10:16am Tuesday 8th December 2009
THE more I see and hear of US President Barack Obama, the more he reminds me of one of his predecessors, Jimmy Carter: a disastrous mixture of sentimentality, indecision and ineptitude.
From what I read on the US news networks, many Americans are coming to the same disappointed conclusion. It is hard to recall that Obama was hailed as a demigod when he came to power a year ago. Half the world’s population spoke of him in awe as the man who would put everything right. Now, he just looks like a man who talks a good line, but achieves nothing.
History has demonstrated many times that it is weak leaders who take nations into major wars. Obama is showing himself to be the latest in this succession. For what on earth does his new policy on Afghanistan add up to? He tells us he is going to send a further 30,000 US troops, but then he adds that they will not be there for the long-term, and he even nominates the year 2011 as the date when they will begin their withdrawal.
If you were a Taliban commander, what would you make of this? You would say to your soldiers: “We need to fight a defensive war and survive the Yanks’ troop surge, while killing as many of them as possible. All we need to do is to wait for them to leave and we can take over the country again.”
The American policy on Afghanistan is fatally confused. A pity that this policy is enthusiastically supported by the British Government, so that we, too, are involved in a catastrophic folly – this utterly pointless waste of our soldiers’ lives.
The expressed hope is that we shall weaken the Taliban and train the Afghan army and police force to suppress the insurgents in the future. The proverbial snowball in hell has better prospects. Afghanistan is endemically corrupt, as was shown in the recent fraud which passed for a general election.
Obama, Gordon Brown and the rest of the sentimental ideologues vainly imagine they can implant democracy in a state that has known tribal despotism for centuries. This is insanity. The Soviets tried to control Afghanistan, starting with their invasion in 1979 – and they were prepared to be far more ruthless than the Western powers will ever be.
The Soviets failed and had to make an ignominious withdrawal. We and the Americans will one day soon have to do the same.
So what’s the point of wasting more of our soldiers’ lives over the next two years or so?
The policy is totally incoherent. Obama and Brown tell us suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan will protect us against the terrorist threat. But, as former Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan, now a professional politician, told us recently: the Taliban do not go in for global jihad and fighting wars on foreign soil. That is the ambition of al Qaida.
It would be encouraging to think our politicians understood this, but they don’t. In any case, the leaders of al Qaida are not only in the border country shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan: they are in Somalia, Sudan and the Yemen.
And despite their current campaign against the insurgents, the Pakistanis will never defeat either the Pakistan Taliban or al Qaida. Their own people are against this campaign. In short, the Pakistanis may dislike the Taliban, but they dislike Britain and the US a lot more. So bring our boys home now – while they are still alive.
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