Iraq & Afghanistan
Phillip Adams; 5/7/08
Pour enough blood, tears and testosterone (or oil) into the dry and dusty dunes of the Greater Middle East and you create the quicksand that’s been swallowing mighty armies for millennia. The glorious Greeks came to grief there, as did the roaming Romans and the Christian Crusaders. More recent importers of military might that sank into the sand included the French, the British and the Russians. Now, learning nothing, the Americans (with the Brits and us in tow) have sunk deeper and faster. The US might have fared better under a President as arrogant and ignorant as George W. Bush - someone who knows little of geography and less of history - had he not been surrounded and dominated by others as dangerously stupid. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld bolstering Bush? That triumvirate made the Three Stooges look like intellectual giants and have doomed the next presidency. Whoever wins will be bogged to the axles in not one but two un-winnable wars.
See: No Internet Text, The Australian,
Getting into Baghdad was as dead easy as the reprehensible Rumsfeld predicted. Getting out verges on the impossible. Though Obama promises a quick exit, Iraq’s quicksand would soon have him in its grip - with every wriggle making things worse. John McCain, showing early signs of dementia, imagines nothing less than a military and political victory, and wants the US to stick around - for a century if necessary.
Nobody, however, is talking about getting out of the other war. The one in Afghanistan. The British and the Australians share Washington’s enthusiasm for that one - a bipartisan conviction that we should stick around or up the ante. NATO and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are calling for more troops - and our Prime Minister, along with Britain’s and the choice of future US presidents, aren’t arguing. While we might be trounced in Iraq we’ll beat those blokes in ragged clothing who have local blacksmiths hammer out crude replicas of AK-47s and travel by donkey. Piece of cake.
Pity this coalition of the willing didn’t ask the Russians. And a shame the Russians didn’t ask the English.
The Poms were trounced twice in Afghanistan - in 1839-42 and 1878-80. Armed shepherds massacred an expeditionary force trying to escape Kabul in 1842, leaving a sole British survivor out of 16,000 troops and camp followers. And 100,000 Soviet soldiers, though they managed to slaughter over a million Afghans, were utterly defeated by the same rabble of tribesmen.
The Russians’ major success was to drive a quarter of the population into neighbouring Pakistan, creating religious time-bombs that are now exploding in the face of the invaders - or in urban targets far away.
The final count of Russian casualties is believed to be at least 20,000 dead and 100,000 wounded. Surviving soldiers returned home full of anger and resentment. The cost of the defeat in bodies, roubles and political repercussions would play a significant part in the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet here we go again.
It’s easy to forget that the Taliban, a co-creation of the West, were warmly welcomed by many Afghans as a distinct improvement on both the Russians and the local warlords. And now, almost seven years after they were ousted, the tide is turning back to the Taliban.
The outside world has never won a war in Afghanistan and never will. The country continues to take the pounding started by the Russians in their arid parody of America’s Vietnam - and like the disciplined Vietnamese the undisciplined Afghan population shrugs it off.
Yet it’s a war the West seems happy to wage. It hasn’t cost as much as Iraq in terms of men or money. It was a more popular conflict to begin with - with September 11 providing a plausible excuse. And unlike Iraq it didn’t require the three stooges, George, Dick and Donald, to lie about weapons of mass destruction and connections to terror attacks on the US.
Many in Afghanistan hope for the best and don’t want the West to leave. At least around Kabul there’s a semblance of order. There have been fewer scandals in this conflict than in Iraq - no Abu Ghraib and not so many civilians slaughtered. The main PR problems have been the failure to find bin Laden, the growing numbers of angry refugees (ripe for recruitment by Islamists), the bountiful crops of opium poppies producing heroin for Western addicts, and the inability of the coalition to either crush the Taliban or stop the Afghans killing each other. Apart from that, things are just fine.
The real war is in Iraq. It’s a total shambles. Perhaps a million dead. Two million more as refugees. Trillions of US dollars down the drain. A significant factor in the soaring oil prices currently adding a vast burden to worldwide economic problems. In this context Afghanistan is a useful distraction, a measure of manliness for those wanting out of Iraq.
Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, UK, USA