After reading Donald Bolduc’s plea for continuing our war in Afghanistan at Small Wars Journal, I can only repeat the same observations I made in 2001 and 2002. Afghanistan will never be capable of defending its own borders. As long as it is incapable of defending its own borders, the country cannot prevent the Taliban from re-establishing a foothold in the country. As long as it can establish a foothold in the country, we can never prevent violent radical Islamists from gaining a foothold there without our remaining permanently.
The difference between Britain and the United States is that Britain thought it was entitled to occupy Malaya permanently. Do the American people have that consciousness about Afghanistan?
The borders are irrelevant. The Taliban are indigenous to Afghanistan and Pakistan. They represent the Pashtun, some 40 million people, and the largest tribe in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are, in fact, a native liberation movement, just as the Viet Cong were so many years ago. The Viet Cong were eventually marginalized through mass death and the coming the the NVA.
The Taliban cannot be defeated unless we are willing to engage in genocide in both countries. It would have to be Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot level genocide. At our present level of commitment, we are actually losing. We have also made enemies of nearly everyone in Afghanistan, including our last two puppet presidents.
Donald Bolduc is literally a war criminal. All of our Presidents since at least Lyndon Johnson, and now including Trump, who campaigned against war, are war criminals. Every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who served under them and every Secretary of Defense and State are also war criminals. I mean that in the Hitler-Tojo sense, the Nuremberg sense.
Our country has become a rogue terrorist state, the chief source of death, destruction and terror on the planet. And for nothing. People like Donald Bolduc are not to be quoted; they are to be hated.
The borders are relevant. The most basic reason that military campaign hasn’t been working is that when pressed the Taliban can just flee into Pakistan. Preventing that would require control of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan will never be able to do that. Heck, we can’t even control our border with Mexico.
As for the rest of your comment I think you greatly overestimate the popularity of the Taliban. They’re self-appointed; they weren’t elected by anybody. They don’t represent the Afghan people much more than I do. The most you can say is that they represent some of the Afghan people.
To repeat my position for the umpteenth time, I don’t think we should have invaded Afghanistan at all and having invaded our strategy should have been counter-terrorism rather than counter-insurgency. COIN doesn’t make any more sense now than it did 15 years ago.
It is not about Afghanistan. It’s about having a substantial military and logistics infrastructure on the borders of both Iran and Pakistan.
If we just stay long enough Afghanistan will turn into Sweden. Maybe even Mississippi.
Steve