And the War Goes On

The decision to send another 10,000 soldiers to Afghanistan was a difficult one for President Obama. The Americans are highly divided on this issue. More than half of them believe that the war is, in fact, pointless. And amidst the disapproval, only a feeble majority thinks that new troops are necessary. No one wants to repeat the Vietnam experience when public opinion turned against the war, with the immediate result of soldiers actually being abandoned in the swamps of the guerrilla attacks. If one counts the time spent in Iraq, the United States has been at war for almost ten years. No other nation could have afforded to spend such vast amounts of money or conduct military missions on such a regular basis and yet achieve so little. There is no peace, stability or democracy in Iraq.

Moreover, in Afghanistan and the entire region near the Pakistani border, medieval warlords have had plenty of time to develop their dominion and forces. They have prepared for a long war of harassment, funded without much effort by the production of illegal drugs. It is only wishful thinking that the local administration, as was reconfirmed in the pretend elections held in Kabul, has any power at all. On the other hand, it is true that the population can already benefit from certain democratic measures.

Nevertheless, reform is difficult to adopt and can only succeed if international organizations and structures manage to exert their control, in a relatively discrete and authoritarian manner, over Afghan institutions. Are we supposed to gather that Afghanistan will never be able to function unless it is controlled and aided by the international community? The head of the executive branch in the U.S. refuses to ask himself such a question. No one can blame Barack Obama for taking his time in order to listen to various opinions, reports and suggestions, and in order to shape the public opinion in his country.

Almost nobody can remember the rhetoric of the previous administration in support of the intervention in Iraq. In the meantime, the Pentagon’s shameless lies, as well as the false arguments put forth by their loyal British ally, came to light. Infuriated as we all were after the terrorist attacks against the United States, we felt it was only natural for the American administration to take some emergency defensive measures. We understood that it had the right to identify the centers where the attacks had been prepared in order to strike back. Nevertheless, it soon became apparent that the war on terror concealed geo-strategic interests. In the end, although the administration managed to protect U.S. territories against further attacks, it failed to neutralize the very center from which new acts of terrorism could originate. The war in Iraq has actually been beneficial to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

They had the time to regroup in the tribal regions in the desert mountains, where they continue to infect both Islamic nations and the rest of the world with jihad ideology – i.e. with the exaltation of the “holy” war against Western civilization. It is, without doubt, impossible to neutralize this source of propaganda against democracy and the Western world by the time the troops leave Afghanistan in 2012. Pakistan, with its atomic bomb and its ambiguous rivalry with India, remains an uncertain ally of the United States.

The Afghan power will probably extend more smoothly to the rest of the territory once new NATO troops arrive. However, this will not mark a victory for the Western democracy that Bush Jr. wanted to carry to Afghanistan in his tanks (first to the regions that were rich in oil, naturally). The Afghans, in the superb, yet unproductive pride they must have inherited from the warriors who defeated the army of Alexander the Great and the Soviet tanks, seem to be stuck in a hazy legend of autocracy.

They do not understand our mercantile modern society, in which the bravery and exaltation of war has been reduced to movie subjects. Conversely, we cannot understand the identity hysteria, which simply does not care about poverty and the obsolete tribal dictatorship. For now, it remains certain that the Afghans are more quick to appreciate and use the invaders’ weapons rather than the ideas the latter bring with them. Will Barack Obama’s new plan succeed in untying a mentality contemporary with the Gordian Knot*? Will he slice it in half with a strike of his sword?

* The Gordian Knot is an ancient metaphor for using a quick, bold action to solve a seemingly impossible problem.