THE DEFEAT LOBBY:AMIR TAHERI
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7395/pub_detail.asp
The defeat industry is back at work again, with the usual suspects acting as a chorus calling for an American retreat in the face of Islamist terror.
Five years ago, the same cast of characters was calling for retreat from Iraq, abandoning that country to al Qaeda and its allies. The argument, according to Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was that America, having already lost the war, had better acknowledge defeat and run away.
Those who wanted to appear more sophisticated, like then-Sen. Joe Biden, recommended that the United States carve up Iraq into three or five mini-states and then withdraw.
Bravery: Afghans are preparing to vote next week despite Taliban attacks. Above, women peruse election literature.
At the time, those of us who knew what was going on inside Iraq rejected those calls for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Our argument was that the Iraqi people didn’t want al Qaeda and its allies and that America had a duty to help them defeat their enemies, who also happened to be the enemies of the United States.
At the time, the man in the White House was prepared to ignore the siren song of defeatism. He also had a general in the field who knew how to win this new type of war.
Today, the arguments used to prepare public opinion for a cowardly surrender in Afghanistan are the same.
The first argument is that the Taliban are supported by a majority of the Afghan people. The claim is based either on ignorance or bad faith.
The Taliban was created by Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI, in 1992 with recruits among Afghan refugees from the Islamist madrassas of Peshawar. Using money from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Taliban managed to persuade many local warlords to rally to its flag.
Yet, despite support from Pakistani officers and war materiel, the Taliban never won a single battle against its Afghan enemies: It simply bought control of most of Afghanistan.
The Taliban then tried to project itself as the defender of the Pashtun community against other ethnic groups. It has failed even in that.
Most Pashtun tribes reject Taliban as a Pakistani Trojan Horse. This is why Taliban assassins have murdered more than 1,000 Pashtun tribal leaders in the last six years.
However, even if the Taliban did represent all Pashtuns, that community remains merely the largest of the 18 main Afghan ethnic groups, but accounting for only about 40 percent of the population.
Most Afghans — the Tajiks, the Uzbek, the Char Aymaq, the Nuristanis and the Hazara, among others — would rather die than submit to Taliban rule.
The second argument is that no insurgency can ever be defeated. The case of Iraq has already debunked that claim. And history is full of other instances of an insurgency being crushed by determined warriors — such as the communist insurgency in Malaya, the Dhofar uprising in Oman, the M19 in Argentina and Uruguay, the Shining Path in Peru and the FARC in Colombia.
The general who led “the surge” to success in Iraq is now in command of the US and allied troops in Afghanistan. An intellectual as well as a warrior, Gen. David Petraeusknows all that.
Given a chance by his political masters, he’d be able to cut the Taliban down to size with the help of Afghanistan’s increasingly determined armed forces.
President Obama says that victory can’t be the objective in Afghanistan. He is confused by his belief that victory means an emperor surrendering to an American general. In war, however, victory means nothing less and nothing more than achieving one’s objectives.
The man who was in the White House in 2001 set two objectives for the war in Afghanistan: to destroy the bases of international terror and to make sure that that faraway country doesn’t become a haven for Islamist terror again.
By 2003, the first objective had been achieved. The second, however, remains. Success requires the establishment of a stable system of government based on the freely expressed will of the Afghan people.
Toward that objective, millions of Afghans are preparing to go to the polls next week to elect a new 249-seat parliament with more than 2,600 candidates representing a wide political spectrum.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Amir Taheri writes for the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal. His latest book is The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution.
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