If there were ever a time when the peace movement should be able to
have an impact on U.S. foreign policy, that time should be now. If
there were ever a time for extraordinary effort to achieve such an
impact, that time is now.
Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan
government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip. But it’s
not easy. And the grim fiasco of Afghanistan’s last election is
shadowing the next.
Another display of electioneering and voting has been ordered up from
Washington. But after a chemical mix has blown a hole through the
roof -- with all the elements for massive fraud still in place --
what’s the point of throwing together the same ingredients?
Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of Helmand longer than the First and Second World Wars combined – yet the mutterings from the marble halls of Washington DC suggest he may order a troop escalation.
Eight years. We’ve been in Afghanistan longer than any other war in American history. The party of the president who invaded Afghanistan has been repudiated at the polls. Yet we still haven’t altered the flawed strategy that allowed uneducated tribesmen with outdated weapons to defeat us year after year.
We haven’t learned a thing.
Late last month,
five U.S. troops died within 24 hours in southern Afghanistan. Taliban
militants have killed more Americans and other troops deployed by NATO this
year than in any of the previous years since President Bush ordered the
invasion in 2001.
Will President
Obama supplement the 21,000 soldiers sent to Afghanistan during the summer? If
he heeds the experience of the Vietnam War, he'll find a gracious way to leave
the place and save his presidency.
Here's the thing: This may be our next "Vietnam moment," but Afghanistan is no Vietnam: there are no major enemy powers like the Soviet Union and China lurking in the background; no organized enemy state with a powerful army like North Vietnam supporting the insurgents; no well organized, unified national liberation movement like the Vietcong, and that's just a beginning. Almost everywhere, in fact, the Vietnam analogy breaks down -- almost everywhere, that is, except when it comes to us.
As we demonstrated at the White House last Monday calling for an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, we could hardly have imagined President Barack Obama would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize four days later.
While the award came as a surprise, it is somewhat understandable. We have met and conversed with peace activists from around the world over the last year, and we've observed a palpable, nearly desperate, universal hunger (obviously shared by the Nobel Committee) for a more peaceful, less militaristic U.S. foreign policy.
No serious person thinks that Afghanistan - remote, impoverished, barely qualifying as a nation-state - seriously matters to the United States. Yet with the war in its ninth year, the passions raised by the debate over how to proceed there are serious indeed. Afghanistan elicits such passions because people understand that in rendering his decision on Afghanistan, President Obama will declare himself on several much larger issues. In this sense, Afghanistan is a classic proxy war, with the main protagonists here in the United States.
It's early in 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson faces a critical decision. Should he escalate in Vietnam? Should he say "yes" to the request from U.S. commanders for more troops? Or should he change strategy, downsize the American commitment, even withdraw completely, a decision that would help him focus on his top domestic priority, "The Great Society" he hopes to build?
We all know what happened.
An unremarkable paragraph
in a piece in my hometown paper recently caught my eye.
