Last week in the northern province of Faryab, two more American soldiers were murdered by one of the police officers they are in Afghanistan to train. As my friend Diana West calculates, that brings to 17 the number of U.S. troops killed in just the last four months by the Afghan security forces they are mentoring. The total climbs to 22 when the killings of other Western troops are factored in.
None of this is new. It is just an uptick. This is how it is in a tribal, fundamentalist Muslim society that regards nothing with such hostility as another civilization’s attempt to assert and imprint itself — just ask the Soviets. If our Afghan expedition seems all the more pointless now, nearly a decade after the U.S. invasion, it is because we long ago stopped pursuing the American interests that brought us to that hellhole. We came to dismantle al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. We’ve stayed — and stayed, and stayed — to make life better for a population that despises us.
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The mounting military casualties do not account for at least seven humanitarian-aid workers also murdered in recent days by rampaging Afghan Muslims — if one may use that double redundancy. The throng of assailants stormed the victims’ U.N. compound in Mazar-e-Sharif after being whipped into the familiar frenzy at Friday prayers. The dead, just like the American soldiers, came to Afghanistan to make life better for Muslims. For their trouble, they were savagely slaughtered, with two treated to decapitation, a jihadist signature.
“When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield,” instructs Allah, “strike off their heads.” That is from Sura 47:4 of the Koran — or what is so preciously called “the Holy Qur’an” by Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. To underscore the point, Sura 8:12 of this same Holy Qur’an finds Allah assuring that if Muslims would just “smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them,” it would help Him “instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.”
You’ve got to hand it to Allah: All that smiting and instilling terror works. General Petraeus is so terrified of what rampaging Afghan Muslims might do next that he could not bring himself to utter a word of criticism for their barbarity. Instead, as he offered condolences to the victims’ families, his wrath was targeted at Terry Jones.
Jones is the pastor of an obscure Christian congregation in Gainseville, Fla., where he ceremonially burned a Koran last month. Mind you, it is standard practice to torch Bibles in Muslim countries, where apostasy from Islam is a capital offense and where proselytism of any creed other than Islam is forbidden. About that noxious practice, General Petreaus hasn’t made a peep — which goes a long way toward explaining why our military itself actually confiscated and destroyed Bibles in Afghanistan last year. It’s not Bible burning and Muslim rampage that get our commander’s goat. It’s Terry Jones. “We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Qur’an,” Petraeus thundered in a statement issued jointly with Mark Sedwell, the Obama administration’s ambassador to NATO.
Of course, it wasn’t Jones who butchered and beheaded the U.N. workers. It was Afghan Muslims, stoked by the same Islamist ideology that has Afghan security forces killing the Westerners who struggle to civilize them — the ideology that is the mainstream in this cradle of al-Qaeda. In fact, it is not even accurate to say that Jones incited the Afghans. His Koran-torching stunt took place on March 20. The murderous riot did not occur until nearly two weeks later — only after the natives were whipped up not just by the fire-breathing Friday imams but by the inflammatory rhetoric of Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
If Islam is a peaceful religion, why is it so easy to incite violence in its followers? If the Koran does not mean what it says, why are Muslims so willing to follow those who claim to quote it to justify violence?
Why is our military doing anything but the waging of war? Nation-building gets in the way through its influence on ROE. Can't we either let the military fight in a way let allows them to win, or take our troops out of there? Currently we seem determined to maintain the fiction that a bloodless war can be fought and a nation like us built in a country that has much more commitment to tribal relationships than to any overarching governmental structure. If we aren't willing to accept that people (civilians) are likely to die in war, we should not go to war. But if we do go, we should go all out and win. That would be the best way to have a short war.
He has effectively submitted, and his lecture back to Americans on Quran burning was obviously well-received at the White House. So he is also an instrument of American policy. He is said to be an extraordinarily competitive man, but it's not clear what he is competing for, now.
The accumulated stressors on Petraeus might have broken him, or he might simply be talking to the new political room he's in with Obama. Or both.
Andrew McCarthy's analysis of our mission in Afghanistan is good, in the sense that it is serious, coherent, and consistent, but I don't think it is right.
All the nation-building blather aside, we are in Afghanistan this long because it is a very nicely remote place in which to kill jihadis. It is a killing field, to which the target demographic is drawn irresistably, so long as it thinks it can kill and defeat the Big American. This was the cynical side of our business there (and for some of the period in Iraq) that the cynical side of George Bush would never speak of.
Afghanistan is not only a good place for the U.S. to kill jihadis, it's a good place for beleaguered governments in the Muslim world to urge their jihadis to go get themselves killed.
That nation-building blather facade is nicey-nice stuff for the feckless "international community" and good cover for the underlying purpose.
The typical counterinsurgency strategy of winning "hearts and minds" is a way of distinguishing the everyday treacherous Afghan tribesman from the murderous demographic on fire with jihad.
OK, the catcha is not working for me. I've tried to post 2 times and I think I'm entering the catcha correctly but it comes back with: *Designates a required field and there's nothing (nothing) to find...very frustrating. Maybe, this time it will work. Let's see what happens. Ok, I entered the word: PLAY. Oh, I see, I'm suppose to click play not enter play. OK, I entered "Different by design".
"First, why should we (care) about the Afghan people? And second, why are we sacrificing American blood and American treasure to build an Islamist post-nation that hates America?"
Bingo! Keep up the good work Andrew. This war is absurd. We are wasting American treasure and resources on a futile mission. I'm really sick and tired of supporting Islamists - no good deed goes unpunished. They are a bunch of barbarians enslaved to a dark and repressive religion.
Why are we in Afghanistan?
1) Nation building - oh come on folks, get a grip!
2) Kill Jihadists - it's like trying to exterminate termites and pesty bugs under rocks. We might as well leave the region and wait until the bugs build up some critical mass and then go back with air strikes, create some havoc, and blow things up. Sort of like getting your house tented for Termites every 15 years or so. There's no point in 'tenting' Afghanistan in perpetuity. It makes no sense at all.
One can care about the Afghan people and still realize that they need to come to an appreciation of democratic values in their own way - and they may never do so.
In the mean time, what with the dismantling of our own country by the dedicated leftists in charge, just what kind of hopeful example do we offer the jihadists? We are well on the way to being morally and financially bankrupt.
Mr. McCarthy's has had his "General Betray-Us" moment.
Does this guy -listen- to what's coming out of his mouth?
Does he realize that he's just joined MoveOn.org?
An exit strategy is a defeat strategy. Anyone who asks "how long" is advocating defeat.
As Gates' recent negotiations show, we're not going to "leave" Iraq. This is because the war there is over and we won -- specifically, Petraeus oversaw our victory there.
We have no exit strategy for Germany, Japan or South Korea either, you will note. Because we won. We did leave Vietnam. Because we lost. Anyone want a repeat?
Withdrawal from Afghanistan would be DEFEAT.
Total, unmitigated, disgraceful, cowardly defeat which would convince every jihadi lunatic in the world that we were gutless wonders on the road to extinction or slavery. And they'd have a lot of good evidence for that hypothesis.
No faux-macho posturing about airstrikes "later" can disguise this.
Yo guys and gals, David and his crew have been working for us and they know their way around: in a guerilla warfare quagmire you gotta take scores of detours, knowumsaying?!
In the State Department, they call it "clientitis" and I agree that is what's going on. Think about the Army culture for a minute. General Casey, after the Hassan massacre, was worried this would affect the Army's "diversity." No concern expressed about a jihadi officer murdering men and women. The entire senior Army hierarchy seems infected with this stuff.
Thank you Mr. McCarthy. What I would do differntly, though, is withdraw to a military bae in Afghanistan from which I could incessantly bomb jihadists. (Also, I would put a sign saying, No Aghanis Welcome.) Second, I would work with anti-Karzai, pro-American forces to remove Karzai (willingly or otherwise) and replace him with a pro-American secularist strong-man. Although, I must admit, that given the current Administration, I doubt we could find anyone willing to take over from Karzai.
@Kennedy and McPhillips: Petraeus changed his tune to fit the proclivities of his new boss. That's the way most senior army officers are. Extremely competitive, but without principle - the side effect of a promotion system entirely based on the perceptions of your immediate supervisors. Those who are not like Petraeus are either "fired," (given a negative performance review) or leave. The military leadership of this country has been like this since the Vietnam era at least, if not earlier.
Mr. McCarthy you have done a terrific job in keeping the heat on a horrifying aspect of our military leadership that has capitulated to the enemy. Petraeus is just the most obvious example, this rot extends throughout the whole DOD leadership. Please investigate and write about the extensive shoveling and wasting US taxpayer dollars throughout the DOD and it's 10 Battle Commands around the world. I'd start with the US European Command (EUCOM) established 1952 to provide "unified command and authority" over all U.S. forces in Europe....this is in addition to funding NATO, UN, IMF, EU missile shields, etc....this command should have been discarded 20 years ago at the minimum!
@Jack in Silver Spring, years ago what I thought should be done was to bomb the c**p out of the place and then tell them that if they ever try that again, we'll come back and finish the job for good. It's more than time we left this dump.
Well done, Andy. Most conservatives and most Americans in general apparently have come to the same conclusion. The Koran burning riots and the official American reactions pushed much of the former into the withdrawal camp.
It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment we had stayed too long in Afghanistan. There is no question it was closer to the date when we invaded that it is to now. The mission, which was to expel al-Qaeda, was accomplished and the whole thing morphed into a social program.
In a perfect world, we would have an actual general rather than a social worker in Kabul. That general would drive Karzai to a Taliban area, where a nuclear device would to detonated, and the "president" would be informed there is more to come if al-Qaeda reconstitutes on Afghan soil. The non-social general would shove money at Karzai, tell him there is more to come if he behaves, and then we would leave.
The irony is, of course, that something not quite so dramatic but similar eventually will happen. It likely will be a sustained bombing campaign followed by withdrawal. The remnants of the purported nation we have built then will be overrun by barbarous savages who will take the nation back to the Stone Age. And shortly thereafter, the History Channel will run documentaries that recount what went wrong and Karzai will pop up in Monaco from time to time to bemoan American treachery.
Petraeus is a patriot. I find this "going native" comments rather insulting. He is in a tough spot. What he says in the ground have a direct correlation with American casualties. He could be doing 100k speaking engagements at rubber chicken lunches, but he is in Afghanistan fighting for us. I'll rather you say thank you and go back to your desk job.
Guys - no matter how brilliant this column (and it is) or how logical our suggestions as to what to do, we can bank on one thing:
While Obama is in office, he and his administration will invariably pick the most idiotic among the possible choices, and then screw up its implementation to boot.
Of one tiny little thing I am glad, though. Through our involvement in Islamic countries, we are force-fed constant reminders of the degree of civilization of that part of the world.
Eventually, even the most willfully blind among us may start questioning whether such barbarity is somehow our or Israel's fault, or whether maybe--just maybe--it may be endemic of a perpetually-angry society ossified in a 7th century mindset.
In some ways, even the idiocies spouted by Petraeus will, by their sheer Kafkian hyperbole, force some of the previously-unconvinced to see that there is in fact a very large elephant in the living-room.
Besides this, though, I don't see any advantage in staying or getting involved in any of those dung-pits. I agree with those who say that when it comes to Islamic countries, our best bet would be to isolate ourselves from them, bribe them when necessary, and when they get too uppity, bomb them into the stone-age (living in which they seem strangely comfortable).
In the meantime, repeat after me: NO MORE IMMIGRATION FROM MUSLIM COUNTRIES.
Longplay - I think you and I have the same goals: getting out Afghanistan. Clearly, nation building is counter-productive, given how barbarous the Afghanis are. But I don't want the Taliban (an AQ at one remove) to be able to regroup. Hence, my recommendation that we withdraw to a large, secure military base where no Afghanis are allowed entry. Of course, we have to remove Kharzai before we go,not only because he is corrupt, but he's not our guy anymore. He was the one who incited the massacre of the aid-group. We need a secular thug in Kabul to do our bidding.
Votaire: You say: "Eventually, even the most willfully blind among us may start questioning whether such barbarity is somehow our or Israel's fault ... " I am afraid you have too much confidence in Leftists. Like Goldstone, they will believe what they want to believe, and don't bother them with the facts. They will remain willfully blind until their heads and bodies have been sundered.
When Kipling (bless his heart) 'went native,' he not only kept the best of his British core values, he very perceptively analyzed both the many virtues and the faults of those diverse human beings who dwelt on the subcontinent he loved so much.
When I analyze our current foreign policy, however, I think that both President Obama and General Petraeus suffer not so much from 'going native' as from Stockholm Syndrome. They also know next to nothing of the people they patronize.
