Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Trump gave a speech in which he explained why he’s changed his mind on pulling out of Afghanistan: it would create a power vacuum and enable the Taliban to sweep in. Instead, we’re going to stay and kill terrorists until conditions on the ground allow us to leave. But we’re not going to engage in nation-building.
Great, he’s going to pivot to Afghanistan and focus like a laser on killing terrorists. Where have I heard that before?
I don’t object to killing terrorists but why aren’t we nation-building? Because nation-building was proposed as the cure for the root cause of terrorism but it turns out the root cause of terrorists is not poverty or lack of democratic institutions. Establishing a puppet regime with purple-finger elections and midnight basketball won’t stem the flow of terrorists so we’re not going to waste time and money doing it.
Fine. If that’s not the root cause, what is the root cause of Islamic terrorism?
I suspect the root cause of Islamic terrorists is radical Islam, even if everybody in Washington is terrified to say it. Why not fight them? Because there are different sects with different agendas and different funding, making them hard to find and kill, and the press would crucify you for trying.
But we know one of those sects is Wahhabism. Which is funded by Saudi Arabia. Which is run by the Royal Family of the House of Saud who the US protects from domestic unrest with US troops even as the Saudis work to get OPEC to undermine American domestic oil production.
As it sits now, our War on Terror policy is to kill the individual puppets but support the puppet masters even as they attack our economy. That’s insane.
Forget the terrorists. Let them squat in their mountains and kill each other. Close our border so terrorists can’t come here, then go after the root cause. Go after the money.
Issue drilling and pumping permits to produce oil on leased federal lands which will flood the world market with American oil and depress Saudi incomes.
Declare Saudi Arabia to be a financier of terrorism and seize all Saudi money in American banks.
Pull US troops out of Saudi Arabia to force them to spend their remaining money defending themselves from their own people. If we have any AK’s laying around that we captured in Libya, hand them out to the locals as we’re leaving Saudi Arabia. Regime change on the DIY plan.
We’ve been fighting a War on Terror since 9-11 by going after street-level terrorists. It’s not working. Try something else.
Joe Doakes
We can’t be worried about that now. Not when most of our forces are finally trained and configured to fight the wars we are currently losing. What were you thinking Joe?
We are just keeping up with tradition. We like to start off big wars as the unprepared underdog.
Perhaps when Americans start thinking that mortgaging their great-grandchildren’s future for more ‘failure to win’ isn’t worth anything good we may get out of Afghanistan. We’re getting nothing good yet — not even security.
Wars that we’re losing? No, perhaps more “wars that we don’t have the will to win because we don’t want to antagonize Muslims.”
Reality here is that civilization does indeed have a gut check; we can either persuade a supermajority of Muslims that the interpretations of “jihad” as “kill non-Muslims” are not operative, or we can fight low level wars against that minority of Muslims who believe this in perpetuity. The question is how we either best fight that war, or how we best persuade Muslims to abandon violent jihad. I would dare suggest that giving them the vote is not sufficient.
The only counter is that if we pull out, then likely the House of Saud will turn to Russia, who likes to play in the Middle East. They will continue to undermine US oil interests, because it benefits them. And they will continue to finance Wahbism, because that is what they believe. They continue to sit upon a necessary natural resource that most of Europe requires.
Just like his predecessors, Trump does not want to go after the root cause of the Afghan problem safely ensconced in a nuclear — armed Pakistan. So the only way left for Trump to prevent Pakistan from installing its puppet Taliban rule is permanently station US troops in Afghanistan just like in South Korea.
The alternative to ‘fighting them over there” isn’t “fighting them over here.” It is stopping them from coming here, and that will not be done because it threatens the neo-liberal world order. Restricted immigration and civil liberties problems or useless foreign wars: take your pick.
The global order will choose #2 as long as it elites are kept safe from terrorism and Americans are paying for the wars with blood and gold.
A national dialogue about Afghanistan never occurred under the two previous presidents. No one has tried in any serious way to have an ongoing dialogue directly with the American public as to what was at stake in Afghanistan that justified the expenditure of our treasure and so many precious American lives.
Bush and Obama have used the public’s disengagement from the military and what is happening overseas, the sacrifices of a very small handful of Americans, to their great benefit. Neither had to actually exert any war time leadership and go around the country drumming up support for the continuation of this war.
Whether “winning” (however defined) indeed is possible and how the United States ultimately withdraws from a war with no real end in sight remains to be seen.
Regime change on the DIY plan.
Problem is, the cure will likely be worse than disease and fueled by gazillions in petrodollars.