[THS] Why NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26042.htm

A Plea for Common Sense
Why NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan

By Christoph Schwennicke

July 28, 2010 - "Spiegel" -- It is difficult for politicians to admit they were wrong. But
when it comes to Afghanistan, the consequences of not doing so could be high. It is
time for the West to cut its losses and withdraw.

The most difficult thing to do in politics is to change course -- admitting that
everything that was right yesterday is wrong today. It is a particularly challenging
maneuver when the decision is between war and peace.

Winston Churchill, stubborn as he was, never could admit that he had made a
mistake in 1915 when, as first lord of the Admiralty, his strategic error helped lead to
the bitter defeat of the Entente troops at the hands of the Ottoman Empire at
Gallipoli. Similarly, it took 30 years for former US Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara to acknowledge that the Vietnam War had been a mistake.

The German government, NATO and the West shouldn't wait that long. Together
they should realize -- and admit -- that the war in Afghanistan is not going to end in
success. We have failed. The war has been lost. The country that we leave behind
will not be pacified. It is possible that we could have been successful had we
understood earlier how the country works. But now, we are no longer a part of the
solution -- increasingly, we have become part of the problem. It is best just to leave
now, before additional blood is spilled. The secret war logs given by WikiLeaks to
SPIEGEL confirm as much.

Led by the US, NATO and other Western allies have been trying to pacify Afghanistan
for almost 10 years -- with little success. War aims have changed frequently. None of
them, however, has been achieved. The intervals between the large-scale
Afghanistan conferences, from Berlin to Paris, London to Kabul, have become ever
shorter, but the list of problems has only grown. The country remains a potential
breeding ground for terrorism as it was prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the US.
And little that the West has imported to Afghanistan since then has put down such
deep roots that it would survive a pullout for long. Girls' schools, wells and newly
paved roads are pleasant side effects of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. As a
justification, however, they are not enough.

Clearer from a Distance

"Nothing is good in Afghanistan," said Margot Kässmann, then-head of the Protestant
Church of Germany, a few months ago. The angry response from German political
leaders was quick and biting -- and showed that she had touched a nerve. Her
comments were criticized, with some justification, for having shown a lack of detailed
knowledge of NATO's mission in Afghanistan. But sometimes things are clearer from a
distance.

Afghanistan is a nightmare, a graveyard of empires. The British came first, followed
by the Soviets; now NATO and the UN are losing their innocence on the battlefields
of Afghanistan. In total, the US, its allies and private security firms have almost
200,000 soldiers stationed in the country, roughly equal to the number the Soviets
stationed there in the 1980s. It wasn't enough then, and it won't be enough now.
And increasing that number would be militarily difficult and politically impossible. The
West has bitten off more than it can chew.

When sending troops abroad, governments take out a kind of loan from the populace
-- a loan of trust. This is particularly true in Germany. Should payments not be made
on that loan, the electorate eventually calls it in completely. And without the support
of the populace, overseas missions become increasingly difficult. This point has been
reached already in Berlin and in a number of NATO capitals.

Losing with Dignity

It is difficult to ignore the political parallels to the Vietnam War. The Western alliance
has reached the point where calls for patience and for continued support have
become increasingly shrill, even desperate. Politicians' words are sounding
increasingly hollow. In a recent government statement, Chancellor Angela Merkel was
so uninspired that she resorted to borrowing former Defense Minister Peter Struck's
famous formulation that Germany's security is being "defended in the Hindu Kush."

Before the Afghanistan mission's aim becomes only that of saving face, we should
withdraw. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger demanded in 1971 that his
country should lose the Asian war with dignity. To achieve that aim, the US stayed in
Vietnam for two more years -- years which resulted in the deaths of additional
hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

One can hear similar expressions of desperation these days. Only recently, German
Development Minister Dirk Niebel said on television that Germany has to stay in
Afghanistan. Berlin owes it to those who have lost their lives, he said.

One wonders how much longer we will have to listen to such justifications.