OBAMA´S DECISION ON AFGHANISTAN: THE ODDS OF SUCCESS ARE QUESTIONABLE.

If Obama is wrong, Bush´s poor decisions on Afghanistan could haunt Obama´s presidency to the very end.

…A home-made mileage sign on a US base in far-away Afghanistan.

OK, the man has finally made his decision on Afghanistan, and the decision is basically what he said he was going to do during his election campaign. Today I get really upset when I hear the far "Lefties" screaming that "Obama is now being a war monger." In reality, Obama is following through on his election promises that "Afghanistan was the correct war." Unfortunately, due to Bush´s screwing up what our brave troops and the CIA had accomplished early on in Afghanistan, Obama´s now inherited a real "bag of worms".

Obama today has more knowledge than he had as a presidential candidate. And since the latest situation with the local Afghani election fraud and the government corruption and the drug trafficking has come to the forefront, one would have hoped that he would have changed his approach to this situation. But he is going ahead and committing more US and foreign troops. It´s a very big risk, for more reasons than one.

First, let´s get it straight. Bush, Cheney and company were the true "war-mongers".

They attacked a country that did nothing to America. They threatened North Korea and Iran which drove both countries to diving even deeper into their nuclear development programs. They built the Guantanamo Bay Prison, which became a major al Qaeda recruiting tool. Their "war-on-the-cheap" set up the situation that became the pictures that went world-wide on the Internet of the torture mess at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In addition to all this, Bush´s bad decisions eventually alienated most of America´s allies around the world that were behind America 100% after the 9/11 attacks.

And this all started because the Bush Administration ignored their own intelligence reports before the Twin Towers were attacked. They can take responsibility for setting up 100% of the messy situation that President Obama has inherited from "George W. Bush…..A 1st Class War Monger".

So, did President Obama make the right move? Let´s look at the difficulties that now face the president.

As compared to Iraq, the president isn´t dealing with a country that had a strong, centralized government. It is more of a country composed of many different villages with regional war lords or religious Muslim leaders.

Iraq was a country with a mostly educated population. However, today it is estimated that over 90% of the population of Afghanistan is illiterate and they are all devout Muslims.

Iraq´s long-time oil reserves eventually made much of the country into a modern country. The only real natural resource in Afghanistan today is the illegal opium poppy trade that currently funds the Talban and the Muslim extremists.

The Afghani´s do not trust the current corrupt Karzai government, especially when the brother of the president is a well known drug trafficker. (In addition, graft and corruption within the Afghani government has been the normal way for doing their business for the past 1000 years.)

As is well understood, the Muslims of Pakistan, (Afghanistan´s powerful next-door neighbor) and the Hindu´s of India, have been mortal enemies for the past 1000+ years. This is why both countries today have nuclear weapons and why both countries have thousands of military personnel stationed in permanent installations along their common border.

Due to the internal skirmishes between the tribal areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are also today villages where the only work activity for earning income is for remaking and repairing modern guns and weapons. These weapons are then sold to other local villages in both neighboring Afghanistan and in Pakistan for their self-protection. (Virtually everyone in the mountain areas on the Afghan / Pakistan border carry a gun or weapon of some kind, this includes the children.) Their favorite weapon to work on and repair is the readily available Russian AK47. These villages collect and repair the many available guns left over from the past Muslim conflicts with Russia. There is an on-going local "Cottage Industry" for supplying weapons to the local areas.

OBAMA"S CONUNDRUMS:

This is the strange atmosphere that also includes the almost impassable terrain where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are holed up today. And this is where the US Military is expected to deal with the Muslim insurgents. It is also where they are expected to train these local Muslims whose only education currently comes from a Muslim clergyman that has no books and teaches verbally from his memorization of the Holy Koran.

President Bush and company seriously dropped the ball in Afghanistan over the previous 8 years. They had originally marginalized the Afghani Taliban and had driven out al Qaeda. (And now there is the report that Bush purposely hesitated when he could have gotten Osama and the al Qaeda leadership.)

It is sad that if they had actually finished the job, they could have honestly said that they were attacked; that they went after those that attacked on 9/11; and that they "kicked their ass!". It would have been a clean "Win". Today, they have no way to describe what a "Win" in Afghanistan would even look like.

President Obama is now expected to train these illiterate Afghani´s over the coming 18 months. Unfortunately, this was not even attempted over the previous 8 years of Bush inaction.

Today, many Americans are weary of our recent decades of past war activity. And the fighting in Afghanistan has now lasted longer than both World War II and the Korean Conflict combined.

Here in the United States, we must be aware that for those children born in the late 1980´s; with the first Gulf War, the Kosovo Conflict and then 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, those young American have only seen the US at some kind of war for most of their young lives. In an interview last year on the streets in Philadelphia, a young woman stated that for her life to date, all she could remember was that America was always at war. To her, war was "business as usual in America". And many of the young males from back then have already fought and many have died in a foreign country on the other side of the world.

So, can President Obama succeed in getting enough Afghani men educated, trained and motivated to take on the assignment of protecting their own citizens?

>>> Will the Karzai government be able to gain the support of the average Afghani citizen?

>>> Will they be able to stop the opium trade that is supplying the financing for the Taliban and al Qaeda?

>>> Is the total number of troops enough to get the job done in the roughest terrain for fighting a war and with local natives that just want the soldiers to go away?.

>>> And finally, can the US troops leave Afghanistan in such a way as to say they have completed their mission, when they don´t even know how to state what a "win in Afghanistan looks like?"

I wish the president and the troops a lot of god luck and hope for their safe return. But as the decorated Vietnam Veteran, Senator John Kerry had said years ago when testifying to the US Congress regarding the war in Vietnam: "I am not here as John Kerry. ...In the swaps of Vietnam, we found that all too often ... How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Let´s hope that President Obama does not find himself in that position.

Copyright: G.Ater 2009

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