My apologies for the non-coherence of this diary...but it saddens me that we, as a country, have become so Iraq-focused, that few people (including me, honestly) are aware of the things
going on in Afghanistan:
Gunmen in a car shot Taj Mohammad, an outspoken opponent of the Taliban and a former governor of Ghazni province, near his home, said Habibullah Khan, administrative chief of the province's Andar district.
Four of Mohammad's bodyguards were also killed. Two suspected Taliban had been arrested, he said.
This shooting was preceeded by
another, earlier in the day:
A roadside bomb killed five police officers Friday as they traveled in a convoy transporting four bodies believed to be Macedonian workers kidnapped in southern Afghanistan a week ago, a senior official said.
By the way, other reports are putting the number of police killed by what I'm assuming is the same roadside bomb at nine, rather than five.
Interestingly, it seems that many Canadians, who have 2,200 troops currently in Afghanistan, are getting a little queasy about the whole thing, partly due to the killing of an innocent, unarmed Afghan civilian that's been getting a good bit of press.
Afghanistan, as Kolko [a retired York Univerisity historian] points out, is a classic case in which the Americans overestimated their ability to change events on the other side of the world. It easily won the war in the traditional military sense. But by failing to understand the politics of the region, it encouraged an insurgency that is now growing in strength and that, so far, it has been unable to defeat.
Opposition to Canadian troops' involvement in Afghanistan seems to be built around the same arguments that we see in our own opposition to Iraq. Namely that military and foreign-policy decisions are based on empty sloganeering (e.g. "Americans/Canadians don't cut and run!"), rather than on anything remotely resembling logic.
We were prepared for the up-front military part of the war and, as in Iraq, we won that handily [so say the leaders and the media, anyhow]. But the lack of more long-range thinking along with the administration's nauseatingly positive spin on insurgency-bordering-on-civil-war is sickening:
We like stories, and expect stories, of young girls going to school in Afghanistan. It means a lot to the American people to hear the President say that. It means a lot for people to realize that there is an entrepreneurial class that's beginning to grow. We believe in hope, which is the exact opposite of the ideology of the bin Ladens of the world, and the Taliban.
The upshot to all this is, as other countries are sending more troops to Afghanistan (Britain, Canada, the Netherlands), the US is quietly reducing troop levels. I assume they're hoping that, with less direct US involvement (and hence even LESS coverage by the US media), Afghanistan will become a quaint, distant memory and the "We kicked the Taliban's ass" meme will stick, even though the on-the-ground situation is far more complex - and sad - than that.
