Afghanistan

View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan

This article in the NYTIMES online by C. J. Chivers, Carlotta Gall, Andrew W. Lehren, Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, and Eric Schmitt, with contributions from Jacob Harris and Alan McLean takes as its starting point the recent publication, through Wikileaks, of thousands of classified documents about the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan.

The article is unpleasant reading. It details, in example after example, how difficult it is to stabilize a country that doesn't seem to have any interest in stabilizing itself.


My reflections:

1) This is not about Afghanistan, but about every single nation in the world that is falling apart because it can't feed its population at a living standard they're willing to accept. While Islam is certainly adding flavour to the problem, the underlying problem is that people are fighting for control over resources. Afghanistan is too hot and too dry, and its population is too hungry. We either have to feed them or fight them.

2) The conflict is being shaped not so much by Islam, but by a lethal triangle of Western inventions. The first corner of the triangle is dirt cheap, mass-produced high-tech weaponry and explosives. The second is dirt cheap transportation. The third is dirt cheap communications. It's the combination of all three that enables modern insurgents to do things today that only national armies could do in the past.

Add to that, if you like, that our modern, industrial agriculture has pushed food prices so low down, that there's no way that Afghanistan can make a decent living from growing food for the world market.

3) The driving force behind the current conflict isn't so much Islam, as the money that the Afghans can manage to suck out of Western nations, in exchange for heroin. Until we learn to take care of our own heroin addicts, the Afghans are going to keep doing it for us.

4) Armies in a war are a little like businesses in a market place: If all else is equal, victory will go to the party with the lowest operating costs. In Afghanistan, our operating costs per shot fired are simply enormous, compared with what the enemy has to pay.

That much being said, all other things are of course not equal. Our weapons are more sophisticated, and we have more of them. The insurgents, on the other hand, can hide in the civilian population, and is free to torture and murder anyone they suspect of collaborating with us.

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I'm left with a strong impression that the war in Afghanistan can't be won, because I can't imagine how anyone can manage to stabilize a place like that. Their education level is low. They have no fisheries. There's very little industry. It's too hot and too dry, and the soils probably way too saline for their agriculture to have any hope of competing with ours. There's no reliable civilian infrastructure. And yet, as long as there's a western market for expensive heroin, the place is a bubbling cauldron of money. This place is going to continue to mean TROUBLE.

:-J