The war in Afghanistan is a war in which whatever the United States does now, or that President Obama does now, both the United States and Obama will lose. The country and its president are in a situation of perfect lockjaw.
Revelations about the alleged payment by Italian troops of protection money to local Afghan commanders to stop attacks on their forces have reignited a recurrent debate among scholars of international affairs: does Italy have a coherent foreign policy, or even a foreign policy at all? In the long term, Berlusconi or not, Italy is poised to remain where it firmly belongs: in the Atlantic and European camps.
Six months ago the US military was being praised by many security specialists as finally having gotten it – understanding that its future was counter-insurgency best practices which means nation building under fire from insurgents in the world’s toughest neighborhoods. Yes, it had taken a while, but the military’s top leadership had finally seen the light.
The Obama administration seems to be having big second thoughts about Afghanistan. President Obama in his election campaign promised to make Afghanistan the central front in our unnamed war.
Afghanistan is a country of 33,000,000 people that has been at war for 30 years, has a life expectancy of only 44 years, an infant mortality rate 151/1000 births, and experiences about 660,000 deaths from all causes per year. Life is hard, brutal and short in Afghanistan
The American military at the end of the Cold War was a formidable force, large in size, very well equipped, and quite capable of meeting any conceivable Soviet warfare challenge, nuclear or conventional. Its recovery from Vietnam was total. Thoughts of honing its fast fading counter-insurgency skills or of a search to discover how best to participate in peace-keeping and nation-building ventures were far from its doctrinal priorities.
One of the enduring features of Western strategic thinking over the past half-century has been to immediately write off one’s less powerful enemy, if the latter has been militarily overpowered. As the history of contemporary warfare suggests, very often this approach is couched on the realist thinking that a vanquished enemy is incapable of making a comeback.
The recent death of Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British servicewoman to die on a “deliberate” operation in Afghanistan, attracted much attention from the UK print media. The tributes reveal wider cultural discomfort towards the death of a young, bright servicewoman as a direct result of conflict. They also demonstrate the significance of gender to the legitimation of the ‘war on terror’.
I have to wonder why it was so incredibly important that Prince Harry be sent to a war zone in the first place. I have nothing but respect for soldiers who face combat in the front lines of Afghanistan, Harry included. His desire to serve his country and make a difference in the world by putting himself in physical danger is admirably brave, just as it is for any other man or woman who signs up to do the job. However, Harry is not just any other man, no matter how desperately he wants to be considered this way.
The question can be posed as follows. The Unites States went to war in Iraq to destroy Weapons of Mass Destruction that did not exist, and we fight a War on Terror now despite virtually no evidence whatsoever that a serious terrorist threat to the American homeland exists. “Why,” then, “do we fight?”
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