Another Afghan "Victory" Over Great Power?

"A point could be reached at which the government of Afghanistan becomes irrelevant to its people, and the goal of establishing a democratic, moderate, self-sustaining state could be lost forever." Lt. General Karl Eikenberry, in 'New Survey of Afghans Reveals Time Is Running Out,'Michael Fumento, TCS Daily, 3/9/2007

If you've ever spent much time looking into the history of Afghanistan, including current accounts like Kaplan's Robert D. Kaplan's Imperial Grunts you know a startling fact. No great power, or group of them, as now, has ever subdued tribal factionalism long enough in Afghanistan to permit a genuine Afghan national government to sustain itself. No doubt part of the decline in the current NATO mission there has to do with the fact that Afghans don't distinguish the current mission from the Russian one of the 1970s and 1980s and the British one of the 19th century. The latter two were plainly imperial missions, attempts to expand British and Russian power. Kaplan's eyewitness of Afghanistan, both during the Russian intervention and more recently, suggests that the only valuable mission conducted there by NATO was by American Special Forces. When "Big Army" arrived, with its heavily defended firebases and camps, the Western forces there no longer had direct contact with Afghanis. For Afghanis, one presumes, they began to look an awful lot like the Russians did twenty years ago. Special Forces operations, in close and often out of any legal uniform, directed by people with long and intimate contact with locals, succeeded magnificently, bringing down the Taliban government in sixty days. Since then, as former paratrooper Fumento reports, it has not gone well. A similar initial success in Somalia, combining Special Forces with local powers, may come to a similar state if "Big Army" drops in. Where is Donald Rumsfeld when we really need him?

Luther