Barack Obama once described the operations in Afghanistan as a
"necessary war". That war has lasted eight years and General Stanley
McChrystal, the commander of the US forces there, appointed by Obama,
is urging him to deploy 40,000 more troops.
In Indochina, the US supported corrupt and illegitimate puppet
governments, to no avail. In Afghanistan, Britain and the Soviet
Union failed to subdue the country, despite all their efforts. US
military losses have been relatively small (880 since 2001, compared
with 1,200 a month in Vietnam in 1968) and anti-war protests have
been low-key, but have the western armies any chance of winning, lost
in mountains, surrounded by drug traffickers (1), and suspected of
crusading against Islam?
The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner still hopes to "win
hearts and minds with a bullet-proof vest" and McChrystal assures the
world that "the American goal in Afghanistan must not be primarily to
hunt down and kill Taliban insurgents but to protect the population".
Apart from their cynicism, these statements are based on a common
assumption that social development can be combined with military
operations in a country where it is impossible to distinguish between
insurgents and civilians. In Vietnam, the US journalist Andrew
Kopkind summed up this kind of "counter-insurgency" in 1966 as "candy
in the morning, napalm in the afternoon".
<http://mondediplo.com/2009/11/01afpak>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/11/starts-with-candy-ends-in-napalm.htm>monochrom
at 11/26/2009 06:07:00 PM
