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Unraveling The Taliban
An Opinion
Human relationships are prone to pitfalls, the most common of which is misunderstanding between cultures and peoples. Therefore, it is no small asking to comprehend a phenomenon that occurs in a context that seems centuries old, among people continents afar and of another religion and faith. The Taliban belong to this category.
In short, they were a group so constituted during the civil war in Afghanistan, which erupted after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, to take over control from the groups that were supported by other countries in the region. It was not important at that time that was supporting them or what ideology they espoused. As regional powers maneuvered to ensure that their supported group would control Afghanistan, the Taliban represented that Pashtun majority of Afghanistan that had felt left out in the power games of Kabul. What distinguished them from other groups was they were more cohesive, in terms of where they belonged to and the religious fervor and ideology they shared with one another.
This is precisely what makes Taliban so different from enemies that America has ever fought. An enemy with religious fervor has a stronger will to fight through difficult periods; something if which its opponent lacks, leads to victory. The war of attrition in Afghanistan between the Taliban and a vastly superior military machine bears the hallmarks of the Soviet invasion. The Russian army was worn down by the difficulties of terrain and the grit of an enemy that was not in any hurry to leave its country of birth. The New York Times sums it up in a single sentence ‘We can’t defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the last seven years have shown’ (How to Leave Afghanistan, Leslie H Gelb, New York Times 12th March 2009), an unlikely conclusion that anyone would have reached in 2002.
To have arrived at such a point begs the question if America is making the same mistakes it has been committing for the last seven years? Whatever the answer to this question may be, America has already lost on one important front that can still be retrieved: principled leadership. In the aftermath of September 11th, the world empathized and gave its support to invasion of countries where militaries are now bogged down. NATO, represented by more than a dozen countries, took it upon itself to be a part of the Afghan multinational force. This groundswell of support came from the belief that America had been wronged and deserved help.
A number of years on, after Abu Ghraib, no WMDs in Iraq, Guantanamo and a determined insurgency in Afghanistan, the world is witnessing a defensive America trying to limit, not eliminate, threats to western countries by means of the strongest military machine the world has ever seen. This downturn has been primarily caused not only by errors in tactics but by what many may see as a loss of any moral principle in the ‘fight against terror’. Terrorists have through their sustained pressure shown that their enemy does not hesitate to employ tactics that cause significant collateral damage, or use torture as a legitimate means to extract information from prisoners, thereby blurring the moral lines between both sides in the eyes of the world public, and more significant the most important constituency to which the terrorist seeks to appeal to: the Muslim world. It is this inherent advantage of the Taliban that must be neutralized before America can defeat future threats.
This article was written by a member of Boomer Yearbook living in Pakistan. While Boomer Yearbook does not take a stand on the correct or incorrectness of America’s “fight against terror”, this member nonetheless poses the question about whether or not it is prudent for Pres. Obama to have increased the troops in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.
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