"We came, we conquered, we failed"

Len apologizes for the sporadic nature of posts on WWW this month. Walt and I aim for a post a day, and generally we make it or come close, but right now Len is preoccupied with business matters -- we don't make a living from blogging, you know!! -- and Walt is off communing with nature somewhere.

All the same, we do try to keep up with news and views as expressed in the meedja. Surfing the net today, I came across a trenchant opinion piece by Grant LaFleche, writing in the Saint Catharines Standard, one of the QMI papers.

In M Lafleche's opinion, "The NATO's project in Afghanistan has failed. It's been 12 years since the Taliban was deposed and everything the mission was supposed to achieve is on the verge of collapse."

He does not argue (as perhaps he should) that "intervention" in Afghanistan ["invasion", surely. Ed.] was unnecessary. He says it was the right thing to do, but that we -- the USA and its NATO allies -- blew it.

"The post 9-11 strategy was to and crush the Taliban, and then turn over control and security to the new Afghani government as quickly as possible," says M LaFleche.

"It was ridiculously short sighted and naive. Afghanistan is not a literate nation with a democratic tradition or history of a free market. To transform into a self-reliant democracy and economy was not a project of a few years but of several decades. It would mean building an entirely new political economy and discarding centuries of tradition that was, literally, stuck in the middle ages. It would mean a plan more than ambitious than the rebuilding post war Germany or Japan. It meant nation-building from scratch."

But no nation has been built. The "democratically-elected" Mohamed Karzai pretends to be in power, but his writ does not run much farther than a mile or so from the perimeter of Kabul...if that far. When the USA withdraws its troops next year (with the remaining "others" hitching a ride on the last chopper out), the Krazai government will collapse, the Taliban will rush to fill the power vacuum, and Afghanistan will revert to what it has always been -- a barbaric, savage and ungovernable collection of warring tribes.

What happens then? We'll let M LaFleche have the last word. "We will likely again debate the merits of sending our troops to war while we ask ourselves what went wrong the first time around."