I have recently been reading Simon Jenkins columns in the Guardian in which he proposes getting the hell out of Afghanistan. But he does not convince me.
I believe some international presence in that country is appropriate. An international presence began in late 2001 and was welcomed by many Afghanis. Only trouble was the neocon realpolitik of the time, anxious to start a war with Iraq, such that decision-makers made deals with despotic Afghani warlords instead of nourishing democracy and development.

In my earlier post, I depicted IRAQ in 2003, NOT Saddam, as relatively harmless, defenseless and absent AQ style terrorism. These are the facts as I understand them. That the viscous tyrant Saddam who fifteen years earlier may have been a possible candidate as pan Arab leader, but like his country after twelve years of economic sanctions was by then a spent force. That Husain became just one more fiction writing wannabe, is an apt national metaphor of the period.
If Iraq in 2003 still gave some baksheesh to suicide bombers in Palestine then this no more justifies the attack in 2003, than it would the British bombing Queens New York, in the eighties because of funds raised for republican terrorists in Northern Ireland.

“Hundreds of years of Afghan history” is a platitude. Belgium has hundreds of years of history; so what?

The Afghans who fight alongside NATO forces are not then Afghans? Why not?

“Talk about our high-tech weapons …” I can make no such comment; few can in reality, though many try.

Pointing out the tendency of a piece of writing is legitimate. I never stoop to abuse or actively misrepresent even in order to make a argument; I believe the points I made about the connections, clear and certain between Taliban ruled Afghanistan and attacks on the west are correct and fair. Your position is similar to that held by the majority of views I hear or encounter. The people who hold such views are not monsters or fanatics nor dupes but their views if enacted into policy would have a very definite outcome. This is what I pointed out and I can support it with examples. I am quite certain you are not indifferent to terrorism or I should not have replied.

To map out a long series of attacks on the open societies of the ‘west’ – including now Africa and India – is not “a good way of diverting criticism”, if criticism it be. Essentially I see this struggle as one which began with the attempt to re-run the 1948 Palestine War and change the outcome. When, following defeats in 1967 and 1973 this was obviously not going to happen, Palestinian Arab groups supported by chiefly Arab countries began to switch their focus steadily and purposefully away from the Near East to the soft targets in Europe and elsewhere. Initially such groups where essentially political and only tangentially ‘Moslem’; they committed outrages dividing their attention between Israel and increasingly non-Israeli targets. This pattern was inherited by notionally Islamist sympathisers following the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Marx, Sartre and Fanon gave way to Khomeni and the Koran, and complicated further by the fact that Iranians are not Arabs and have history also.

Subsequently, the ideology of ‘Palestinian’ resistance has been subsumed and overwhelmed by Islamist ambition: A ‘millenarian’ concept of an ‘Islamic world’, not simply ‘Moslem lands’ but entire Continents. I will not go into the background here but the forces at work today are intent on over throwing modernism (i.e. ‘the west’) however bizarre that idea strikes you and I. They have shown themselves well able to seize on the complexities and contradictions of western society the better to undermine and threaten it. Obviously, no such overthrow is in fact possible; but a great deal of harm is being done nevertheless and more is to come in my view.

Some believe as you may not that “we” can have a quiet life by giving up what for them is merely a war or series of wars drummed up by venial American politicians and flashy academics with a route in to the global media. Give up, come home, and , yes, cut Israel adrift, and all will be well. We have nothing to fear. I disagree with this point of view, quite apart from the moral aspect, and believe in contradiction to it that “we” will have far worse to follow if such a course is taken. I know Obama realises this and I hope he is not alone.

I am indeed quite willing to answer to my abilities any criticism of what I have written. Your pieces have much to commend them but as yet I see no criticism, simply complaint.

I am just asking, on the basis of hundreds of years of Afghan history of sucessfully resisting foreign invaders, why do you think we will suceed where so many others have failed. And is there any reason to suppose that the Afghan People view US-NATO forces any differently than they did the British and the Russians? Talk about how our high-tech weapons will make the difference is reminiscent of similar boasts made forty years ago by the US Military in Vietnam that modern weaponery would overcome the Viet Cong.

Note: I certainly do not have the beliefs that Larkers attributes to me in his last three paragraphs. Answering critics by charging falsely they support people being blown up on buses and subways may be a good way of diverting criticism, but it does not answer it.

It is useless to point out the many differences between historical events which merely share geography. Napoleon’s battlefields recall those of later wars; therefore, according to David All’s reasoning, these must somehow be similar events, guided by similar motives and objectives. Napoleon, Cavour, Bismarck, Willem II, Hitler – all the same. Crudities such as these obscure rather than provide insight.

Afghanistan is a curious place in which to seek to make money. If David All wishes to imply the U.S.A.’s taxpayer’s have been rooked at home, I might be persuaded by evidence; to imply a foreign war was started “to bring freedom to the benighted Natives” (as if freedom itself were somehow risible) in order to cash in seems an unnecessarily complicated fraud. Embezzlers are seldom so careless with other people’s money.

The links between Taliban controlled Afghanistan and terror operations of increasing brazen violence against the west would have required action sooner or later. David All is silent about how to deal with this. For him and many on the left it begins with Bush, with perhaps a backward glance at Reagan and Thatcher (but never Brezhnev). The longer history is complicated and contradictory. It serves no useful purpose if a simple ‘white hat, black hat’ narrative is to be enforced. “Mummy! Make the big, bad American go away!” is all one needs to say.

There are perplexing difficulties in dealing with issues such as Afghanistan and increasingly Pakistan, but evasion is a luxury the open societies of the west (an euphemism which has outlived its specific use; Japan long since and India increasingly, are “western” in this sense) cannot practice for ever. Electorates are likely to object when their loved ones are burned alive on public transport or in their offices doing a day’s work. Some, many, want something done about it. One complication in the response to international terrorism (Egypt, Kenya, Greece, Argentina. India, not just the U.S.A. or U.K.) is the fiction of western unity, one created out of a necessity following the Second World War, a war largely fought in the west against much of the rest by the Anglo-Americans (and with mixed motives). This fiction is ably demonstrated by the disunity of response to contemporary international crises like those in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, DRC, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere formerly, where an active response has been (mostly) shackled by passivity among Continental Europe, reduced to a pose of hand wringing and diplomatic tutting. That failure of will has had serious political consequences. (It is wonderful to watch countries who have enriched themselves whilst being defended for half a century by the U.S.A., condemn its policies as warmongering …)

It is not an absurdity to wish to live a peaceful existence and many do so wish to live. But faced with the failure of it’s armies to oust Jews from ‘Moslem lands’ following defeats in 1967 – 73, aircraft, airports, tourists and now workers in the heart of the west have felt the force of ‘young angry Moslems’, directed at the supposed sponsors of the Jews, swollen to a ‘global jihad’ intent now on nothing less than the overthrow of modernism in which the greatest weapon to exploit is the west’s own indolence. Viewing current attitudes among western progressives, one of which I take David All to be, it is not such a far fetched ambition as it seems.

Those previous missions didn’t have all of the following: helicopters, night vision equipment, drone aircraft, sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment etc etc. and a willing and co-operative government in Kabul.

How exactly did Saddam (invader of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) become “well contained” as you put it. Can you remind us?

Afghanistan would be in a lot better shape today if not for the unnecessary invasion of Iraq that diverted most of the resources such as troops and aid away from Afghanistan. As savage and brutal as Saddam was, he was well contained and little threat to other countries. Cheney/Bush invaded Iraq for two reasons, INMO:
1). To provide a big payday for Cheney’s old firm, Haliburton with contratcts for Iraq’s Reconstruction and to gain control of Iraq’s oil for the Oil companies that contributed many millions to Bush’s campaign.
2). To divert attention from the real perpetraturs of 9/11 and many other Terrorist atrocities such as the beheading of Daniel Pearl, our so-called Friends, the Saudis who are the world’s leading sponsers of Hate and Terrorism.

The Taleban are being set up in western news circles as a resistence movement. Resistence to what? Afghans are not a single people any more than many other polities. The history of the country actually embraces many facets of its pivitol role in the long era summarised by the “Silk Roads”; of exchanges between east and west. It was a final testament to the Taleban’s fundamental views of the country’s ‘exclusive’ identity that they powdered with hammers all ‘non-Islamic’ exhibits in the Kabul National Museum and destroyed the Buddhas of Bamyan, a crime against world heritage.

What the Teleban represent is vile and ‘resistence’ is not what they represent at all. I am saddened by the deaths of my country’s young men (with technology supplied by Iran). It is they who died in resisting, resisting the hate filled ambitions of these people. To give up now will effectively politically bank roll the worst elements in Islam and invite further interference in the free world. For they attacked us and first. The rest is appeasement.

And Hugh, your depiction of Saddam @ 11:59 pm as a harmless, defenseless soul, opposed to terrorism and only interested in writing fiction was more offensive than anything I wrote. If you think such a depiction of Saddam isn’t an apology for a man who in truth was a tyrannical Stalinist torturer and murderer aspiring to be the predominant leader of the Arab world and the predominant military power in the region by means of military aggression and funding incentives for suicide bombers, then I have to wonder what you imagine an apologetic for Saddam would look like.

As of now, they are not. We should focus on getting bin ladin and not rebuliding the country, stopping the poppy trade, educating the women, re-inventing the economy etc …

It is mission creep.

It’s the best that we can hope for, outside of Kabul. Most of the reconstruction projects going on are for schools and mosques – and as we can build them a school but can’t give them teachers to staff it, for “schools and mosques” read “madrassas and mosques”. That’s where the whole problem came from in the first place, ain’t it?

We’re wasting our time, money and soldiers’ lives trying to make a western-style democracy there. For Bob above and others thinking of the BBC article on the poll, showing that the vast majority of Afghans want us and not the Taleban – two questions:

1. Do you think the people making the poll took a balanced sample from around the country? Or do you think the poll was conducted exclusively in areas where the market researcher wouldn’t need a rifle company to guard them while they asked the questions i.e Kabul?

2. Had the research been conducted by the Taleban or other militias rather than the government, do you think the results would show the same?