The Lost War?

There was a time when the war in Afghanistan was a “good war”: the United States was attacked on 9/11. Aside from the lunatic fringe that does not count in history, the rest of the world applauded the U.S. effort to clear Afghanistan of a fanatical gang that offered sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.

The war in Afghanistan, and the Western attempt to make the country a more livable place, was the counterpoint to the “bad war” in neighboring Iraq: a war with no sense, no justification, motivated by Washington D.C.’s oil greed — or, in Freudian re-actualization, a form of the child overcoming the father.

This distinction between a “good war” and a “bad war” has been diluted over time. Today, nobody misses Saddam Hussein. Against all expectations, Iraq has achieved a minimum degree of order and security, even if this minimum, which has always been precarious, has meant the destruction of the country’s Sunni political structure, or, in other words, the emergence of Iran as the main actor on the Middle East stage.

While reasons for slight relief exist in Iraq, Afghanistan’s “good war” is at risk of turning into a lost war. More accurately, into an abandoned war. There are signs that the United States and Great Britain are disposed to “hara-kiri.”

Barack Obama, in his most misguided speech yet, already communicated that July 2011 will be the date of dismissal. I’m not a military expert, but any rational person would pose the fateful questions that the Sunday Telegraph did in an editorial yesterday: What if by July 2011, the Taliban gives an “illusion of stability,” only to attack later? Won’t the settlement of a date, without any concession or reference to the real situation on the terrain, be a strategic surrender before the enemy?

David Cameron, British prime minister, says no. Being even more generous than Obama, Cameron repeats the G8’s official position to establish an ultimatum: five years maximum is the time that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has to put the house in order.

This ultimatum is interesting for two reasons, both lamentable.

First, it signals NATO’s irrepressible desire to leave Afghanistan at any cost, a disposition that does not encourage the troops and which only strengthens our enemies.

Above all, it puts a bomb in Karzai’s hand: an invitation to fight the Taliban, and in case of failure in the next five years, the certainty of being devoured by them when NATO’s troops leave Kabul. Will this be the best incentive for the Afghan government to be ruthless with the insurgency?

Sept. 11, contrary to what was said and written, didn’t mark the beginning of a new era. It meant the opposite, the end of a long cycle of Western setbacks against Islamist enemies — a cycle that started with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power in 1979, and one that multiplied, in renewed acts of terror in Mogadishu, Kabul, Nairobi and finally, New York.

Pulling out from Afghanistan, giving the country to its old butchers, will not be just another Western defeat and an inexcusable betrayal of the 2000 men who fought on the terrain and will not return. It will mean the certainty that the war which wasn’t won in the Middle East will end, sooner or later, by visiting us at home.