America won’t win in Afghanistan. No, this isn’t treason, or even dissent; it's fact. The recent announcement by President Obama to increase troops, and re-think our strategy is not necessarily a poor one. In fact, it is completely beside the point.
Americans tend to define wins and losses in an infantile way. Winning and losing are basic notions. If we defeat our enemies, and have total military control, we have won. A "victory" isn’t needed. America just needs to win.
A true victory in Afghanistan isn’t possible because America simply doesn’t have the level of commitment necessary to help a region that is a country in name only. Afghanistan has, at best, an impotent government, and at worse, an illegitimate one. The nation lives miles below any kind of American understanding of the poverty line.
The American people don’t care enough about Afghanistan to commit the money and resources to a nation that needs complete rebuilding.
If we don’t remember history, it will surely repeat itself.
Remember the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s? The CIA worked with Afghan rebels, and supplied them with money and equipment, and assisted in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan forever.
Then, like something so familiar, the money vanished, and the attention was gone. We had won the war, we had a victory, and that was all our vain sense of purpose needed.
Our ideals are as empty as the half-crumbling buildings littering the afghan hills if we can’t accept all of the responsibility of the job we undertook.
For once, can the goal be for a true victory? President Obama himself said, “Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.”
According to Sam Stein of Huffington Post, who recently wrote about Vice President Biden's influence on America's new strategy, the new Afghan plan will "focus on fighting Al-Qaeda rather than nation-building."
Patriotic statements of grandeur and self-importance don’t build schools for children. They don’t give back the homes destroyed by Taliban brutality, or American collateral damage. Our goal is to kill terrorists quickly and efficiently, and then forget this whole Middle Eastern mess.
Terrorism doesn’t just destroy American lives and buildings.
It destroys the lives of the people in Afghanistan who lived under the harsh Taliban regime.
Terrorism doesn’t just come as powder in envelopes. It comes as machetes and machine guns in the night for some people.
President Obama has a privileged opportunity to save a whole country of people and to see a tangible victory against the Taliban.
Instead of just winning, let’s try for a victory.
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