The Taliban's best friend

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7464

The Taliban's best friend
by P.M. Carpenter | May 15 2007

Remember all the U.S. military's talk about having learned from Vietnam's counterinsurgency mistakes? Perhaps we hadn't learned the fundamental lesson -- trying to defeat homegrown insurgents who possess a powerful nationalistic will is nearly always an impossible, Herculean task -- but at least we had patched our Achilles' heel of destroying villages to save them.

Such responses didn't exactly create the native good will necessary to outweigh countervailing nationalism, normally hostile to armed occupiers. So no more, said the military. It knew better now, and it would be a friend to the good people whose lands we occupy, not a force of oppressive destruction.

Remember that happy talk? The "new" counterinsurgency manual? The rock-solid changes in attitude and approach? Sure you do, but there's a good chance that Afghan villagers don't, buried as they are in rubble, courtesy the same U.S. military.

"The anger is visible here," reports the New York Times, "in this farming village in the largely peaceful western province of Herat, where American airstrikes left 57 villagers dead, nearly half of them women and children, on April 27 and 29.... The accounts of villagers bore little resemblance to those of NATO and American officials — and suggested just how badly things could go astray in an unfamiliar land where cultural misunderstandings quickly turn violent.

"What angers Afghans are not just the bombings, but also the raids of homes, the shootings of civilians in the streets and at checkpoints, and the failure to address those issues over the five years of war. Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn."

We lost the war in Afghanistan in 2001, when -- and because -- Bush administration officials were already scheming a rationale for invading Iraq. The necessary resources for the Afghanistan war -- the one for which we had justification -- initially were put in reserve and then diverted to the unjustified war. The proper amount of manpower and materiel could have cleared the Taliban and wiped al Qaeda from Afghanistan, but we scurried off chasing rabbits.

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