Posted on 03/17/2009 11:29:38 AM PDT by MyTwoCopperCoins
Reporting on President Barack Obama’s 35-minute conversation with The New York Times abroad the presidential jet, United States One, Helene Cooper and Sheryl Gay Stolberg quoted him in the March 7 issue of the paper as saying that the US was not winning the war in Afghanistan and might reach out to the ‘moderate’ elements among the Taliban. The process, Mr Obama indicated, might be similar to the one in Iraq where success in turning the war in America’s favour during the last two years was due as much to an increase in the number of troops as weaning moderate Sunni elements away from Al Qaeda. He added, “If you talk to Gen David H Petraeus (currently head of US Central Command and earlier commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq) I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Mr Obama seemed to have been referring to a possible course of action rather than settled policy. He also appeared to be aware of the difficulties such a course would encounter. Thus recognising that the “situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex”, he said, “You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of a challenge.”
The New York Times indicated some of the other difficulties. American military planners, its report stated, “would have to figure out which Taliban members might be within the reach of a reconciliation campaign, no easy task in a lawless country with feuding groups of insurgents”. It also referred to the fact that US officials have “criticised the Pakistani Government for its own reconciliation deal with local Taliban leaders in the Swat Valley, where Islamic law has been imposed and radical figures hold sway. Pakistani officials have sought to reassure administration officials that their deal was not a surrender to the Taliban, but rather an attempt to drive a wedge between hard-core Taliban leaders and local Islamists”.
The difficulties mentioned by both Mr Obama and The New York Times report are real. Tribal loyalties change quickly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. What prevents a ‘moderate’ Taliban tribe which had been won over through the grant of considerable financial and military largesse, from turning bitterly hostile to the US following what it considers to be an insult or an act of betrayal? What happens then to the money and the arms they had received?
Besides, a key element in the war against terrorism is psychological and involves countering terrorists’ attempts to frighten people into submission by projecting Governments as incapable of vanquishing them and protecting the public whose cooperation the authorities need in critical matters like intelligence-gathering. Negative statements about the progress of the war in Afghanistan, followed by overtures to ‘moderate’ Taliban, would indicate that the US is by no means certain to win the war, thereby boosting the morale of the Taliban and demoralising the people ranged against them.
The war against the Taliban, which is inseparable from the war against Al Qaeda and terrorism, is a global phenomenon with a civilisational dimension which is perhaps more important than its military one. The Taliban and Al Qaeda stand for a way of life which is the very antithesis of the one that has evolved through the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe and finds expression in political democracy enshrining human rights and gender justice, and a plural culture that celebrates diversity and non-conformism, the efflorescence of art and literature, and joy in living. The Taliban and Al Qaeda stand for what is tantamount to a dictatorship of the clergy and enshrines religious laws whose punitive regime militates against the basic principles of modern jurisprudence. It is an order that banishes joy from society and imprisons women within their homes, denies them education, and virtually treats them as objects.
The argument that while all this is true, there is a limit to what the US can do, does not wash. The Taliban, which emerged in mid-1994 as a force to be reckoned with, is a creation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and the Quetta transport mafia with tacit support from the Central Intelligence Agency. The Taliban’s extremist doctrine gained its current ascendancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the US-aided jihad against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The ISI, which coordinated the jihad, ensured that 70 per cent of the billions of dollars of military and financial assistance that the US provided went to the pathologically anti-American fundamentalist Islamist groups loyal to it and the rest to the moderate, pro-US jihadi groups. Simultaneously, Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq’s massive Islamisation drive had caused an unprecedented mushrooming of madarsas which produced every year thousands of fanatical young men, raised on a pedagogy of hatred and indoctrinated to live for martyrdom and savage killing of all considered to be enemies.
They flocked to the fundamentalist jihadi groups that fought the Soviets; their successors have been swelling the ranks of the Taliban. The US has a moral responsibility to defeat the Taliban which it had helped to create. The argument that realpolitik not morality should guide state policies ignores history. In the 1930s, the West watched while Adolf Hitler unleashed his racist dictatorship on Germany and targeted the Jews, hoping that the ‘Nazi dog’ will kill the ‘Bolshie dog’. The result was World War II. In the 1980s, the US actively promoted Islamist fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan and, in 1994, blessed the creation of the Taliban which imposed a nightmarish dispensation in Afghanistan. The outcome was a complex chain of events that led to 9/11. One can cite many other examples of ‘pragmatism’ recoiling on its practitioners. The result of a deal with ‘moderate’ Taliban cannot be different.
Of course, defeating the Taliban will not be easy. It will require a global coalition like the one that defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and imperial Japan in World War II. Mr Obama should concentrate on forging that.
They were not talking about the war...they were dicussing bail out for NYT.....
It’s Air Force One, actually...
*HONK*HONK*
YES!
Pictures! We want pictures!
Say it loud, say it PROUD:
O ne
B ig
A ss
M istake
A merica!
This murderer would just as soon murder us all.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.