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Taliban Resurgence?

January 31, 2008

Democrats have talked endlessly about how we’d lost Iraq and needed to spend more time looking for Osama (not Obama) in Afghanistan. Things have a funny way of working out. Iraq now seems to be working out much better, but Afghanistan may need a lot more help. As the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” depicts, The Russian empire fell as a result of Afghanistan. And?

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Despite the presence of more than 50,000 U.S. and NATO troops throughout Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken back control of vast rural areas during the past year and now has a foothold just outside Kabul. An attack on the Serena Hotel has raised questions about whether any place in the country is safe from the fundamentalists and terrorists whom the war was originally intended to eradicate. Men dressed as police walked in and detonated explosives killing many.

The attack was masterminded by Mullah Abdullah, a close ally of Pakistani militant leader Siraj Haqqani. Haqqani is thought to be based in Miran Shah, the main town in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region of North Waziristan and the U.S. military has a $200,000 bounty out on him. Saleh said he did not known whether Abdullah is Afghan or Pakistani.

Isn’t it amazing that we can’t find either Obama nor Abdullah! And if the U.S. economy keeps tanking, how much longer can we afford such a war?

In the better times that followed the U.S.-led invasion, Kabul’s famous Chicken Street used to attract hundreds of foreigners seeking a bargain on Afghan rugs, leather goods and gemstones such as lapis lazuli. But, these days, the Westerners have all but disappeared from the downtown thoroughfare in Afghanistan’s capital. At shops such as the one owned by Mohammed Hasef, a 36-year-old rug salesman, security fears have become so intense that he even shoos away beggars out of fear they could be wearing suicide vests.

The NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill, says that the Taliban is in fact on the run in many parts of Afghanistan. In an interview Tuesday, he acknowledged that the Serena attack was “a spectacular hit” by the militants but said its significance “was probably not as big as it was made to seem.”

So, how long will we be in Afghanistan? How do we get out? And are there any comparisons to the Russian defeat there twenty years ago and our non victory so far? Tough questions that the next President of the United States will have to answer. Who do you want making that decision?

Written by Ernie · Filed Under Daily Commentary 

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