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By Gary Rotto
 SAN DIEGO —I have been stewing on this for several weeks. At the end of the summer, I could not believe the title in my email box. “Enough is enough” was entitled the message … from John Burton, Chair of the California Democratic Party. And the topic was Afghanistan.
“It’s time for American troops to come home – not only from Iraq, but from Afghanistan too. And the first step is an exit strategy.” Now, I think it’s a good policy to have goals in any war and to have mapped out a strategy for building the infrastructure of a country and for exiting that country. But to lump Afghanistan with Iraq is just plain wrong.
The case for entering Iraq was sketchy and based on what has been proven to be outright lies. Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban, who had very clear ties to al-Qaeda. I can see only two ways that someone would fault the US invasion of Afghanistan: if one believes that the US brought on 9/11 itself or if one is a jihadist. Short of that, we needed to (and continue to need to) drive the Taliban from power and engage in nation-building in Kabul.
As Robert Farley writes in the American Prospect, ”The Afghan question is critical to devising criteria for military intervention, because it should represent an easy case, a war under optimal conditions and launched with justification: the Taliban was a weak military power, a nasty regime, had close ties with terrorists, faced widespread international condemnation, and showed contempt for the international community.”
Maybe someone else can locate it, but I remember a Time magazine cover which had the lone “face” of an Afghani women. I recall that the woman was not in a burka but rather what looked like a primitive fencing mask. It struck me as a cage.
According to the Inter Press Agency news service, “Scores of schools and other government buildings have been blown up over the past two years, in Swat, Bajaur and Mohmand.” Parents in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where lawlessness prevails and the Taliban have set up shop, have been warned by the Taliban not send their daughters to “un-Islamic” schools.
According to Radio Free Europe, women are not allowed to work, or receive an education after the age of eight. Despite this, some women brave the restrictive codes to seek a decent education.
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The noted author Christina Lamb, who has documented life for women under the Taliban, told Radio Free Europe, “They would
arrive in their burqas with their bags full of material and scissors. Underneath they would have notebooks and pens. And once they got inside, instead of learning to sew, they would actually be talking about Shakespeare and James Joyce, Dostoyevsky and their own writing. It was a tremendous
risk they were taking. If they had been caught, they would have been, at the very least, imprisoned and tortured. Maybe hanged.”
While the invasion of Afghanistan was not based upon the fight for women’s rights, you get the idea of the nastiness of this regime and the reason for fighting the Taliban and riding the area of al-Qaida training facilities.
According to CBS News, Gen. Stanly McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has asked for as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops while some administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, push for a strategy that would not require a troop surge. According to the New York Times, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Senator John Kerry and Senator Jack Reed have all “expressed varying degrees of doubt about the prospect of sending more forces to Afghanistan.” The problem seems to be a fear of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam or ignoring the lessons from that war.
Yes, there are important lessons to be learned from Vietnam as well as from the situation in Iraq. The military mission should be clear. And once we have engaged in warfare, we need to assure that the military has the forces to complete its mission. This is very different from debating whether to engage in the first place as now troops’ lives are endangered as well as those of the local population that has favored a more modern view of Islam and modern life instead of the rigid, pre-modern interpretation violently enforced in Afghanistan. In fact, the imposition of this rigid interpretation of Islam makes countries throughout Central Asia very, very nervous. This includes the secular Islamic country of Turkey, an important ally of both the US and Israel.
So the simplistic view put forward by Burton is naïve at best and dangerous overall. There are 99 co-sponsors to House Resolution 2404. Locally, only Congressman Bob Filner is listed as a co-sponsor. But there are five Republicans who have co-sponsored this bill including conservative Dana Rohrabacher of Long Beach. The resolution calling for an exit strategy in the Afghanistan engagement seems innocuous. But as noted on the California Democratic Party website, this is only the first step to a total withdrawal-- One that if executed swiftly, will return total control of Afghanistan to the Taliban and make permanent the al-Qaida recruitment and training facilities in that region.
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