Friday, November 1, 2013
It's not too Late for America to Help Afghanistan Avoid Becoming Another Iraq
Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is in Washington for talks with senior members of the Obama administration, including Vice President Biden and President Obama. Al-Maliki is asking for American help in bringing under control the sectarian and terrorist violence raging in Iraq. He is asking for military equipment and training, technical assistance and intelligence sharing relating to al-Qaida. The Iraqi government has acknowledged that it needs help if it is to stem the violence and suppress al-Qaida terrorist attacks. Violence in Iraq has been on the rise since April, when security forces initiated a deadly crackdown on sunni protesters, many of whom believe they are being discriminated against by Prime Minister al-Maliki's shiite-led government. Iraqi officials have attempted to halt the rise in car bombings and suicide attacks by various means, including floating helium balloons equipped with security surveillance cameras high above Baghdad, and by setting up hundreds of police checkpoints around the country. But such efforts have been mostly ineffective. At the same time, identifying the perpetrators - sunni, shiite, al-Qaida or others - has been a challenge since it is rare for any group to claim responsibility for attacks. What is clear is that more than 5,000 Iraqis have been killed thus far in 2013, and in October, more than 1,000 were killed - the largest monthly death toll since the civil war of 2008. One tactic being used by the al-Maliki government is executing convicted terrorists. But, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called on Iraq to halt all executions and commute the sentences of hundreds of people sentenced to death. A spokesman for Navi Pillay said the executions on Tuesday and Wednesday of 42 people convicted of terrorism charges was "obscene and inhumane." The claim that the death penalty helped deter terrorism was a "fallacy", given the surging violence in Iraq, he added. The number of people executed in Iraq rose from 18 in 2010 to 123 in 2012. So far this year, the authorities have carried out 140 executions, according to figures compiled by the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq. Ms Pillay's spokesman, Rupert Colville, said in a statement that large-scale executions do not deter terrorism. ~~~~~ Dear readers, it may be too late to unravel the sectarian and terrorist mess in Iraq. It is being described as a failed state that is rapidly reverting to the strongman status it experienced under Saddam Hussein. Most observers say that the Iraq infrastructure is much better now and that ordinary people are freer and better off financially. But their country is in a state of violent turmoil. What can be learned from the Iraq experience is that newly recreated states in the Middle East that are just getting to their feet in modern governance cannot be expected to run before they walk with a lot of support. Afghanistan comes to mind as the prime example of this. President Obama and America may be war weary, but keeping some help available to Afghanistan for the next few years would be the best way to help it through its political and terrorism difficulties and ensure that the American soldiers who gave their lives there will be better honored than the 4,500 American soldiers whose deaths in Iraq may now seem to have been somewhat in vain.
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All said us so very true. And war weary I guess we are. But we are in the middle of a great conflict. One that when finished will be determined by one side nearly eliminating the other from existence.
ReplyDeleteBut this is a religious conflict now... One between Shiite & Sunni sects of the Islam with both eventually against the Infidels of the world. And an enemy that has no regards about dying in the name of a religious leader, dying for the glory of the same ... That enemy is hard to defeat.
But we must.
We (the USA) are a rudderless ship adrift in an ocean that has no friendly winds or ports for us to get shelter from the storm ... The storm of Obama's rash of bad decisions.
ReplyDeleteIn order to help Afganistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria,etc., etc. -first we need to have the leadership that will take us through the process. We need to have our president and his inner circle of administrors and advisors on board.
ReplyDeleteWe don't, we won't until we have resolution on our leadership shortage which is stealing our abilities to assist other nations.
We thought we were getting a leader, instead we got a divider. We thought we were getting a honorable man, instead we got a "operator". We thought we were getting a friend, instead we got a fake.
There is always a bigger picture in International Affairs & Politics and the Afghanistan - Pakistan - India triangle is certainly one of the biggest.
ReplyDeleteAfghanistan is now into it's 28th consecutive year of a war being waged on it's soil.
The hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan and has for years and will for years to come. Most observers in the West view the Afghanistan conflict as a battle between the U.S. and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on one hand, and al-Qaida and the Taliban on the other. In reality this has long since ceased to be the case. Instead our troops are now caught up in a complex war shaped by two pre-existing and overlapping conflicts: one local and internal, the other regional.
Within Afghanistan, the war is viewed primarily as a Pashtun rebellion against President Hamid Karzai’s regime, which has empowered three other ethnic groups—the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the north—to a degree that the Pashtuns resent. For example, the Tajiks, who constitute only 27% of the Afghan population, still make up 70% of the officers in the Afghan army.
Although Karzai himself is a Pashtun, many of his fellow tribesmen view his presence as mere window-dressing for a U.S.-devised realignment of long-established power relations in the country, dating back to 2001 when the U.S. toppled the overwhelmingly Pashtun Taliban.
The Pashtuns had held sway in Afghan politics ever since the state assumed its current boundaries in the 1860s. By aligning with the Tajiks of the northern provinces against the Pashtuns of the south, the U.S. saw itself making common cause with the forces of secularism against militant Islam; but it was unwittingly taking sides in a complex civil war that has been going on since the 1970s—and that had roots going back much further than that. To this day, because the Pashtuns feel dominated by their ancestral enemies, many support or at least feel some residual sympathies for the Taliban.
There is also an age-old Pashtun-on-Pashtun element to the conflict. It pits Taliban from the Ishaqzai tribe, parts of the Nurzais, Achakzais, and most of the Ghilzais, especially the Hotak and Tokhi Ghilzais, against the more “establishment” Durrani Pashtun tribes: the Barakzais, Popalzais and Alikozais.
Beyond this indigenous conflict looms the much more dangerous hostility between the two regional powers—both armed with nuclear weapons: India and Pakistan. Their rivalry is particularly flammable as they vie for influence over Afghanistan. Compared to that prolonged and deadly contest, the U.S. and ISAF are playing little more than a bit part—and they, unlike the Indians and Pakistanis, are heading for the exit.
I think that for the aforementioned facts the USA must stay in Afghanistan for years to come.
We are not nation building, we are protecting the likes of UAE, Saudi Arabia, potentially Egypt, certainly Israel, and much of the Arab Peninsula in the much bigger picture and scheme pf world peace.
One step forward and 2 steps back will not achieve anything.
Any continuation of aggression by outside waring countries in Afghanistan is a major danger to both regional and International stability. The Afghans certainly need our forceful presence.
ReplyDeleteDown and nearly out friends is not the same as down and out. ai-Qaida and the Taliban are perched to spring from the south and the Pakistan border onto the whole of Afghanistan before the winds fill the void of departing western troops.
ReplyDeleteObama is about set to take fellow democratic praise for the pending withdrawal of all American troops... "let the Hunger Games begin".
Some twelve years after the international community went into Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida and oust the Taliban, Western troops are about to withdraw, with neither objective achieved. The Taliban now control most of rural southern Afghanistan. That share is likely to increase next year when the British and the Americans withdraw 100,000 of their troops. Al-Qaida, which has moved to the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere, has been severely damaged but is far from finished.