Stuck in Afghanistan, What To Do
Things are not going like they should in Afghanistan. According to experts, the situation has become so problematic that, in the words of Britain’s top commander in Afghanistan, we may be forced to strike a deal with the Taliban.
In other words, the Taliban could possibly return to power within a couple of months, perhaps years, time - not because they will have overthrown the elected government and pushed out foreign forces, but because those foreign forces and elected government have not been able to destroy the Taliban and to bring order and stability to the entire country.
This forces one to wonder whether we have our priorities straight in Afghanistan. Some say that a ’surge’ is needed in this country, just as it was needed in Iraq. That seems, however, not to be the case. The main difference is likely to be that the Taliban can, quite simply, cound on a lot of support from local villagers. Additionally, they were in power before the U.S. attacked. The rebelling Sunnis and Shia in Iraq were not in power.
Furthermore, the Taliban have one major advantage; they don’t hate opium. The West does. It has tried to force Afghanistan’s government do something about the habit of Afghan farmer to grow and sell opium. But the West seems to have forgotten that opium is the only product Afghan farmers can successfully grow and earn money with. Other products just won’t do it.
As such I cannot help but agree with Daniel Flitton, writing for The Age: the best option for the West is probably not to try rebuild Afghanistan (well, it was never ‘built’ as such) but to simply try to destroy terrorist organizations in that country and / or to weaken them so severely that they cannot even think about carrying out terrorist attacks against the West and its allies. This means, in other words, that they should not care less about how the country is run, whether opium is being grown or not, but that the West will simply have to haunt down terrorists and other extremists wherever they are. A true war on terrorists, not an effort to rebuild Afghanistan. That could very well be the West’s best approach; in the end, the people of Afghanistan will have to decide about their own faith, and from the looks of it, they do not wish a future Afghanistan that is modern and ‘western.’
