Hey! Remember Afghanistan? It’s still out there, and we’ve still got a handful of soldiers fighting.
The question now is what to do there. The war is seven years deep and suddenly it seems as though everyone’s got a newfound concern for the resolution to the first leg of the “War on Terror”. There are a thousand and one snarky comments to make on that, but the point is just to read what Zbigniew Brzezinski has to say on the matter.
Big quote ahoy.
In short, let’s not get into the nation-building business. “We’ve had some sort of a notion that we build a modern society, democracy, with the help of Western-type Afghans.”
While President George W. Bush “theologized” that concept, “Obama no longer embraces that theology,” Mr. Brzezinski says. “But let’s face it: Two years ago, what did he know about Afghanistan?” The former top national security aide is no soft-liner and thinks it would be a disaster to withdraw from Afghanistan or set deadlines for getting out. That brings up what the United States did after the Russians had to retreat.
“Our biggest mistake was in 1989,” he says. “The Taliban arose not because of what we did in Afghanistan to help defeat the Soviets. They arose because of what we did not do in Afghanistan, which was to continue helping after the Soviets were driven out.” Looking at these Afghanistan bookends, he says Mr. Obama should “draw those two lessons together.”
“We have to stay in Afghanistan politically and economically,” he says, “but at the same time we must not make the war against the Taliban our central preoccupation, thereby giving them the opportunity to label us the way the Soviets became labeled, as enemies of Afghans.”
The 1989 model is one that many people have brought up over the past few years, either in terms of explaining what got us into Afghanistan in the first place (meaning, what spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda) or explaining how to get us out of there (as Brzezinski illustrated).
What mucks things up is that we spent the last six years “muddling around”, to use John McCain’s terminology. The war in Afghanistan was considered such a shrug-off that almost as soon as we were in the country was treating it like a minor side attraction. Not a real war, no, just something to toss some extra troops at if they aren’t busy. The focus was on Iraq, and now it’s come back like a ton of bricks. Let’s hope Obama can figure out a solution.
