The Futility of the War in Afghanistan

A response to Erica Gaston's article in the Guardian yesterday.

Many Afghans said the fact that the insurgency
was spreading despite the increase in troops made them doubt international intentions (pdf) in Afghanistan. "The international forces are not honestly trying to bring peace. In 2001 and 2002, they could eliminate all the Taliban in a week, but now there's only a handful and they don't seem to be able to get rid of them," a man from southern Kandahar province said.

This makes it look as though the failure of the Afghanistan War is based on a failure to provide fast enough results that can be seen and understood by bewildered Afghans who are not always necessarily wise enough to understand the sacrifice the West is making for them.

The problem is that the Afghanistan War has been premised on mutually contradictory aims, all of which are concerned with the interests of Western states and those who are behind the Asian Development Bank that brought about the decision to construct the TAPI pipeline.

To build a pipeline from the Dauletabad gas fields to India is a significant geopolitical aim of NATO that rarely gets a mention in the mainstream newspapers in the West for the reason that it seems to contradict the official version that NATO is "staying the course" due to what the Afghans want.

Erica Gaston is yet another liberal think tank traveller who has no interest in in challenging official truth on Afghanistan. The cause is deemed noble so the means to that end of liberating Afghanistan are the only thing that matters as well as ensuring Afghans believe in the future offered by NATO.

As always the incessant progressive update bulletin never questions whether NATO and "the international community" is primarily concerned with getting the TAPI pipeline built and whether that actually endangers the possibility of ending war in Afghanistan.

Indeed that and the discovery of $3 trillion of hard mineral resources will most likely precipitate a pathological struggle for control in Afghanistan, a land where substantial numbers want an end to the perpetual fighting, do not know who to trust and want to survive.

By survival that means the right to survive economically. NATO's absurd "War on Drugs" and poppy eradication programmes only mean impoverishing ordinary Afghan farmers and that increases support for the Taliban. As Misha Glenny argues, it is Western demand that drives the opium trade.

With the news of Development Alternative Inc representative Linda Norgrove's death it should be remembered that the bleak futility of her appalling end should not detract from the futility of the cause she served as funded by USAid: that of poppy eradication.

No matter how much the crop is curtailed the demand makes its cultivation worthwhile. Only the legalisation of drugs in the West can reduce the huge profit made from opium trafficking.The choice is there but it will not be made as it certainly would not be one politicians are willing to endorse.

Certainly progressives refuse to accept this as the belief of liberal humanists is that drugs and the creation of a society of free and wholly autonomous beings do not go together. In fact, the creation of an atomised and deracinated society in the West results in the pathological craving for drugs.

The War on Drugs is an futile as the idea that human rights can be exported by force. This basic lesson is still yet to be learnt by liberal interventionists and numerous assorted "NGO" careerists looking for adventure in Afghanistan or who have a cushy job pontificating in "helpful" roles.

The one positive finding from our research was
that despite the negative attitudes towards the international community, most Afghans we spoke to still wanted international involvement in Afghanistan. They still supported the presence of foreign troops and continued international engagement in the country. This suggests that for all the missteps of the last
nine years, there is still time to turn the situation around.

"Missteps" can hardly account for drone bombers and distant air raids blowing up and killing wedding parties nor the intensity and constant commitment to a war that cannot be won but which it is desperately hoped can be as part of the geopolitical strategy of getting the TAPI pipeline built.

Enlightened self interest is a rationale continually touted by those who implicitly accept the existence of the TAPI pipeline and its centrality to NATO and US geopolitics but which is also denied as it does not seem to fit in with the whole idea of why the war is being fought.

In contrast with certain ideological anti-war types, there is is no reason to assume that those who want a "constructive outcome" in Afghanistan are not always well intentioned. Yet instead of looking at the war as a "humanitarian opportunity" it is better to face the facts.

The Afghanistan War is premised on the absurd idea that a regime of rights can be imposed by force. It cannot..