Operation enduring war

Operation Enduring Freedom which began eight years ago next month looks as silly, though not as bloody, now as the US foray into Vietnam.

As of this week, the US and its allies, including, alas, Australia, will be propping up yet another demonstrably corrupt puppet in the form of Hamid Karzai – just as they propped up the corrupt Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam for several years before the CIA engineered a coup against him in 1963 before blundering on against the inevitable result for almost another decade.

The only difference in Afghanistan between this week and last week is the corruption, in the form of vote-rigging, has now been proven.

It had always been idiocy to try to install democracy, peace and the rule of law by force in Afghanistan. But the hot heads in the White House had to be seen to be doing something after the terrorist attacks on US soil eight years ago yesterday. In less than a month after the attacks, they launched Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It shows how little time they spent in thinking and preparing.

It has become Operation Enduring War.

Indeed, it now seems tragically likely that Afghanistan will eclipse Vietnam as Australia’s longest war.

There is a special onus on a government, especially a democratic government, deciding whether to go to war. The bulk of the masses will support a war, almost any war, a first. It sometimes takes years to work out that nearly all of them are unjust or avoidable. With rare exception, support wanes as the war goes on.

They should have thought more. As it happened the un-borne-out predictions of the First Gulf War becoming “another Vietnam” made the similarities between Vietnam and the Afghanistan foray less obvious. They are now apparent.

In each case there were things that could not be tamed with force — communism and nationalism in Vietnam and religious fundamentalism and tribalism in Afghanistan. In each case the threat to the US or the “free world” was misconceived or exaggerated — communist dominoes with Vietnam and terrorism with Afghanistan.

In each case there was a failure to address the real causes for anti-US feeling – support for French colonialism followed by support for forces opposed to a popular nationalist (who happened to be communist) in Vietnam and support for Israeli-Jewish dispossession of Palestinian-Muslims in the Middle East. And in both cases the US supported corrupt governments.

In each case the medium term result was similar – the use of force hardening the resolve of the enemy and strengthening the enemy by drawing more people’s to its cause.

In each case the realisation that the cause was hopeless came agonisingly slowly and the policy change to do something about it was the same: hand over to the locals.

And the ultimate result in Afghanistan will be the same as Vietnam – defeat, ignominy, lowering of respect in the eyes of the people of the world.

The folly of the two situations is the same. The only difference is the degree.

So will the US persist – and will Australia melancholically therefore also remain at war? Will we both continue to support a corrupt government and pursue an unwinnable war? Yes, for some time yet.

Or will President Obama be miraculously different among US Presidents in not following the folly of previous Administrations? Extremely unlikely.

The sensible thing to defeat fundamentalist religious terrorism would be to admit past error and withdraw from both Afghanistan and Iraq and to stop supplying Israel with money and weapons and to stop supporting Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land.

Yes, the Taliban would take back much of Afghanistan and it would be terrible for Afghan women. But it is going to happen anyway. The US and its allies, and more particularly their people, have neither will nor the resources to quell the Taliban and Afghan warlords forever.

Ultimately, they are going to have to slug it out among themselves and exhaust themselves to peace. The presence of Western troops just prolongs the day.

There are at least some differences with Vietnam. The opposition in Afghanistan is nowhere near as numerous, well-armed, popular or cohesive as in Vietnam and can be held at bay with far fewer troops. That might make it more palatable at home.

But, on the other hand, the enemy in Afghanistan has shown itself capable of striking on US home soil, in a way that the enemy in Vietnam could never contemplate.

And therein the case for a more intelligent approach – not the same old idiocy that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is offering — a conference on Afghanistan which sounds exactly like what the US did in Vietnam: slowly hand over “security” to the inept, corrupt locals who they have hitherto been supporting with the inevitable result.

Why not do the smart thing instead.

Why doesn’t the US Administration ask the simple question: why do terrorists strike US and other western interests?

And when they answer that question why don’t they just stop doing the things that provoke terrorism?

Alas, there is a really scary difference between the war in Vietnam and against communism on one hand and the war in Afghanistan and the war against terror on the other. At the end of the Vietnamese folly, at least there was resolution and peace. It was over. There was no communist conspiracy to take over the world. Just a few nationalists.

But the Afghan folly is part of a wider one – dealing with the Muslim world and its grievances in Palestine. When the Afghan folly is over, that underlying folly will remain.
CRISPIN HULL