An American Lion

Afghan resistance fighters return to a village destroyed by Soviet forces. March 25, 1986

This was a real hum-dinger:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday the Afghanistan war is different than the Vietnam war that divided America in the 1960s and 70s.

“Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action,” Obama said in announcing the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

“Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency,” he said. “And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border.”

Really?

Within minutes of the attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened the largest FBI investigation in United States history, operation PENTTBOM. The suspects were identified within 72 hours because few made any attempt to disguise their names on flight and credit card records and they were among the few non-U.S. citizens and nearly the only passengers with Arabic names on their flights, enabling the FBI to identify them and in many cases such details as dates of birth, known or possible residences, visa status, and specific identification of the suspected pilots. On September 27, 2001 the FBI released photos of the 19 hijackers, along with information about many of their possible nationalities and aliases. All the suspected hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Egypt.

Really?

The quiet truth whispered by soldiers in the field and aid workers in Kabul is that the Afghan government is not likely to ever control southern Afghanistan’s wildlands, the foreboding territory beyond the provincial capitals.

Villagers fear thieving police more than militants, and the August presidential election laid bare how pervasive corruption is here. The Taliban is playing to the general disgust with corruption by offering itself as an alternative.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a large man with a woolly black beard, once served as the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan. He always greets me with a smile and seems an unlikely representative for a hardline regime. He uses an iPhone — though his grandson recently broke it.

Zaeef is a conduit between the Afghan government and Mullah Omar’s Taliban. Zaeef told me the militant leadership refers to its forces not as Taliban now, but as “mujahedeen,” a throwback to the Afghan “holy warriors” who ousted the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that only one out of 10 militant fighters is a true “Taliban.” The rest are ordinary Afghans, Zaeef said.

That bodes extremely ill for U.S. and NATO efforts.

“Every day you are killing people. Dozens of people. They have brothers, they have fathers, they have sons,” Zaeef said. “The Taliban are my brothers, the Taliban are my sons. The Taliban are my cousins. They are not different from us. They did not come from the sky. They did not come from another Earth. They are all from Afghanistan.”

Really??

Marc Sageman, a former CIA mujahidin handler turned counter-terrorism analyst, last month told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a troop boost “may result in moral outrage in young Muslims in the West, who would take it upon themselves to carry out terrorist operations at home in response. So, far from protecting the homeland, the surge may actually endanger it in the short term.”

Sageman complains of an “insidious confusion” between the Taliban and transnational terrorist groups such as al-Qa’ida, and a widespread misconception that the Taliban’s strongholds are “terror central”. After studying 60 al-Qa’ida related plots in the West since September 11, 2001 Sageman found the vast majority were homegrown and none had any connection to the Afghan insurgency. “The proposed counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan is irrelevant to the goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qa’ida, which is located in Pakistan,” Sageman says.

“Afghan fighters are parochial, have local goals and fight locally. They do not travel abroad and rarely fight within their own country. They are happy to kill Westerners in Afghanistan, but they are not a threat to Western homelands. Foreign presence is what has traditionally unified the usually fractious Afghan rivals against a common enemy.”

The Taliban leadership is evidently following the debate in the West and, as the Karzai government struggles to assert its legitimacy, has moved to reposition itself to take advantage of shifting sentiment.

In a recent address to mark the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr, Taliban leader Omar departed from the well-worn Islamist rhetoric to describe the uprising as a popular “nationalist movement” which, he claims, is at “the edge of victory”.

With an eye on his Western audience, Omar declared: “We would like to point out that we fought against the British for 80 years from 1839 to 1919 and ultimately got independence by defeating them. Today we have strong determination, military training and effective weapons Therefore we will continue to wage jihad until we gain independence and force the invaders to pull out.”

Omar adopted an almost statesmanlike tone to offer a rare olive branch to the world, asserting that the “Islamic emirate of Afghanistan” is a “responsible force” that “will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others”. He said the Taliban “wants to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbours [and] open a new chapter of good neighbourliness, mutual co-operation and economic development”.

The conciliatory note was echoed in an open letter to the Shanghai Co-operation Conference in which Omar repeated his wish for “good neighbourly relations”, and again in a statement to mark the eighth anniversary of the US-led invasion, asserted the Taliban poses no threat to the West.

“We did not have any agenda to harm other countries, including Europe, nor [do] we have such agenda today,’ the statement said. “Still, if you want to turn the country of the proud and pious Afghans into a colony, then know that we have an unwavering determination and are braced for a prolonged war.”

These overtures are seen as a deliberate bid by the Taliban to differentiate itself from al-Qa’ida. Omar’s comments were at odds with al-Qa’ida’s agenda in several respects.

His description of the Taliban as a nationalist movement is a challenge to the al-Qa’ida view that nationalist movements such as Hamas in Palestine undermine the push for a global caliphate, while his calls for neighbourly relations conflict with Osama bin Laden’s support for jihad in states such as China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

I guess that settles it. The pretty man gave his speech, and it was fabulous, and we’re all done with that now. The problem is, we are fighting a nationalistic movement, and it is broad-based, and President Obama is lying to the American people about what we face and what Afghanistan is truly all about. Of course they want to slap down the comparisons to Vietnam. We lost in Vietnam. Except, we nearly won in Vietnam, but withdrew because we didn’t have the wherewithal to finish the job. Of course they want to walk away from a discussion about what is and what is not a futile way to appease the right wing in this country. They are all enthralled by warmongers, and generals, and talk of war. No one really understands the value of peace, except for the remote few of us who have spent any time thinking about these things. And I have thought about this. Are American soldiers and Marines supposed to go die for Hamid Karzai and his right to run a kleptocracy? No. End of story.

How did such a bunch of smart Poindexters blunder into their own Vietnam? How did so many sober, smart adults living in the reality-based world end up following what Dick Cheney and John McCain would have done, and that is, send more troops to Afghanistan?

Defending America sometimes means walking away from quagmires. Why doesn’t anyone get that?