George Will is Right About Afghanistan

One of America’s most intelligent and articulate columnists and conservatives, George F. Will is making a very good point: American forces should get out of Afghanistan.
Will isn’t saying that America should stop its war against terrorism or Al Qaeda, he believes that a US occupation of Afghanistan and related nation building efforts are a waste of time, money and lives. Will is correct: the United States should wind down its military presence in Afghanistan and end the end idiotic attempt to “build” Afghan democracy.
The US and its allies have been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years and seem to nowhere close to “victory.” Now, we certainly achieved the objective we went into Afghanistan for in the first place, we destroyed Al Qaeda’s terror headquarters and dismantled the infrastructure that supports it. We also punished the Taliban for hosting Al Qaeda and supporting the Sept. 11 attacks. Since then it has not been clear why we’re in Afghanistan or what we’ve been doing there.
Does anybody really believe that having US troops on patrol in every corner of Afghanistan enhances our national security or prevents terrorism? How does having American troops drive or walk through Afghan villages with no electricity or running water fight terrorism? The terrorists don’t come from Afghanistan, they merely hung out there for awhile because it was a safe place for them.
Even if we could defeat the Taliban, the enemy in Afghanistan, we won’t win because the Taliban will simply flee back into Pakistan. Although I might note that the Pakistani government sick and tired of Taliban violence is using its military to wipe that odious organization out. Since the Pakistani army can wipe out the Taliban, why are American and other troops necessary in the area? Since drone attacks and commando raids can take out the terrorist leadership why do we need a huge US presence in Afghanistan?
Our troops are not fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan what they are doing is nation building. Trying to transform Afghanistan from an Iron Age backwater into a modern democracy. Outside of Kabul and some border areas, Afghanistan has no real infrastructure, no roads, no railroads, no power grid and no communications network. Building these things and training Afghans to operate them would cost trillions and without this infrastructure Afghanistan will not be a modern nation.
We can build schools, health clinics and libraries and hold farcical elections but that won’t transform Afghanistan. Our puppet government there is corrupt and ineffective and unpopular. The only thing we seem to have taught Afghan politicians is how to stuff ballot boxes. Indeed our efforts may have completely discredited the concept of democracy in Afghan eyes.
The only way to “defeat” the Taliban militarily would be to blanket Afghanistan with hundreds of thousands of infantrymen. The US and its allies simply don’t have enough troops to do that. We’d have to occupy or at least be in a position to occupy every mountain valley and cave that would be impossible.
An Iraq style surge, our present strategy, won’t work in Afghanistan. Iraq is a modern country with a modern infrastructure. The surge worked in Iraq because the Iraqi insurgency was an urban movement based in cities. All we had to do was occupy the cities and the insurgency was driven underground. Afghanistan is a rural nation and the Taliban is a guerrilla movement based in the countryside. We’d need several hundred thousand soldiers, an army comparable to the one we had in Vietnam, to pacify the Afghan countryside.
Neither America or its allies have that many troops available. To make matters worse our allies are bailing out. The Australians are planning to leave and our second biggest ally in Afghanistan, Britain could soon follow. The Afghan war is unpopular in Britain and the British media is openly hostile to it. The British press has hyped up British combat deaths while the US media has ignored American casualties in Afghanistan. Britain will soon pull out of Afghanistan especially if Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to stay in Ten Downing Street.
If we don’t listen to George WillGeorge Will’s sensible advice and confine our military efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the eradication of our real enemies, there will be hell to pay. We should fight the Afghan War sensibly with proxies, surgical strikes and common sense for if we don’t we will face a debacle comparable to the Vietnam War.