Earth Matters: Fat chance

I am no war monger. A child of the Summer of Love, my pacifist leanings were honed by experts in the art of social revolution. Coming of age in the Vietnam Era galvanized my opinions and beliefs even if I didn’t fully understand how they would affect my life and what I would become. It’s not all bad; there are more destructive world views.

My world view assumes there are no good wars. Since war is apparently hardwired into human behavior, however, I must acknowledge some wars are less bad than others. One—maybe the only—criteria is justifiability. Is there a damned good reason to engage in martial conflict?

I have been told to stay away from the politics—reasons—for going to war. At some remove from the halls of power, I undoubtedly do not have a comprehensive understanding of geopolitical peregrinations and international conflict. Okay: I’ll buy that. But with due respect to those with differing opinions, like the critic says: I know what I like.

That is not to say I like the war in Afghanistan. But on grounds of justifiability, it’s better than any other war we’ve got. If we are to wage war, and apparently we must, we should be fighting the real enemy, the religious extremism, ignorance and grinding poverty imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. No question: the Taliban seriously frosts my lilies.

Afghanistan is fertile soil for the likes of the Taliban. Conquering armies have stomped the Afghan mountains for centuries en route to rape and pillage in India. Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Seljuks, Tartars, Mongols, Durani, Russians and Americans have all colored Afghan soil. Afghans, people who live among the Hindu Kush Mountains, go with the flow. Separated into fiercely independent rival fiefdoms, the country’s isolation defines some kind of sovereignty that sustains today.

Writing in 1925, journalist Lowell Thomas wrote, “Afghanistan dislikes the foreigner…Those of the wilder tribes of Afghanistan…are prone to give token of their enmity to the foreigner in the shape of whining bullets that oftener than not reach their mark.” Of Asia in general and Afghanistan in particular, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”

The Taliban is a nasty bunch of Sunni Pashtun Islamic terrorists that ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Not entirely homegrown, the Taliban are religious extremists, many educated in Madrasahs, fundamentalist Islamic schools in Pakistan. The Taliban enforces the strictest interpretation of fundamental Islamic Sharia Law ever seen in the Muslim world. Believing, “the face of a woman is a source of corruption,” education for girls and women is forbidden. Women are not allowed to work and face public flogging and execution for violations of Taliban and Sharia laws.

The Taliban finds refuge in Afghanistan because of geographic isolation and the non-centralized nature of Afghan sovereignty. Taliban strongholds proliferate in mountainous border terrain between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is thought to be holed up. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in 2001 the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and bring bin Laden to justice. We met with mixed results.

We should have known—history informs—that no one ever really wins fighting a war in Afghanistan. Yet Afghanistan was the obvious place to join conflict because that is where bin Laden was hanging out in the Tora Bora caves. Although United States and NATO forces ran the Taliban out of town, we were singularly inept in finding and holding bin Laden to account. Presumably, he is still in residence.

We kicked the Taliban out of Kabul, but they didn’t go away. According to Radio Free Europe, NATO’s top intelligence officer in Afghanistan said the tribal nature of the dominant Pashtun population makes the Taliban insurgency difficult to contain. Because Afghan society is complex and hermetic, no one knows who, how many or why the Taliban insurgency is increasing in strength and activity. We should not be surprised that we know nothing about it.

Riding the crest of American public opinion that the United States should withdraw from Iraq, it makes a certain amount of sense to redeploy troops to neighboring Afghanistan. There, we hope a “surge” of American military might will forever banish the Taliban, establish peace and security in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and generally make everything nice. Fat chance.