Remember Vietnam? One in 20 twenty year olds alien-abducted to fight for the country in a place they’d never heard of. How’s that for a piece of discrimination. More than 500 killed and the war against dictatorship continues and will flare-up again soon according to US academics.
The real point to our sending troops off to die is this. Is Australia worth the heart-break? With gunslingers in our major capitals, law and order breaking down, compromising Anzac Day, Xmas and Easter traditions so not to offend our new demographic…I think not.  I would not want a son or daughter in uniform in Afghanistan or in any overseas posting for a country that can’t even spell sacrifice let alone understand it. God help this country at the turn of a new generation. But in the meantime, get our troops out of the land of sand. After all, as a war lord said when the yanks ‘invaded’ his country, ‘Arabs don’t understand democracy’. Methinks most Australians don’t either.

I heard it today on radio…not once but twice…both times by politicians who said, “We are in Afghanastan to protect Australians!”  Exclamation point mine. 

It was an approximate time radio show that brought out this bit of political wisdom:  When talking about politicians making promises and not keeping them it is necessary to go into, “EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT”!!!  Ex. points mine.  Expectation management must mean learning how to cover lies.  That is a whole new Gnomenclature!

The “war in Afghanistan” is a deplorable misnomer - it was and remains an invasion.

They went into Afghanistan to capture Osama Bin Laden.  They got him, but in the wrong country, so that doesn’t count.  They should stay there until they get it right.  When Osama Bin Laden has been captured (or killed again) in Afghanistan, then and only then should the Seppos and their allies withdraw.

Be realistic.  When you have armed forces as big and well-equipped as the US has, you have to find somewhere for them to fight. It has to be some country that’s not too friendly, not too powerful and not too Christian.

Whether events in Afghanistan in late 2001 were an “intervention” or an “invasion” is a somewhat semantic argument.  The actions taken by the “West” were in accordance with United Security Council Resolutions 1368, 1373 and 1378.

There have been many disappointments since 2001, and the reasons are complex.  I could list: an insufficiently inclusive peace process, a rather hubristic rush to declare “victory” as early as 2004, the extraordinary venality of nouvelles élites, distortions created by an economy based on illegal narcotics, the complex post-colonial distribution of Pashtuns, the disillusion of an impoverished majority who had hoped for better, and the underlying problem of competition for scarce, degrading land in an agrarian economy.

I am pleased that Australia’s armed forces will not be in Orozgan so much longer.  Orozgan is arguably the most mediaeval of all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, and should not be used as a yardstick, well, for anything.

Afghanistan now has a functioning Human Rights Commission, Electoral Commission, some improvements in basic medicine and, according to Oxfam, 2.7 million girls in school, by comparison to 5,000 in Taliban times.  Civilian assistance has been frustrating, but not fruitless.

Afghanistan is also a country of 30 million people who bleed, struggle with the rent, and try to look after their families, just like the rest of us.

As Afghans move to the next phase of their troubled history, please don’t abandon these good people.

Post script: I have been to Afghanistan and, for that matter, to Orozgan.  Tasmanian Times readers will know that I am a statutory office holder.  I hope that my comments are relatively non-partisan, but it’s best you know, for purposes of the Electoral Act 2004, that my address is 28 Blair St, Lutana.

Historical comparisons tell us that there are only two ways to “solve” the problems of Afghanistan-type countries, riven as they are by millennia-long tribal vendettas (think Montagues v Capulets without Renaissance art and Shakespearean poetry) and, if that by itself wasn’t bad enough, by centuries-long sectarian bigotry (think Prods v Micks minus any shared sense of community).

One way is that enough people form a critical mass, find a leader / leaders, and declare: fuck this for a bad joke -  let’s grow up, join the 19th century, and see ourselves as Afghans first, and all the rest second. Anzac hero Kemal Ataturk comes to mind.

(Mind you, that would take some time, and cause lots of such people to be killed for supporting such anti-traditional attitudes.)

The other way is that some external power imposes control over the territory with overwhelming force, using a few very painful Big Sticks + lots of very persuasive Carrots, and by giving it a make-over show very clearly that the old ways are (a) no good, (b) gone for good, and (c) not coming back.

Which is not what either the Soviet-sponsored Marxist regime of the 1980s was, or this UN-endorsed NATO intervention is. Both wastefully and futilely half-arsed, ideological posturing, on the cheap, tokenistic, and bloodily futile.

(What’s below assumes that, being the species that we are, and given the workings of evolution, there were cock-ups. And these outlines are simplified to fit a few paragraphs -  don’t blame me for not being Livy, Plutarch or Mommsen.)

FIRST EXAMPLE: Rome and the Italic peoples, the 300s to the 100s BCE.

Rome’s leaders, and particularly its Senate, were among the most astute Realpolitikers of any time or place, and, understanding that endless summertime inter-tribal warfare was just plain stupid, they persuaded their Italic neighbours, both on the battlefield and through diplomacy, that confederacy as “Friends and Allies of the Roman People” was a better way. Rome provided a Pax Italicana, and the Italic peoples provided their young men as auxiliaries for the legions both in defending the peninsula and extending the empire of the Roman People. Various other benefits followed, outlined in “What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?”

SECOND EXAMPLE: Scotland / Great Britain from Culloden through the Clearances.

Life in the Scottish Highlands, despite the romanticised nonsense peddled by jessies in Edinburgh, could easily have been what Thomas Hobbes had in mind with his observation about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”  -  absolute control by clan leaders, endemic warfare with other clans, a standard of living which cavemen would shun, adherence to an alien Popery -  all hated, despised and feared by the more civilised Lowlanders.

Culloden ruthlessly broke the politico-military powers of the clans, the Clearances (usually enacted by the surviving clan chieftains) brutally established a modern economy, and young Highland men formed some of the most famously effective regiments in the British Army. Overwhelming force, not always unwelcome, did what a Scottish consensus was never able to. The remnants of the old vicious tribal barbarism is now limited largely to the weekend thuggery of soccer yobbos in Rangers v Celtic.

(Remember -  very simplified.)

THIRD EXAMPLE: the British Raj -  again, an external power, only this time not a neighbouring one.

“India” is more like “Europe” than, say, like China, in that India, like Europe, is a peninsular extension of the Asian continent inhabited by peoples of different races, languages, scripts, religions, customs, histories, traditions, and cultures. That “Europe” is far from being a ‘more perfect Union’ does not surprise us; that “India” is one nation ought to amaze us. That the Raj did NOT fragment into scores of states and statelets after 1947 is one of the Wonders of the 20th Century.

A main reason is the nature of the Raj in its various forms from 1757 to 1947, despite the negatives of colonialism and imperialism. The Pax Britannica, both by its subcontinent-wide institutions and through the opposition it engendered, ensured that the old tribal loyalties were subsumed into a national consciousness. (There were, in 1997, and more in 2007, some Pakistani thinkers opining, quietly, very quietly, that Moh. Ali Jinnah was wrong, very wrong with a capital R.)

No-one has done that for the motley tribal collectives we call Afghanistan, and no-one will (be bothered to) do so in either the short or the long-term future. They are on their own. They will have to find their own Kemal Ataturk. He is most likely not born yet; and perhaps, neither is his father, and nor, maybe, is his grandfather. As for “he” being a “she”, not even Western feminists give a stuff for the girls and women of Afghanistan.

Poor fellow their country.

When the Indonesians invade Australia ( as they might well do one day) and we have armed troops strutting around our streets, breaking in doors to look for “insurgents, resistance fighters or what ever you name people who do not want to be subjugated, we will do well to remember the feeling of freedom we had once.
The people of Europe, Vietnam, Indonesia, The Falklands and even the British Channel Islands, all knew that feeling.
We must get out of foreign sovereign countries that do not want us there.

According to this article -

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/Taliban-commander-We-cant-win-Afghanistan-war/articleshow/14834169.cms

- Westerners are not the only people reported as thinking that the war in Afghanistan is “unwinnable”.

BTW, have not read, heard noror seen no stories of our feminists^ outrage at the recent brutal execution of an Afghan women for “adultery”  -  have you? ^ including our Very Own, and very vociferous, Germs.

Come on, Sisterhood: what’s holding you back?

Leonard C #8
The Taliban may not win the war in Afghanistan but will still be there when “The West” don’t win the war by pulling out.
Pat