yacek1
25.02.02, 15:40
story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/020221/7/14zdw.html
BUSH'S VIETNAM:
Wed Feb 20,10:02 PM ET
By Ted Rall
An Afghan Quagmire Begins
by Ted Rall
NEW YORK-I knew that the United States was in big trouble back in November,
when I spent three weeks in Afghanistan. Despite the Niagara-sized deluge of
propaganda assuring Americans that thousands of indiscriminately-dropped bombs
would keep them safe from terrorism, the bloodbath I witnessed told me
otherwise.
And things have gotten worse since.
On the subject of bombing, the lessons of military history are clear. No war
has ever been won by bombing alone. And in almost every case, the hearts and
minds of civilians turn against the side that bombs them. Partly this is
caused by "collateral damage"-people killed because they happen to be next to
a legitimate target. What's made it worse in Afghanistan is that we've killed
thousands of people by bombing villages and cities where no one had seen a
Talib or Al Qaeda fighter in years. We've already killed more civilians than
died in the 9-11 attacks-and as we know firsthand, seeing innocent people
killed creates rage among their survivors. To the Afghans, we're the
terrorists. Inevitably we'll pay an awful price for killing their husbands,
wives, sons and daughters.
Trying to win through bombing was stupid. Bombing a country we knew nothing
about was insane.
The United States only committed about 10,000 ground troops to the war in
Afghanistan (a country the size of Texas), and the few soldiers we sent are
holed up at local airports and camps in the middle of the desert. Occasionally
they venture out of their cantonments in SUVs with tinted windows for sit-
downs with local warlords, but they rarely talk to the locals to find out
what's really going on.
The interim government of American puppet leader and former Unocal oil
employee Hamid Karzai is both impotent and incompetent; as a result individual
fiefdoms have sprung up all over Afghanistan to fill the power vacuum left by
the fall of the Taliban. Fierce battles have broken out between the warlords
of Herat and Kandahar as well as those of Jalalabad and Khost. The aviation
and tourism minister was stripped and stabbed to death in front of 800 Muslim
pilgrims at the Kandahar airport; Karzai blames his own intelligence and
defense chiefs for the murder.
Afghanistan is not in danger of disintegrating into civil war. This is civil
war.