American Omelette

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But it may be time to leave since the window of opportunity has closed.

Why now? Because we missed our chance at really making a difference in Afghanistan and must now consolidate our position.

Here’s my thinking.

First, yes, it is honorable to be fighting the good fight against the shitheads that hit us on 9-11. We hit them pretty hard back in 2001 but should have continued until the Taliban and every other nut-case out there was safely back in their place of worship or six feet under them (sorry, but the insane-radical-evangelical-self-righteous-dying-to-go-to-heaven crowd has no place in running countries). We also should have used the planet’s goodwill to further our causes in the Muslim world by showing them that moderate thinking is better than crazy-paranoid-god-told-me-to-attack thinking. Instead, we decided to go the crazy-paranoid-god-told-me-to-attack route in Iraq and the rest, as they say, is history. So here we are… five years later justifying our existence in Iraq, while Afghanistan is going to hell and the Taliban are winning over the hearts and minds of their people with their silly god-fearing rhetoric. Again.

You see, without helping the poor people of Afghanistan with things like eating and staying warm, the Taliban will promise them salvation (and food) if they follow their extreme teaching; a common revolutionary tactic. And with the bad guys running back to Pakistan —their safe zone— each time they attack and kill American and NATO troops and civilians, we have little chance of beating them. Think what you will about the Russians , but their mighty army took a beating in their ten year war. They took 400,000+ casualties… with more than 14,000 dead. I am certain American forces are better equipped and trained, but fighting a guerrilla war where the attackers can retreat to a friendly country is a recipe for failure.

Why can’t we learn from this? Is it American machismo that is making us so blind to see that our current approach will ultimately fail?

Sure there is progress. The young girls of the country are finally getting educated and women can hold jobs. Yes, we’ve built some roads in the country and the infrastructure is improving (primarily in Kabul), but we haven’t showed the farmers how to replace the most profitable crop they have… opium. Those farmers are caught in the middle —when the Taliban was in power they all but eradicated the drug crop (the Taliban had a serious war on drugs with an off-with-their-heads philosophy)— but now that they’re not, opium is once again the lead crop because the farmers have to eat.

So why pull out now (now being over the next 18-24 months because that’s how long it will take)? Because the USA and its friends must regroup and reform a foreign policy that makes sense. The forever-war strategy that the neocons of the Bush era have made as policy can’t work. We can’t afford it. If we are to survive as a powerful, economically stable, influential party in the world we must encourage our moderate Muslim friends to police their neighborhood, or risk a nuclear-Muslim Iran and Pakistan.

Pull out of Afghanistan? If we don’t it’ll be the centerpiece in the next presidential election of 2012. The insane-radical-evangelical-self-righteous-dying-to-go-to-heaven crowd that is making the planet so unsafe can be taken out with a very new and bold direction that the peace-loving and sane world will buy into (bookmark American Omelette for this approach soon). This policy of blasting our way to peace has been tried for millennia; since we’re supoosed to be so smart and sophisticated, shouldn’t we try something different?

What we are experiencing is nothing like our father’s or grandfather’s war, and we certainly don’t want this to be our children’s and grandchildren’s war… right?. It is up to us to fulfill the human destiny which, together, can deter terrorism and shitheads who want to hurt people and make life miserable. We do that by being smart, gathering our friends together, and showing a common front.