Robert Scheer: Keeping Afghanistan Safe from Democracy

[laststeamtrain]

Keeping Afghanistan Safe from Democracy
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091103_keeping_afghanistan_safe_from_democracy/
Posted on Nov 3, 2009

By Robert Scheer

The most idiotic thing being said about America’s involvement in Afghanistan is that the best way to protect the 68,000 U.S. troops there now is by putting an additional 40,000 in harm’s way.

People who argue for that plan clearly have not read Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s report pushing for escalation. The general is as honest as he is wrong in laying out the purpose of this would-be expanded mission, which is to remold Afghanistan in a Western image by making U.S. troops far more vulnerable, rather than less so.

He is honest in arguing that American troops would have to be deployed throughout the rugged and otherwise inhospitable terrain of rural Afghanistan, entering intimately into the ways of local life so as to win the hearts and minds of a people who clearly wish we would not extend the favor. He is wrong in indicating, without providing any evidence to support the proposition, that this very costly and highly improbable quest to be the first foreign power to successfully model life in Afghanistan would be connected with defeating the al-Qaida terrorists.

As the president’s top national security adviser has stated, there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members left in Afghanistan and they have no capacity to launch attacks. These remnants of a foreign Arab force assembled by the U.S. to thwart the Soviets in their hapless effort to conquer Afghanistan are now alienated from the locally based insurgency.

As Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain and foreign service officer in charge of the most contested area, said recently in his letter of resignation, we have stumbled into a 35-year-long civil war between rural people “who want to be left alone” and a corrupt urban government that the U.S. insists on backing. Hoh, who quit after a decade of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote that he was resigning not because of the hardships of his assignment but rather because he no longer believed in its stated purpose:

“ … In the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan … I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. … To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war. … Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and wanted by its people. … I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.”

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091103_keeping_afghanistan_safe_from_democracy/

[RC]

1. Someone went around checking ID's or what?

"...there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members left in Afghanistan..."

Surly there are more than 100 Afghanistan's still alive there, 'cause we only kill the bad guys... 'sept for occasional wedding parties.