NATO's Mission Impossible: Its Effects on the Afghan Partisan Movement and on US

[unhappycamper]

NATO's Mission Impossible: Its Effects on the Afghan Partisan Movement and on US
Scott Atran
Anthropologist; Author, 'Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists'
Posted: November 28, 2010 01:41 PM

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"In counterinsurgency," noted Acting Director of U.S. National Intelligence David Gompert, "the population is not just the field of battle but the prize." The problem with our mission in Afghanistan is that each passing day not only makes that prize more unattainable abroad but brings new risks at home.

The NATO-led mission in Afghanistan is now near parity with the Red Army's top troop strength, and has already lasted as long as the doomed occupation during the 1980s that facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Empire. NATO's recent decision to fight for four more years in a war that cannot be won, on behalf of an untrustworthy and unpopular government, in order to solve a problem that no longer really exists, is a stunning waste of lives, treasure and the goodwill of the world's peoples on whom our own national security ultimately depends.

Still, the United States and its allies persist in pursuing what one soldier in the field described to me as "a crazy dream." As a result, NATO's already diminishing credibility and, more portentously, America's already declining influence in the world, likely will degrade faster and further despite newer, more positive plans for NATO's future program elsewhere.

"As we approach our 10th year of combat," intoned President Obama, "we must never lose sight of what's at stake:" to deny al Qaeda a safe haven by "building democracy" with the good cop tactic of social "reconciliation and reintegration" (which no Taliban group has yet accepted) and the bad cop strategy of military "containment and counterinsurgency" in a country already tormented by three decades of constant war. Truth be told, although the Taliban and al Qaeda have had an unsteady alliance of convenience, there were never any Afghans in al Qaeda, and there is no significant al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan today. The one incontrovertible fact is that over the last five years or so, the greater NATO's footprint in the country, the more widespread and lethal the Taliban insurgency has become.

The recent revelation in Britain's newspaper The Guardian, that some Afghan émigrés from the UK and other Western countries regularly return to fight with the Taliban against perceived Western occupation of their homeland, signals that the Afghan insurgency has become a partisan movement of the Global Age. "I work as a minicab driver," one London-based Taliban part-timer said," I make good money. But these people are my friends and my family and it's my duty to come to fight jihad with them."