Time Is Up For Afghanistan

Bad things always seem to come in threes. This year the U.S. military has endured three separate incidents that have the potential of changing the course of the Afghanistan war. The YouTube revelation of Marines urinating on dead insurgents set the stage for two other horrific events. The burning of the Holy Quran at Bagram Air Field resulted in weeks of civil unrest, death of six soldiers, and protests against America. It was the premise for yet another apology by the Commander-in-Chief for military actions. Regardless, if there were cryptic writings on the page margins of the Qurans or not, burning them was an idiotic thing to do. Few Americans understand the Afghan and intense Muslim sensitivities to the Holy Book, which they view as the direct word of God. To desecrate it is an affront to all Muslims and unforgiveable in Afghan culture. When I was on diplomatic assignment in Karachi, Pakistan, a spontaneous riot erupted. Someone found a Quran laying in a gutter of a busy boulevard. He gingerly picked up the book and started running around like a madman yelling to crowds of onlookers that someone had desecrated the Holy book. As if preprogrammed to do so, pedestrians stopped what they were doing and began smashing business windows and overturning cars. After about an hour of mob violence, a man on a moped drove up to the scene of the alleged desecration and asked if anyone had found his Quran. He explained that it had accidently fallen off his moped’s rear rack. The crowd immediately returned to sanity and began to disperse. Afghans acted the same way once they learned about the burning of the Qurans. If those two incidents were not bad enough, a drunken rogue U.S. soldier wanders off his operating post, goes into a village and allegedly murders 16 Afghans, nine of which were children, and sets their bodies on fire. To the Afghans, nothing less than his headless body dragged around the muddy streets of Kandahar will satisfy their thirst for revenge. The alleged murderer, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, has retained John Henry Browne, a respected Seattle attorney, who is already laying the ground work for his defense. He is making it well known that this was SSG Bales’s fourth tour of combat duty, (the first in Afghanistan), and that he is a loving father, up to his ears in debt, and was a former star football in high school. He is also emphasizing that SSG Bales suffered a non-combat related traumatic brain injury during a traffic accident in Iraq. According to Mr. Browne, SSG Bales also suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. These types of defenses are completely foreign to Afghans who would prefer his trial be in Afghanistan where justice is sure and fast. Whether Mr. Browne can pull off an acquittal before a military jury is yet to be seen. He needs to remember that in all likelihood, most of the military panel members have multiple deployments under their belts. They may believe that a PTSD defense is weak because none of them has massacred women, children and non-combatant males. No matter the outcome of the trial, Afghans have had their fill of Americans and NATO. The vast majority of them just want to be left alone. All the good Americans have done there is unappreciated because no Afghan believes it will last. They know that their culture of corruption, the insurgency, illiteracy, religious fanatics, opium production and crime will unravel the progress made in the last ten years. These three incidents have forced the U.S. to prematurely transfer more control of governance to the Afghans and probably curtail unilateral night raids which has been most effective in capturing or killing insurgents and terrorists. Afghanistan is one of many places on earth that is truly ungovernable by Western standards. The U.S. has learned, or will soon, what the Soviets and English before them learned: Afghanistan marches to a different drummer. It will always reject foreign intervention, regardless of how well intended the interventionists are. The U.S. mission in Afghan has accomplished the dethroning of the Taliban and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Continuing to spend billions of dollars in infrastructure improvements, the establishment of rule of law, building of prisons and additional military and police training will prove to be of no use. Once Westerners depart, whether it is today, in 2014, or even 2114 doesn’t matter so long as corruption is a way of life and opium is Afghanistan’s number one cash crop.