Despite Barack Obama’s face featuring prominently on the evening bulletins on the various televisions positioned around one of central Kabul’s large and grimy restaurants, tonight few of the diners were taking any notice of the news that an extra 30,000 US troops would be arriving in Afghanistan soon.
“It is just a political decision taken by the Americans, it has nothing to do with us,” said one customer.
Those watching were sceptical about the chances of the surge bringing peace. “Wherever the foreign forces go they are attacked and it is the civilians who always get killed,” said Mohamad Ashraf, an economics graduate, as he tucked into a dinner of fried mutton.
To me it seems to be madness.
Let us pray Congress rejects Prexy’s surrender strategy. If one only starts a half job, better not do it at all..
No one has ever pacified and held on to the Graveyard of Empires, not Alexander, not Gengis Khan, not Tamerlane, not Babur, not the British, not the Russians. And the Americans? Someone in the government thinks they can? The former guys didn’t even have rules of war and they couldn’t manage it. The best thing would be to buy everyone, like the Byzantines would have (if they had gotten that far east).
Senior priest, your idea of buying up our enemies sounds good. Unfortunately, Obama has been so busy buying up American private enterprises that he doesn’t have enough tax payer money left over to do as you suggest.
Someone said that if they can hold Kabul and Kandahar and the road inbetween, they’ll have a nation. Of course that means giving the northwest to the warlords, but the Talibs have never made much headway up there.
The geographic region we call Afghanistan has always been divided between strongmen of different tribal groups who generally cooperate with each other. The takeovers of the country by native rulers has always been temporary. It’s best to have governments which are in accord with the culture of the country, I think. Much better to just guarantee the borders, stop any terrorist training camps from being built (drones are good for that kind of thing), let the Taliban have the south and east, Tajiks the northwest, the Turkmen and Uzbeks the north, Shiite Hazaras the center, playing them all off against each other, and so forth. This is what I mean- from Foreign Policy Magazine http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/take_me_back_to_constantinople
Senior Priest #3,
Consider Victor Hanson’s reply to your assertion that Afghanistan is the Graveyard of Empires.