Not in our strategic interests?

Afghanistan is in the news with the US undertaking still another review of the strategy and tactics needed there. Although I am a hawk on a lot of matters, I am thinking we should step back and take a look at Afghanistan.

What is our strategic interest there? Is the conflict there so important that it involves our nation's really strategic interests? In other words, is it something so important all the resources we have should should be used to accomplish the objective? Stated another way, is Afghanistan so important to us that we should expend large numbers of lives and billions or trillions of dollars to make Afghanistan "safe for democracy,"or whatever we are trying to do?

If we left Afghanistan to a fight between the factions there, would it really have any kind of effect on our national interests? How much?


Or is our objective just to make it unsafe for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda?

My thought is that it is appropriate to have a well defined objective, and one that is based upon our important strategic interests.

I really have not seen anyone articulate a firm objective.

Our decision must be measured against some known facts. Many of the best armies in the history of the world have tried to pacify Afghanistan: Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the British in the 19th Century, and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century.

They all failed. The terrain and tribalism makes it extremely difficult to do.

The Afghanis don't like outsiders, and we have become the outsiders once NATO and the regular forces moved in.

If we try to increase our force levels and go all out to pacify the country, it will be extremely costly, and, like the other great powers of the past, we may likely fail as they did.

And we would be diverting badly needed resources from other areas, such as the Middle East, where we absolutely do have very important strategic interests, and where they may be needed soon. Think Iran.

So again, one must ask the question: Is it worth it?

I am having doubts that it would be.

Horse Soldiers

That is the name of a book I have just read written by Doug Stanton.

It is the fabulous story of how fewer than fifty Special Forces troops took down the Taliban in two months, rather than the two years the Pentagon thought it would take.

They and about 15,000 irregular troops of the Northern Alliance, mounted on horseback, defeated 50-60,000 Taliban and Al Quaeda, and took the fortress at Mazar-i-Sharif.

With B-52s or FA-18s circling overhead to assist with GPS guided bombs, these guys conducted cavalry charges against tanks, other armored vehicles and machine guns, and prevailed against tough and tenacious fighters.

When they finally took Mazar-i-Sharif, half of the Special Forces guys stayed behind while the Northern Alliance and the other half continued the pursuit of the Taliban.

After they were gone, some 600 Taliban prisoners kept in the fort got their hands on weapons stored there and staged a revolt, killing a CIA agent there to interrogate some of them. John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, was among the prisoners.

In a 96 hour long battle, the Special Forces fought the prisoners until the Northern Alliance came back from Konduz, and a few reinforcements from the 10th Mountain Division arrived.

They were later reinforced with other Special Forces, but what happened back then is that about a total of 350 American Special Forces and 100 CIA agents, along with the Northern Alliance, managed to do something that the Chinese, the British, and the Soviet Union had all failed to do. Conquer Afghanistan.

Read the book and get an inkling why we are going to lose it back, and why we really are losing or have lost Iraq.

Its a fabulous story.

To bad Hollywood is too left wing to produce a movie about it.