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Afghanistan and the Vietnam quagmire
BY JIM HIGHTOWER
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is America’s “Man in the Stans”—Afghanistan and Pakistan, that is. Hand-picked by President Obama to be special representative to what is at present the hottest of hot spots in the muddled global war on terrorists, Holbrooke is among the Washington influentials who is now urging Obama to hurl tens of thousands of additional troops and tens of billions of additional dollars into the Afghanistan war effort.
Why should America do that? What victory do we seek? In August, Holbrooke responded with a diplomatic quibble: “I don’t use the word ‘victory’ but ‘success’ instead.” Okay. What success will we achieve? Well, the man who would commit untold numbers of people to their death in this hellish land dodged the question by saying: “Success really can’t be defined. We’ll know it when we see it.”
On such gossamer wings does America’s Afghanistan policy fly.
This war has slogged on for nearly nine years, making it longer than America’s involvement in World Wars I and II combined. We’ve already spent $228 billion, 826 Americans have been killed (nearly 200 so far this year), and Obama’s summer surge has muscled up America’s Afghan presence to 68,000 troops (plus another 42,000 from NATO). Yet the Taliban forces we’re fighting are stronger than ever, and our own military commanders concede that not only is the war going badly for us, but the situation is rapidly “deteriorating.”
Still, most military chieftains and Obamacan hawks say we must do more of what we are doing, only do it better so we can win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, which will require the infusion of more troops and treasure. The president has already requested $68 billion for the war in 2010 (an $8 billion increase over this year), and he is pondering a much greater escalation that would dispatch from 10,000 to 45,000 more Americans into what has now become “Obama’s war.”
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