One Quagmire, Coming Right Up
A few weeks ago HistoryNet ran a poll on the effects of the Afhan election asking respondents what, if any, effect it would have on the conflict. Here are the results:
Tilt toward Taliban: 12%
Uncertain: 17%
Tilt away from Taliban: 19%
No significant effect: 53%
Oh, how cynical we have become! Most of the respondents were Americans. Why don’t Americans, who love democracy with a passion verging on the religious, think democratic elections in Afghanistan will change anything?
Because they were rigged. Everyone knew it, including the Afghans themselves. The 53% “no significant effect” respondents above come close to matching the over 60% of Afghan voters who just stayed home. The only polling places which had a decent turn-out were the ones which never opened, due to “security concerns” – the ballot boxes there were full. President Hamid Karzai came in at about 47% of the vote total after one third – yes, one third – of his total vote count was thrown out as fraudulent, and that after just some selected spot-checking of suspicious precincts.
“Fraud to a certain scale can take place in any country,” Karzai’s spokesman explained.
Right.
Pushing him below the 50% mark calls for a run-off election with Abdullah Abdullah, who had the number two vote total. Abdullah, along with the International Crisis Group, have called for the replacement of Karzai’s pal Azizullah Ludin as head of the “Independent” Electoral Commission. Ludin has been widely implicated in the massive vote fraud, so people wonder why he has been retained in this post.
“Azizullah Ludin has done absolutely nothing wrong,” Karzai’s spokesman explained.
Oh. Right.
Don’t say deja vu; French reminds me of Saigon.
We learned everything from Vietnam. We learned nothing from Vietnam.
We have written the most insightful manual on counterinsurgency warfare ever compiled. We have the most combat-effective force in the history of the planet. We have the ability to marshal manpower, firepower, and brainpower to an extent so overwhelming as to show the Taliban for the bush-leaguers they are.
But we cannot win this war.
We can kill people and blow stuff up until the cows come home, but that is not all it takes to win a counterinsurgency – if you don’t believe me, read our own manual. Beating an insurgency also requires giving the populace a better alternative than the insurgency offers, giving them a society in which they have a stake, and we cannot do that because it is not up to us. It is up to the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai.
Just as it was up to the South Vietnamese government forty years ago.
So how many more billions of dollars and thousands of young American lives are you willing to bet on that horse? Because that is exactly what it comes down to, and if you think otherwise, you are deluding yourself.
Editor’s note: This blog was written shortly before the Afghanistan elections were cancelled. On GreatHistory’s partner site ArmchairGeneral.com strategist Ralph Peters and intelligence anyalsty John Sutherland debate three options for the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan.
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Jack Radey said:
Right on target. Except, Karzai is no more leader of an Afghan government than Diem was of a “South Vietnamese government.” Neither government has any independent existence. We trained, armed, equipped, the ARVN from 1954 to 1974. They were losing very badly to the NLF in 1964, and collapsed in the face of PAVN in 1974, when we were no longer involved. We have been training “Afghan government forces” for 8 years now? When you think they’ll be ready?
Ready to do what, defend “their country?” Sigh. If its set up, paid for, armed, trained, and run in the interests of a foreign power, as soon as the foreign power wearies of holding it up, guess what will happen? Why do its leaders, commanders, etc, spend more time stealing than fighting? Clue, they are not in power to defend, build, support, protect or serve “their” country. They are there to get paid by a foreign power. They do what they do to enrich themselves, knowing one day the name of the game will be, “Whoever gets on the helicopter out with the biggest Swiss bank account wins!”
When will we ever learn?
October 29th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Frank Chadwick said:
Jack,
Thanks for your comment.
Back in “the day,” almost all South Vietnamese farmland was owned by absentee landlords who charged rent. So when U.S. forces liberated an area which had been controlled by the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), as soon as it was secure in would come the South Vietnamese security forces and with them the rent collectors. They would set up shop in the ville and demand payment of all back-rent for the entire time the farms had been under VC control. Of course nobody had that sort of cash and so they’d confiscate posessions, arrest folks, etc.
“Liberation” was an economic catastrophe for the farmers. We knew it, and we knew it was costing us the war, but there was nothing we could do about it — it wasn’t our country.
For me, that’s the bottom line. It doesn’t mater how smart and well-intentioned we are; it matters how smart and well intentioned the Afghan government is, and since it is a sovereign state, that is something over which we have no control.
October 29th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Tracey McCormick said:
Frank et al.-
Abdullah Abdullah is pulling out of the runoff – he doesn’t want to take part in the pretending any more.
Looks like the West is hoping Abdullah goes quietly:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/world/middleeast/01afghan.html?th&emc=th
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Frank Chadwick said:
I suppose. Secretary of State Clinton has said that Abdullah’s withdrawal from the race will not affect the legitimacy of Karzai’s election. I agree, although probably not in the way Secretary Clinton intended.
It does make me wonder what it would take for the results NOT to be considered legitimate.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:17 pm