Martin LeFevre: Obama’s Vietnam?

A decision Barack Obama is about to make will determine whether he begins to lead America out of its morass, or becomes a failed, one-term president. And if he fails, God knows what rough beast slouches toward Washington to be born.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama’s fate doesn’t turn on the economy and health care, but on Afghanistan. If he sends in more troops, he’ll repeat Lyndon Johnson’s tragic error in Vietnam. The mistake of invading will be compounded by the monumental blunder of staying and expanding the commitment.

This time however, America will drag NATO, and the entire European alliance, down with us--unless half-in, half-out countries like Germany have the sense to get out before we do.

Chaos grows until intelligence prevails. On its present course, America cannot extricate itself from the quagmire of Afghanistan, much less exercise genuine leadership in the international fight against terrorism.

What is really going on in Afghanistan? This, according to a necessarily unnamed advisor in the Afghan Ministry of Interior: “Here we have internationals and Afghans turning a blind eye to the fact that we are paying off the very Taliban we claim to be fighting. It’s become a self-sustaining war, a self-licking ice cream.”

He’s referring to the widespread practice of international contractors (funded by hundreds of millions of USAID dollars) paying bribes and protection money to the Taliban to build and rebuild Afghanistan’s roads, bridges, clinics, and schools in Afghanistan. That reality has been upheld by the staggering ineffectuality, corruption, and fraud of the Karzai government.

Besides the opium trade, which is still filling Taliban coffers (even as the West celebrates a 10% reduction in the opium trade due to a glut in the market), the Taliban are mastering criminal activities as a way of raking in more cash to blow up American and NATO troops.

And yet the White House is hewing to the line that Afghanistan “was under-resourced, under-funded, under-manned for years, and that’s not going to change overnight.”

A recently issued UN report says that Afghan insurgent forces are morphing into “narco-cartels” similar to guerrilla groups in Colombia.

Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says, “a marriage of convenience between insurgents and criminal groups is spawning narco-cartels in Afghanistan linked to the Taliban, [and that] the drug trade in Afghanistan has gone from being a funding source for insurgency to becoming an end in itself.”

Like good capitalists everywhere, the Taliban is selling out in the face of huge profits. Perhaps that’s part of the American plan for nation building in our image, but I doubt it.

Mr. Costa also noted how the Pentagon has placed 50 Afghan traffickers on a target list to be captured or killed, because, American officials have said, the 50 are also tied to the Taliban.

“Drug lords should be brought to justice,” Costa said in a statement. “Not executed in violation of international law or pardoned for political expediency.”

There’s the rub. Conservatives in the United States repeat ad nauseum how the Clinton Administration failed to stop 9.11 because it had made terrorism a “law enforcement issue,” rather than a military one. The sway-backed Democrats fall for that canard every time, because they feel they don’t dare stand up to the militaristic mentality, else they’ll be branded as “not supporting our troops.”

Under the new-strategy-same-as-the-old-strategy, the trajectory for Obama in Afghanistan is clear. With the fires in the hills spreading fast, he’s seeking refuge in the La Brea Tar Pits.

To see how to get out of Afghanistan, we have to throw out the continuing false premises for the invasion, instead of droning on about “how we invaded with cause, because the Taliban government was providing safe havens for al-Qaeda, from which the September 11 attacks were launched.”

The campaign storyline that President Bush fought the wrong war by going into Iraq was a convenient fable. Both invasions were wrongheaded--Iraq just much more so.

Invading a nation to fight a terrorist network was foolish, resulting in a completely unnecessary cost in American and European blood and treasure (not to mention the ‘collateral damage’ in Afghan civilian deaths).

The failure to distinguish the odious Taliban from the execrable al-Qaeda has resulted in a war that’s devolved into an open-ended police action, while denying the police action that could have prevented the spread of terrorism and war. We have elevated a universally condemned band of cave-dwelling brutes into a regional and global force with the status of a superpower.

Despite Republican shrieks against the “law enforcement approach,” that’s exactly what’s called for, and what’s worked. We can have a bottomless war and failed nation building, or we can deny al-Qaeda safe havens and bring the perpetrators of international terrorism to justice. We can’t have both.

September 11 happened on Bush-Cheney’s watch, not Clinton or Obama’s. Invasion and war have utterly failed. Republicans are obsessed with the impossible and absurd idea that “we have to win this war in Afghanistan.” If Obama follows them, he’s guaranteed to lose.

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher. More of his work and an archive can be found at the Colorado-based site Fountain of Light (fountainoflight.net). martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net

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