policymakers are all for staying. Add attack and heavy lift helicopters and we’ll stay indefinitely, a blueribbon panel just reported.
As for the other key elements of the counterinsurgency – army and police training, development and governance/diplomacy, Canada’s commitment is virtually open-ended. The cement on Canada’s super embassy is still being poured, if you will.
Operationally, on Friday it was announced that Canadian MjGen Marc Lessard is taking command of NATO troops in regional command South – namely, the six provinces that currently comprise the heart of the counterinsurgency war.
As for the rest of CENTCOM, Canada has a warship with a carrier strike group off the coast of Iran; Canada has a military base in the UAE; a Canadian general was deputy to Odierno in Iraq, another has landed in Iraq to be the deputy to Austin.
I won’t even get into Canada’s shameful role in the siege on Palestinians, other than to paraphrase Canada’s ambassador to Israel: we were first!
Canada’s commitment, ratified by a majority Parliamentary vote upon the motion of the minority Government, currently extends to February, 2009.
PM Harper, a fellow traveler of the most fervent cast, has just attempted to manufacture a consensus on committing until at least 2011-12. By resorting to the unaccountable expedient of the all-to-predictable old “nonpartisan expert panel” recommendation scam, Harper hopes to browbeat and finesse the Opposition parties into accepting the all or nothing conclusion ginned up for the “debate” on mission extension.
He is now on record, per the expert’s report, that if at a minimum, Nato doesn’t cough up another 1,000 caveat-less combat troops and some helicopter capacity deployed down south, the mission will end as scheduled, or change from southern combat to some other undefined mode in 2009, pending further vote. (Dozens, the majority of, 70+, dead soldiers have been killed just driving around to camp out at god-forsaken little static outposts or compounds, although we just nontendered either Boeing or Lockheed $1.4 Bn for 3 or 4 of those gigantic cargo planes so we can ship ’em over – without helicopters – quicker.) . Our CDS, Gen. Rick Hillier, also pinch hitting as dept of Foreign Affairs policy mouthpiece in centrally managed Harperville, has just chimed in with a week-long one note no-alternative-to-“sucess”, via increased-open-ended combat-commitment, ten-years-out best-case-but-doable media chorus. It is apparent that by some accounting these forces will be forthcoming, perhaps including in a pinch, given German and French resolve, British forces recently removed from Basra.
Combat is going to continue and intensify, however futilely.
Its over. Given the general exhaustion of the people, the society(s) and infrastructure, years of Karzaian Kabul-only Kabuki governance, the facility and avidity of traditional and enabled vacuum-fillers, the endemic corruption of the Afghan National Police – of local governance at large, the constant of Pakistan, and our attention spans and bone-headedness in general we are many orders of magnitude removed from effective intervention. It would take 300,000 to 500,000 troops and a full Afghan Marshall plan 20 years,WITH THE FULL SUPPORT OF ALL THE NEIGHBOURS AND LOCALS WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THEIR LEGITIMATE INTERESTS/HONOUR REQUIREMENTS WHEN AMERICA VISITS NEXT DOOR, to reach a secure tipping point that is generations away from our imagined, best-case, benign, democratic and Muslim Afghanistan. Or just park the 500,000 on the Durrand Line to sustain some kind of anti-Al Qaedan, medieval status quo, on permanent station to nuke the Islamic Bomb should circumstances or American theology require, manage(or become) the drug trade, and keep an ear out for any pipeline opportunities afforded by an AQ-immunized all-is-forgiven Taleban Lite restoration.
Nato is obviously never going to do it, indeed, is incapable of doing it. But an ineffective pastiche of sub-optimal interventions – in the end, detrimental to all by opportunity cost alone – might well stumble along for decades. Until another more pressing threat, real or imagined, weighs upon the levers of power and limns a new horizon of crisis to campaign against.
Twas ever thus and I wish it were not; I’m all in favour of plausibly imperative, strategically limited, commensurately empowered, realistically confident intervention. The Powell Doctrine. Like his presidency, just another great white hope from here in Canada
The key statement is “no strategy” for the continuing mission in Afghanistan. I don’t feel that Gates or the Bush administration as a whole has articulated a clear strategy before asking for more troops from NATO countries (Actually, Gate’s letter strikes me as poor diplomacy due to its lack of respect.). That’s the main reason why other NATO allies have shown reluctance to commit to more troops; they don’t want to just throw people into the conflict, maybe literally throwing them away. I also think the lack of an articulated strategy is the explanation behind Canada winding up with an unreasonably large burden of the danger. Harper is right to demand that other allies take some of the burden away from Canada. I think it may take the next administration to be able to credibly articulate a strategy. The next administration must do so.
That our allies would balk at more forces for Afghanistan is perfectly understandable, since the United States has all the extra force it needs nearby-misdeployed in the misbegotten Iraq War.
There’s nothing phony about the War on Terror against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In the first post, bevin tries to twist this conflict between NATO allies into his own war with Europe/Canada as blood enemies to the United States. Right after September 11 happened, I remember a Canadian person on the the read newsgroups who would post flames attacking anyone who would put condolence posts for the people that died on 9/11, and then he would post flames that made fun of the people that died. If anyone ever said something sympathetic to the deaths this Canadian would deride him. There was another Canadian who’d brag about being Canadian as opposed to being a citizen of the “jew controlled” U.S, and would slam Americans posting against with slurs like “Eat another plane!” I get the impression that what bevin tries to label “liberalism” is actually a desire by a fraction of the Canadian and European population to hope that al-Qaeda wins, to celebrate whenever al-Qaeda kills U.S. citizens and hope they can kill more. Later on, though, jon describes a different situation where there’s no “huge domestic pressure” to pull out and there is consensus for Canada to stay in with a fairer burden of the danger. I think it’s great for Jon to report that. I really hope that Jon’s vision of the Canadian public is the truth, in contrast to bevin’s abhorrant vision of Canada as being as much an enemy against the U.S. as al-Qaeda is.
In my haste, I forgot to mention the point that bob h has just made. Yes, while NATO allies should contribute forces, the U.S. has the responsibility to send the majority of troops. That the Bush administration has never lived up to that responsibility, in fact shirked its duty to commit enough to Afghanistan in order to follow its Iraq agenda, is one compelling reason the allies can point to for lack of faith in the leadership of the Afghan mission.
It would take a profound culture change to divert my self-absorbed fellow Americans from shopping, fantasy leagues, cosmetic surgery, video games, eating/dieting, celebrity worship, etc, to provide an adequate amount of boots-on-the-ground warriors to perfect the occupation of Afghanistan and environs.
Our chicken-hawk policy makers haven’t dared to suggest that the ‘war on terror’ requires their presence in Iraq.
‘war on terror’
This name became a “Trade Mark” to be used for wars, invasions, build military bases in ME, sale more weaponry, scare mongering, finally those chickens regimes now drops their heads some surrendered his laughable Nuclear Programs, to those who halted in 2003….
But the master behind that evil acts still free with his family and his son remarrying and enjoying his criminal father money more over those Madrasha who graduating those terrorists still in 2008 teaching same books and ideology inside Washington DC and other parts of the world, the master of that evil acts still not sentenced in his own country or even some hold or band on his assets inside his home country.
So where are we in all of that?
Is it the NATO mission?
Or is it insurgency, Al_Qaeda in Iraq that brought with the occupation of Iraq?
BTW,
King Hussein /Jordan had caught family members and put them in prison to enforce his/Kingdom oppositions to sundered.
Saddam did same and he killed them if not come to surrender.
Saudi did with those who opposing their kingdom regime, as reported in early 60 that they dropped their opposition from Helicopters on Saudi desert ended dead.
American doing same in Iraq coughing family members and but them in prisons to make their husband or brother who suspected opposing American to surrender to them.
But we see with OBL and his seven virgins none of them and their sons and daughters no one touched!
Why?