Army chief warns of prospect of failure in Afghanistan.

When the chief of the army starts a claim for more pay with dire warnings of losing a war in Afghanistan it takes away some edge from the argument he is making. Losing in Afghanistan is a worse result than underpaid soldiers, certainly.

He says that Vice-President Joe Biden’s plan to spend more on covert missions than direct military engagement would never work. How killing lots of people with firefights in their own towns is going to win support also seems far-fetched. One can imagine:

“Why are you here?”
“We have come to protect your village from the Taleban.”
“Then why did you kill my brother?”
“He is Taleban.”
“Is he? So what, what did he do to you?”
“He ran away.”

The war with the Taleban is being fought because Osama Bin Laden was not handed over, and since then it has morphed into a war against the Taleban for being what they are. And that seems a just war as they are such bastards.

They tore down Buddhist statues. They make women wear clothes that completely conceal their identity. They enforce Sharia Law. They do not allow liberalism, they are authoritarian, they promote the opium harvest. How many of these would they be doing anyway if they had handed over Osama Bin Laden? All of them. If Bush had not gone to war with the Taleban back in 2002 (this war is now longer than WW2 but thankfully less destructive so far), the Taleban would still be in power in Afghanistan and opium would still be flooding Europe.

That Al Qaeda is in Pakistan and Iraq as well as Afghanistan – the sworn enemy of both the West and Iran, it certainly makes sense for America, Russia and Iran to join forces and consider offering the Taleban an offer of peace if they reform the opium trade and agree to elections. It would seem in the mutual interests of all those nations to break the back of the Taleban before they acquire means, however the assumption is that it is “not possible to negotiate with terrorists”. Apart from the Buddhah statues, the Taleban are not specifically terrorists. They harboured a man who directed an act of war against America and The West and then refused to cooperate with international justice.

If America had joined the ICC and charged the Taleban with criminal involvement with the Opium trade long before 9/11 as it was known and provable by the CIA, would that have been a more effective course of action?

Who knows. We can not do anything except what we can do now. And losing in Afghanistan is not dissimilar to losing in Vietnam. Except that Vietnam was an ideological battle, whereas this is a battle for justice, albeit one where the scales are terribly overbalanced in favour of nobody.

There are no winners in this war. It is entirely negative. Kill them or wait for the next attack is the driving logic. Inventing ways to kill them and drumming up support because of what the West does to itself in full view of its critics, letting financial bubbles explode.

But at least the West has them. The Western idea is that making mistakes is essential to explore all aspects of life, that a liberal science exploration and separation of church and state has led to progress. But military progress is not necessarily what will “win a war”. For a start, there is a “just cause” to remove the Taleban, but only after 9/11 was it a legal cause.

GW Bush went to war without gaining enough support and then really blew it by training his big guns on Iraq prematurely. If he had waited for Afghanistan to be won (who know, it could have taken 20 years) before marching into and turning Iraq into a quagmire it was not beforehand, he would not have toppled the American economy into the red to such a degree.

In other words if the fight in Afghanistan is not a) purposeful or b) legitimate – then is fighting the correct strategy?

One tends to agree with Biden about taking out the leaders of an essentially criminal gang with drones, and stopping Al Qaeda from taking hold in Pakistan these are both important goals to fully achieve. How is that a cause that can be “lost”? Is the NATO police action that has lasted 8 years so far in fact a military occupation with a specific goal?

Perhaps it should have been that all along. It feels like the intelligence community had too much wrong on this one, and that the military incursion into Afghanistan was not well planned. But who knows? Intelligence is not shared with the world, for good reasons.