Georgie Anne Geyer: Seems like old times in Afghanistan
As President Obama and his advisers focus on Europe, Russia and the international economy at the G20 summit, a slowly bleeding wound on the body of American foreign policy is becoming increasingly infected -- and will, in the end, seriously poison his presidency.
The wound is Afghanistan. Its present situation reminds those of us who remember Vietnam of those days in the '60s when minds in Washington were elsewhere -- on the nuclear standoff with Russia in Cuba, on President Kennedy's death, on the civil rights fight -- as we quietly kept sending more and more troops to replace the French in Indo-China.
What we hear from those faraway Afghan mountains and villages, which have voraciously devoured every foreign conqueror for hundreds of years, is that the Taliban is growing in influence. (It is al-Qaida and the Taliban we blame for the 9/11 attack, of course.)
The Taliban is now right outside the capital of Kabul, and young correspondents and aid workers who have covered the war tell me unanimously that they no longer can move around the country without guards. (One of the best, a dark-haired, handsome young American, has now grown a beard and wears Afghan dress whenever he leaves his hotel.)
Moreover, this very week, Taliban fighters struck for the first time outside of their protective tribal areas into Pakistan proper -- into the country's most populous state of Punjab and into that elegant ancient city of Lahore, in an eight-hour attack on the police institute that was only confusedly defeated. A warning.
Yet, even while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking a week ago in The Hague, called the waste of aid money already spent in Afghanistan "heartbreaking," the administration is going to forge ahead, planning to send some 900 new civilian personnel to the country, among other changes. This, despite the fact that foreign civilian personnel have become "the" target of the Taliban and other indiscriminate killers, many of them in the fight only to fight foreigners!
Is this wise? I don't think so. There is the same feeling in Afghanistan today that there was in Saigon in 1968, '69 and '70, when I was there -- that despite all our outward manifestations of military and technological power, the Viet Cong were sneaking up on us from all sides. In fact, it was, just as the Taliban is today....
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The wound is Afghanistan. Its present situation reminds those of us who remember Vietnam of those days in the '60s when minds in Washington were elsewhere -- on the nuclear standoff with Russia in Cuba, on President Kennedy's death, on the civil rights fight -- as we quietly kept sending more and more troops to replace the French in Indo-China.
What we hear from those faraway Afghan mountains and villages, which have voraciously devoured every foreign conqueror for hundreds of years, is that the Taliban is growing in influence. (It is al-Qaida and the Taliban we blame for the 9/11 attack, of course.)
The Taliban is now right outside the capital of Kabul, and young correspondents and aid workers who have covered the war tell me unanimously that they no longer can move around the country without guards. (One of the best, a dark-haired, handsome young American, has now grown a beard and wears Afghan dress whenever he leaves his hotel.)
Moreover, this very week, Taliban fighters struck for the first time outside of their protective tribal areas into Pakistan proper -- into the country's most populous state of Punjab and into that elegant ancient city of Lahore, in an eight-hour attack on the police institute that was only confusedly defeated. A warning.
Yet, even while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking a week ago in The Hague, called the waste of aid money already spent in Afghanistan "heartbreaking," the administration is going to forge ahead, planning to send some 900 new civilian personnel to the country, among other changes. This, despite the fact that foreign civilian personnel have become "the" target of the Taliban and other indiscriminate killers, many of them in the fight only to fight foreigners!
Is this wise? I don't think so. There is the same feeling in Afghanistan today that there was in Saigon in 1968, '69 and '70, when I was there -- that despite all our outward manifestations of military and technological power, the Viet Cong were sneaking up on us from all sides. In fact, it was, just as the Taliban is today....