By Steve Hynd
That's Peter Hitchens, even more conservative brother of the drink-soaked poppinjay the American Right loved so much for his defense of the Iraqi debacle. Chris Hitchens' older brother is a traditionalist conservative and thus has opposed Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan as all being insufficiently in the interests of the UK or US rather than cheerleading for foreign interventionist adventures.
He writes in the Daily Mail on Monday:
This conflict in Afghanistan is not like any other war we have ever fought. Last night, the butcher�s bill reached a figure we were never led to expect. The Defence Secretary who despatched our troops to Helmand never expected it either.
Neither he nor his successors nor the Government � nor the Conservative Opposition � have ever explained to us or their own MPs what British soldiers are doing in Afghanistan.
The explanation shifts and wobbles as the months pass. One minute, we are global social workers, then a sort of drugs squad, then we are promoting feminism or training the Afghan army.
Or perhaps we are introducing �democracy� in a country where men vote as their tribal leaders tell them.
As a last resort, we are spun some tale that by fighting over mud villages near Lashkar Gah, we are protecting Britain from terrorist plots � though all the evidence shows that terrorist plots can be and are begun in Britain, with no aid from supposed �training camps� in Afghanistan.
None of this verbiage is really true. The reason for the slippery and changeable explanations, and the obvious mumbling confusion of the Ministers who give them, is that we are there as part of a political deal, to provide cover and support for an American operation whose purpose and nature are in truth as misty and unclear as our own.
...From now on, each time they drivel about �defeatism� and try to scare us into compliance with bogeyman talk about terrorists, we should simply answer �200 is enough�.
Men can be asked to die for a cause and a country. They cannot be asked to die because a few political pygmies are too vain and too weak to admit that they have made a mistake.
The elder Hitchens is spot on, of course, and it applies on both sides of the Atlantic. We're still in Afghanistan because politicians and military leaders are too afraid to admit getting involved was a mistake to begin with, to afraid of the embarassment of being seen to withdraw "in defeat". There are no other real reasons.
Update: In Britain, both paleocon Right and progressive Left have abandoned their support for the Afghan occupation, leaving the neocon and neolib interventionists standing alone and in Emperor's Clothes. Here's another editorial, from the leftwing Guardian: "Afghanistan: Mission impossible":
Whether or not it is written in the Qur'an that the best way to fool a drone in the dark is to stand still, fighters loyal to the commander Jalaluddin Haqqani were abundantly confident of their ability to lay mines and mount bomb and gun attacks, no matter how big a foreign force they faced. They told our reporter, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, that the more foreign troops there were, the more targets they had. Or take the experience of our photographer, Sean Smith, who was embedded with the Black Watch in Lashkar Gah and the US 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment in Paktia. In the weeks he was with the Black Watch, he saw only one "enemy" body, that of a 15-year-old girl who had been killed in an airstrike on a Taliban position. She had probably been kept by the fighters to cook for them. And this in a period of heavy fighting. There was little evidence on the ground of how effective British troops were being at fighting the Taliban. Paktia province in particular tested our defence secretary's blithe assumption that the Taliban and the villagers that US troops were trying to protect were two different groups of people.
Counterinsurgency theorists imagine the role of the military mission as creating a "space" to be filled by the nascent institutions of the Afghan state � its army, police and judiciary. But here too, amid preparations for elections this week, there is scant evidence of theory translating into practice on the ground. The Afghan police are still reluctant to go into the Helmand villages that US and UK troops have cleared. And against whom is this "clearing" being defined? After eight years we still have no clear idea who the enemy are, or how to distinguish them from the local population.
It remains to be seen how long it will be before their paleocon and progressive American cousins catch up. Any takers for sometime around the midterms in 2010?
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