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Dear America,
About two weeks ago, it was reported in the New York Times that President Karzai of Afghanistan, who has promised to root out corruption in his country's government, was angry that one of his top aides had been arrested by an anti-graft unit supported mainly by the United States. The aide was caught on tape soliciting a bribe to impede an investigation of an organization that was suspected of moving large amounts of money out of the country. In response to the news, Karzai launched an investigation of the investigators, implying that the arrest was somehow a function of an impropriety on their part. His specific complaint was that the investigators were violating the human rights of suspects and the sovereignty of his nation in that Americans, the very same people who are fighting his war against the Taliban and dieing in the process, played a primary role in the investigation. Notably, Congress is withholding $4 billion that was promised to the Afghanistan government in consequence of another case closely related to the one in which Karzai's aide was arrested. The investigative units were set up with President Karzai's blessing, including the fact that American law enforcement personnel from agencies like the FBI were integrally involved, but apparently he thought that the American effort would be as haphazard and half-hearted as the steps he claims to have taken in his own putative attempts to thwart the rampant corruption that is a part of governance in Afghanistan. But that is not all the Afghanistan news that is fit to print.
A few days later, the Times and other news agencies reported on an Afghani sortie against the Taliban that resulted in a disastrous rout of government forces with many casualties. It took days to extricate the troops from the ambush that was set for them, and the imputed significance of the event was that the Afghan army has far to go before it will be both willing and able to take initiative in pursuit of the goals of the war against the Taliban and in that case, Al Qaeda. Between the lack of adequate intelligence and the ineptitude of the planned action, credence for the notion that the Afghan army will be ready to fight their war in July 2011 when American troops begin to be drawn down was dealt a savage blow. And that kind of doubt was further fostered by news about a week ago that ten aid workers-- doctors, nurses and the like-- were kidnapped and murdered in an admittedly dangerous part of Afghanistan, and that the Taliban had taken "credit" for the heinous murders of seven men and three women who had no purpose in mind but to help the Taliban's own people.
It all reminds me of the 1972 presidential election in which Richard Nixon campaigned on what he called his "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. After the election it was revealed that the plan was called "Vietnamization." What that meant was that Vietnamese troops would be trained to perform the military functions then being performed by approximately 500,000 American military men and women so that when the Americans left, the war could continue without any loss of effectiveness in the forces opposing the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army. At the same time, Henry Kissinger was negotiating, at first secretly and later more openly with the North Vietnamese for an end to the war. Both the negotiations and the Vietnamization continued until the United States withdrew in 1975. The news footage of the last day of our participation in the war told the story. The capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, fell the very day our last forces left. So much for secret plans and Vietnamization. The troops trained to defend the country didn't last an hour before the North Vietnamese marched into Saigon, and South Vietnamese citizens were so desperate to get out that they hung like pine cones from the runners on the bottoms of the last helicopters out of the embassy. Our legacy to the South Vietnamese was not a formidable fighting force. It was bedlam and retribution.
I raise the issue of Vietnam, which I have done before, because it seems indisputable that we are headed to the same outcome that we saw there with the war in Afghanistan, and quite possibly in Iraq as well. In Afghanistan it started for us as more of a police action than a war: an attempt to capture, if not kill, the dastardly engineer of the deaths of 3,000 Americans on a single day to which the world refers simply as 9/11. Our forces thought they knew where he was, but despite that knowledge, that abomination of a human being was never captured. Still, the war went on and it was gradually transmogrified into what it is now: a war against what was at the beginning of the war the governing entity within Afghanistan whether we liked it or not, whether it was legitimate or not. At some point, the quest to find Osama bin Laden became the attempt to bring American democracy to a country that has never been exposed to such a thing. As we have done in other places, most recently in Iraq where new acts of terror are beginning to proliferate again now that the only American forces are support troops, at least in theory, we have assumed that everyone in the world will be better off the more they are like us. We want to save them all in spite of themselves, but at some point, we must recognize that our ambitions for others may be less altruism than hubris, and if President Karzai is any indication, less their choice than ours.
Nearly 4,500 American lives have been lost in Iraq, and while the number in Afghanistan is much lower, the pace at which our troops suffer casualties is quickening. With all those lives and the tens of thousands more that have been ravaged by injuries sometimes unspeakable in their horrible effects, I fear that we will once again have squandered them when we finally leave both places completely. What a tragedy that would be, as if there hasn't been enough tragedy already.
I'll see you Monday, America.
Your friend,
Mike
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