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February 28, 2007
Intervention in Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is seen to be justified and it has bipartisan support, even though it is unclear why Australian troops are there; or even what NATO is trying to achieve. It is a low key war and the strategic aims are fuzzy. What sits in the background is the nation-building neo-conservative program of regime change, the ostensible purpose of which is to "drain the swamp" that supposedly nurtures the terrorist pestilence Al Qaeda who was given a home by the Taliban. Islamic fundamentalism rules.
The usual answer for NATO being in Afghanistan is the need to defend a secular liberal democracy by taking the fight to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The justification ends there. Mission creep continues in the face of a Taliban resurgence and control in the south of Afghanistan, even as we are told about the great "progress" that is being made in Afghanistan. Yet economic reconstruction—especially in some of the deprived southern provinces where there are security challenges—has hardly taken place, bin Laden seems to have become yesterdays villain in the process, and the existing government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and divided.
The gap between Western rhetoric supporting democratization and development in Muslim societies and the actual commitment that Western countries are prepared to make is large. Tariq Ali, in this article in Counterpunch suggests that all is not as it seems:
What was initially viewed by some locals as a necessary police action against al-Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks is now perceived by a growing majority in the entire region as a fully-fledged imperial occupation. The Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation. As the British and Russians discovered to their cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never liked being occupied.
The American's victory in Afghanistan is beginning to unravel, and it increasingly looks as if President Hamid Karzai is ruler of little more than the capital city of Kabul. If a growing numbers of Afghans see the NATO-led forces as an enemy similar to the Russians, then there is no way NATO can win this war, given the rising anti-American insurgencies. The solution is political, not military. Is U.S. foreign policy fueling the very Taliban insurgency that the U.S. force is there to combat?
Update: 28 February
An account by Mark Silva from the Chicago Tribune of what it is like being a journalist traveling with the Dick Cheney, the US Vice President, to Afghanistan, after he'd left Australia. It highlights the rules for the press on these trips.
I presume that the objective of NATO in Afghanistan is to establish a long-term presence in the region and that Afghanistan and Pakistan is a base used by the US to launch covert operations into Iran. Western development strategy should concentrate on two areas: helping the Kabul government establish health and education facilities, which do not directly threaten regional rulers, and using the U.S. military to repair infrastructure, beginning with roads.
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I would guess yes.
It's such an awful shame, I think military action in Afghanistan had a decent chance of success, followed by a relatively quick withdrawal. Until the idiocy of Iraq bled this fight of neccesary resources and focus.
Bush's (and by defaut Blair and Howard's) Middle East and anti-terrortism policies have been nothing short of disastrous for us all.