Over the intervening long decades since the British military forays, little has changed in the history and domestic tribal culture of Afghanistan, as the former Soviets discovered to their eternal grief in the 1980s. It remains a mystery that some top policy makers today would entertain even the faint thought that continuing to slug it out “on the ground” with the medieval Taliban can bring things to a successful conclusion -- and, thus, somehow snap Afghanistan out of its one thousand-year darkness and into the 21st century in one short leap.
Others have tried before in other parts of the world with similar experiments.
None ever succeeded.
Demolishing the argument that to press on with military means in Afghanistan is "inextricably tied" to the security of Western countries is now a major priority. Those even rudimentarily familiar with the Vietnam War have powerful arguments at hand to counter the “Afghanistan lobby”.
All the governments of South Vietnam, corrupt to the bone and inept as a doorknob, figure like paragons of sophisticated democratic virtue next to Afghanistan’s “pro-Western” Karzai regime, a groupuscule that resembles more a collection of organized crime thugs than a national administration trying hard to deal with the challenges at hand.
Those who remember the Vietnam-era “pacification” programs, not to mention “internal security” projects like the Phoenix Program, look incredulously at the current efforts by NATO forces “in country” to increase “security” for the poor souls inhabiting the land and to sustain “stabilization through measured force” in an environment of ancient tribal feuds, warlords, and the rule of primitive, man-killing custom.
And those who are familiar with the various operational phases of the SE Asia war, including the prolonged “search-and-destroy” phase, which was aimed, among others, to bring the enemy to a “decisive battle,” will tell you that you can chase the Taliban all you want -- with helicopter gunships, modern artillery, heavily armed outposts, night vision goggles, and .50-caliber rifles -- across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth without ever causing this fanatical Muslim insurgency to as much as sneeze under “pressure” (note also that the Taliban are far from inclined to stage a Tet-like offensive that could expose them to allied fire under adverse terms).
This is not “defeatism,” as the steadily shrinking numbers of pro-Afghanistan war advocates will no doubt jump to tell you. It is rather an unadorned stating the obvious to those still left with some sense among “the top” so that they may realize time has come to pull out of the Afghanistan grinder, where costs outrun benefits by 20 to 1, and focus on more important strategic aims.
Afghanistan is not a headline-grabbing priority here in Greece, but, still, persistent U.S. demands upon the Greek government for more Greek military assets to join ISAF have led Greek government officials to conclude publicly, if somewhat lamely, that Afghanistan is indeed “important for the security of the West”. Of course, nobody in Athens (and many other NATO capitals) believe that this is true -- a fact that defeats, hands down, the “strategic” reasoning that demands continuing in Afghanistan almost ad infinitum. And without sound strategic reasoning, accepted by a thinking majority, any attempt to promote a war that nobody believes in is bound to fail.
A withdrawal from Afghanistan will help ditch the one key strategic misconception that contributed heavily to invading Iraq and Afghanistan and beginning a debilitating war without ending: that al Qaeda will be forced to “concentrate” on battling Western (read: mainly U.S.) forces in both those countries and thus reduce its capabilities of staging terrorist attacks against Western metropolitan targets.
This misconception originates in a basic logical, as well as operational, flaw. Al Qaeda is far from being a concrete alliance of Muslim regiments with a fixed, if irregular, command structure, which can be “broken” by large-scale counterinsurgency ops. Al Qaeda’s vital characteristic is indeed the exact opposite: while, ostensibly, responding to the nominal leadership of Osama, al Qaeda remains very much the loose, flexible confederation of many terror cells, whose high directing leadership appears to be entrenched in the wilderness extending along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
If the U.S. largely failed in Vietnam against the Viet Cong -- a much more “visible” insurgent force than al Qaeda concentrated in one major theater of war -- what makes current pro-Afghanistan war “strategists” believe that the anti-al Qaeda campaign could succeed, under a vastly more complicated international attempt to “decapitate” it by wading deep into cauldrons, like Afghanistan’s, where no previous outside military intervention ever worked?
It seems that American leaders have completely forgotten what accepting the deeply flawed counterinsurgency theories of the 1960s did to U.S. power and international credibility. Indeed, as Robert E. Osgood suggested back in 1979, accepting “the fatal [Vietnam-connected] French misconception that external forces could win insurgencies” led to an all-round, almost egotistical, determination to demonstrate that the U.S. could indeed prevail even under such a fatal misconception, something that eventually led to catastrophe.
The results of Vietnam are a matter of historical record. And Afghanistan is waiting in queue to occupy its own rightful place in the same chapter.