Simon Jenkins: At last we get it - this war is Vietnam for slow learners
[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC.]
One word shines through the spin surrounding this week's Barack Obama policy review on Afghanistan. The word is exit. Before he became president, Obama was much taken by the idea that Afghanistan was a good and winnable war, a usefully macho contrast to his retreatism on Iraq. But in a military briefing at the time, he asked what was the exit strategy from Kabul and was met with silence. He has got the point.
In Britain, Gordon Brown too has no answer. Whether speaking to troops in the field or to the House of Commons, he incants the unconvincing line that the war he is waging, and plainly not winning, against the Taliban is about "terrorism on the streets of Britain". He cannot believe this any more than do his listeners. His platitudinous references to Afghanistan in the counter-terrorism strategy launched yesterday are evidence of this, complete with its absurd insistence on "poppy eradication".
This war remains what it was from the start, aggression against a foreign state intended to punish it for refusing to hand over the perpetrators of 9/11. It was later sanitised (largely by the British) as a liberal intervention to bring democracy and gender awareness to a poor people. The American architect of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, had no such lofty ambition. He just wanted to hit hard and get out. It was Tony Blair and the neocons who saw the country as a testbed for their new philanthropic imperialism.
After nearly eight years of fighting, the original objective - to find Osama bin Laden - has eluded the strongest military coalition on earth, while liberal intervention is ever further from success. A British government has again sent an army to get stuck in a senseless war against Pashtuns. It never learns.
If Britain has forgotten, at least Obama appears to be learning from America's equivalent example, Vietnam. The drift to a repeat of that catastrophe is the last thing his presidency needs just now. He can see that the occupation of Afghanistan has made every mistake in the invader's handbook. It has been Vietnam for slow learners...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
One word shines through the spin surrounding this week's Barack Obama policy review on Afghanistan. The word is exit. Before he became president, Obama was much taken by the idea that Afghanistan was a good and winnable war, a usefully macho contrast to his retreatism on Iraq. But in a military briefing at the time, he asked what was the exit strategy from Kabul and was met with silence. He has got the point.
In Britain, Gordon Brown too has no answer. Whether speaking to troops in the field or to the House of Commons, he incants the unconvincing line that the war he is waging, and plainly not winning, against the Taliban is about "terrorism on the streets of Britain". He cannot believe this any more than do his listeners. His platitudinous references to Afghanistan in the counter-terrorism strategy launched yesterday are evidence of this, complete with its absurd insistence on "poppy eradication".
This war remains what it was from the start, aggression against a foreign state intended to punish it for refusing to hand over the perpetrators of 9/11. It was later sanitised (largely by the British) as a liberal intervention to bring democracy and gender awareness to a poor people. The American architect of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, had no such lofty ambition. He just wanted to hit hard and get out. It was Tony Blair and the neocons who saw the country as a testbed for their new philanthropic imperialism.
After nearly eight years of fighting, the original objective - to find Osama bin Laden - has eluded the strongest military coalition on earth, while liberal intervention is ever further from success. A British government has again sent an army to get stuck in a senseless war against Pashtuns. It never learns.
If Britain has forgotten, at least Obama appears to be learning from America's equivalent example, Vietnam. The drift to a repeat of that catastrophe is the last thing his presidency needs just now. He can see that the occupation of Afghanistan has made every mistake in the invader's handbook. It has been Vietnam for slow learners...