AFGHANISTAN: QUAGMIRE

The United States scarcely knew what a complex disaster it was confronting when it went to war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. It will eventually – perhaps years from now – suffer the same fate as Alexander the Great, the British, and the now-defunct Soviet Union: defeat.

What is called "Afghanistan" is really a collection of tribes and ethnic groups – Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and more – there are seven major ethnic groups, each with their own language. There are 30 minor languages. Pashtuns are 42 percent of the population and the Taliban comes from them. Its borders are contested and highly porous, and al-Qaeda is most powerful in the Pashtun regions of northern Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. "The fate of Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably tied," President George Bush declared in December 2007. This fact makes the war far more complicated, not the least because enormous quantities of military aid sent to Pakistan is mostly wasted.

Worse yet, Pakistan possesses about 70 to 90 nuclear weapons and the U.S. fears some may fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. At least three-quarters of the supplies essential for America’s and its allies’ war effort flow through Pakistan, and they are often assaulted. Moreover, a large and growing majority of the Pakistanis distrust U.S. motives. The U.S.’s tilt to New Delhi after 2007, which greatly augmented Indian nuclear power, made Pakistan far more reticent to do Washington’s bidding.

Afghanistan is a mess, complex beyond description with mountainous terrain to match. Its principal problems are political, social, and cultural – in large part because Great Britain concocted it arbitrarily. There is no durable military solution to its many problems. As in Vietnam, the U.S. will win battles but it has no strategy for winning this war.
Gabriel Kolko AntiWar.com

-flynn