Patrick Cockburn: To say this war must be won in a year is nonsense

[laststeamtrain]

Thursday, 8 October 2009

Patrick Cockburn: To say this war must be won in a year is nonsense

Eight years ago I was standing on a hill 50 miles north of Kabul watching the flashes in the night sky as the US air strikes started against the Taliban front line. There were a few ineffective puffs of fire from Taliban anti-aircraft guns which could do nothing against the bombs and missiles raining down on them.

It was a strange war to cover, not least because so little real fighting took place. The reputation of the Afghan fighting man is partly based on agilely joining the winning side at the right moment. In the meantime they don’t fight too hard for anybody and try to avoid getting killed.

The US and British press mostly reported the war of 2001 as a real military conflict and rather missed the point that the Taliban had just gone home. I remember visiting the former headquarters of a Taliban armoured brigade in the city of Ghazni south west of Kabul. The tanks and armoured vehicles had all been smashed to pieces by American bombs, but when I asked local people how many men the Taliban had lost, I was told “none at all. They could see what was going to happen so they just ran away.”

Just as the US military victory of 2001 was overstated, so eight years later is the sense of military crisis which is being busily stoked by Gen Stanley A McChrystal, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan. In Washington military officials are quoted as saying that the war will be won or lost in the next twelve months.

This is nonsense. The Taliban have been able to advance so rapidly in the last three years because they have Pakistani backing and because of the spectacular political and military weakness of President Hamid Karzai’s government. But the Taliban draw all their strength from the Pashtun community, which makes up 42 per cent of the Afghan population. They will have great difficulty advancing into areas occupied by the other 58 per cent of the population where there is a Tajik, Hazara or Uzbek majority.

Squads of six or eight Taliban on motorcycles might be harassing the roads around Kabul, but there is no need to treat them as if they were North Vietnamese divisions at the gates of Saigon in 1975.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-to-say-this-war-must-be-won-in-a-year-is-nonsense-1799296.html

[thunder rising]

1. Exactly, don't rush, we have centuries to waste. Pashtun(42%) v The Rest standoff of the millennials

[BobRossi]

2. You can't win the un-winable. nt