If Obama Is So Smart, He Better Re-think His Afghanistan Policy Before It's Too Late

A few weeks ago, as I was preparing for a trip to Indonesia and Laos, I posted a few notes and a short film clip by Robert Greenwald on my travel blog, bemoaning the fact that it's unlikely I'll ever get to see Afghanistan again, a country I visited at some length twice and which certainly made it to the top of my "Can't Wait To Go Again" column. And although I have been back to troubled areas once thought unsafe for westerners-- Egypt, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Vietnam-- Afghanistan is different, very, very different. I doubt many Russian tourists would venture back to Afghanistan these days, a country where live Soviet captives replaced headless goats as the centerpiece of the national sport, buzkashi. "The object of buzkashi is to grab the goat, gallop round the pole with the carcass in hand, race back toward the circle and drop the goat inside. Imagine polo played with a dead animal." Brutal enough with a dead goat. How about a live Russian?

During the CIA's holy war against the USSR in Afghanistan, the US-trained and funded Moujahedeen drugged captured Soviet soldiers and kept them in cages. A reporter from the Far Eastern Economic Review told of Soviet soldiers killed, skinned, and hung in a butcher's shop. "One captive," he reported, "found himself the center of attraction in a game of buzkashi," an Afghan form of polo using a headless goat as the ball. In this case, the Soviet captive was used, alive. "He was literally torn to pieces," said the reporter.

And we're going to bring the Afghans democracy? A few days ago the Obama Administration announced a new Afghan drug policy, subsidies for corrupt government officials instead of eradication of opium poppies. This isn't going to work; in fact, nothing is going to work in Afghanistan.

The first time I heard Obama speak on TV about Afghanistan after his election, I felt a tinge of hopefulness. Unlike his predecessor, he actually knew something about Afghanistan's turbulent and bloody history. Since then, I've grown increasingly disillusioned that he's taking that history into account when setting U.S. policy. In yesterday's Guardian, Simon Jenkins sounded the alarm that Obama's policies in Afghanistan are leading to another Vietnam calibre catastrophe. He's right and the catastrophe won't be just for the Afghan people but for Americans as well. He's got to stop and he's got to stop now or he'll leave the presidency as loathed and reviled as LBJ did. "Senseless slaughter and anti-western hysteria are all America and Britain's billions have paid for in a counterproductive war. If good intentions ever paved a road to hell, they are doing so in Afghanistan."

History rarely declares when folly turns to ­disaster, but it does so now. Barack Obama and his amanuensis, Gordon Brown, are uncannily repeating the route taken by American leaders in Vietnam from 1963 to 1975. Galbraith once said that the best thing about the Great Depression was that it warned against another. Does the same apply to Vietnam?

Vietnam began with Kennedy's noble 1963 intervention, to keep the communist menace at bay and thus make the world safe for democracy. That is what George Bush and Tony Blair said of ­terrorism and Afghanistan. Vietnam escalated as the Diem regime in Saigon failed to contain Vietcong aggression and was deposed with American ­collusion. By 1965, despite Congress scepticism, American advisers, then planes, then ground forces were deployed... The presence of Americans on Asian soil turned a local insurgency into a regional crusade. Foreign aid rallied to the Vietcong cause to resist what was seen as a neo-imperialist invasion. The hard-pressed Americans resorted to ever more extensive bombing, deep inside neighbouring countries, despite ­evidence that it was ineffective and politically counterproductive.

No amount of superior firepower could quell a peasant army that came and went by night and could terrorise or merge into the local population. Tales of American atrocities rolled in each month. The army counted success not in territory held but in enemy dead. A desperate attempt to "train and equip" a new Vietnamese army made it as corrupt as it was unreliable. Billions of dollars were wasted. A treaty with the Vietcong in 1973 did little to hide the humiliation of eventual defeat.

Every one of these steps is being re-enacted in Afghanistan. Every sane observer, even serving generals and diplomats, admit that "we are not winning" and show no sign of doing so. The head of the British army, Sir Richard Dannatt, remarked recently on the "mistakes" of Iraq as metaphor for Afghanistan. He has been supported by warnings from his officers on the ground.

...A classic is a long editorial in ­Monday's New York Times, congratulating Barack Obama on "sending more troops to the fight" but claiming that there were still not enough. In addition there were too many corrupt politicians, too many drugs, too many weapons in the wrong hands, too small a local army, too few police and not enough "trainers". The place was damnably unlike Connecticut.

Strategy, declared the sages of Manhattan, should be "to confront the Taliban head on", as if this had not been tried before. Afghanistan needed "a functioning army and national police that can hold back the insurgents". The way to achieve victory was for the Pentagon, already spending a stupefying $60bn in Afghanistan, to spend a further $20bn-- increasing the size of the Afghan army from 90,000 to 250,000. This was because ordinary Afghans "must begin to trust their own government."

These lines might have been written in 1972 by General Westmoreland in his Saigon bunker. The New York Times has clearly never seen the Afghan army, or police, in action. Eight years of training costing $15bn have been near useless, when men simply decline to fight except to defend their homes. Any Afghan pundit will attest that training a Pashtun to fight a Pashtun is a waste of money, while training a Tajik to the same end is a waste of time. Since the Pentagon ­originally armed and trained the Taliban to fight the Soviets, this must be the first war where it has trained both sides.

Neither the Pentagon nor the British Ministry of Defence will win Afghanistan through firepower. The strategy of "hearts and minds plus" cannot be realistic, turning Afghanistan into a vast and indefinite barracks with hundreds of thousands of western soldiers sitting atop a colonial Babel of administrators and professionals. It will never be secure. It offers Afghanistan a promise only of relentless war, one that Afghans outside Kabul know that warlords, drug cartels and Taliban sympathisers are winning.

...Vietnam destroyed two presidents, ­Johnson and Nixon, and ­destroyed the global confidence of a ­generation of young Americans. ­Afghanistan-- ­obscenely dubbed the "good war"-- could do the same. There will soon be 68,000 American troops in that country, making a mockery of Donald Rumsfeld's 2001 tactic of hit and run, which at least had the virtue of coherence... Obama is trapped by past policy ­mistakes as were Kennedy and Johnson, cheered by an offstage chorus crying, "if only" and "not enough" and "just one more surge". He and Petraeus have to find a means and a language to ­disengage from Afghanistan, to allow the anti-western hysteria of the Muslim world-- which the west has done so much to foster-- now to cool. It is hard to imagine a greater tragedy than for the most exciting American president in a generation to be led by a senseless intervention into a repeat of America's greatest postwar debacle.