Tim Collins: Afghanistan remains a worthy cause

[babylonsister]

I'm not sure about this, but post in good faith for a different pov.

Tim Collins: Afghanistan remains a worthy cause

If we shrink from the fight, subversion and chaos will come to the streets of Europe

Saturday, 11 July 2009

snip//


We are now in the fourth period, marked by the election of President Obama and the appointment of General Stan McChrystal. It is what one US general described as the "decisive summer". This is a well-resourced, deliberate campaign with clear aims and objectives.

But it comes at a price. This is a fight to the death with the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. It will be an incremental fight to clear and hold. The Taliban, with its fascist ways, must be driven from the towns and villages, and a permanent presence of coalition-backed Afghan National Police (ANP) and Afghan National Army (ANA) established.

That means no more remote bombing. It is all about protecting, not destroying, the civilian population. To do this we need to get in close. We need to be prepared to take casualties in order to protect civilians. And I mean protect civilians here in the UK as well as in Helmand province, because if we shrink from this fight, the subversion and chaos of Afghanistan will come to the streets of every city in Europe. It will not confine itself to Islamic fundamentalism either; it will result in a tsunami of organised crime too.

We know from experience from Northern Ireland, and now Iraq, that military solutions are ineffective in dealing with a largely a civil problem. It is better understood by what I characterise as a "spectrum of subversion".

Violence is at the centre of the spectrum, the visible light. To the right is politics. To the left, and crucial to the extremely expensive business of violence and politics, is crime. It funds and underpins the rest of the spectrum. It supports and corrupts the political end of the spectrum simultaneously by funding campaigns and corrupting officials. To succeed there is a need to defeat the insurgency across the spectrum. That means tackling the crime that is the oxygen of subversion, taking control to drive the struggle into the political part of the spectrum by encouraging dialogue, rewarding political progress and making violence increasingly counterproductive.

General McChrystal knows this. He well understands the extent to which the poppy harvest funds the violence. He is intellectually beyond the "just burn the stuff" logic that gave no thought to what the farmers would replace it with. He is acutely aware of the nature of Afghan politics. He understands the need to win over the population, and that means not killing them.

The bit of the war we see is the casualties among our soldiers as they liberate Helmand. What we do not see is the efforts to build a bureaucracy and a society, to sustain the gains that have been bought at such a price.

And this leads us to the crucial point. For once we are winning. We are winning the fight and the argument. The UK commander on the ground, Brigadier Tim Radford, has made this clear. Any successful counter-insurgency is not about body counts but about building a secure environment for normality to spread.

more...

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/tim-collins-afghanistan-remains-a-worthy-cause-1741934.html

[The Magistrate]

1. The Colonel Is Clearly An Optimist, Ma'am

We will know in a couple of years whether some of things he says so lightly are being done successfully actually have been....

[babylonsister]

4. Optimist or realist? I don't have the answer. nt

[The Magistrate]

5. No One Does, Ma'am

It is not a bad analysis. His metaphor of a course of antibiotics is a good one, and we left off with most of the penicillin still in the jar, so to speak. But when you do that, the infection not only comes back, it comes back more virulently, being composed of elements in some degree immune to the drug. The strategy he describes is the only one with a chance of success, but it remains only a chance, not the certainty he presents it as. A degree of optimism is a requirement for the trade, of course, but it can cloud calculation at times, and land people in some sticky situations pessimists would never have got near.

[babylonsister]

6. Thank you, Sir. So there is no answer other than to see how this

plays out. Kerry might be inserting his concern soon. We are all concerned about what will or could be accomplished. I am weighing my optimism and trying to keep track of what's going on.

[BunkerHill24]

2. Occupation is not an option.....

best solution is to just pack up and leave, and let the Afghans handle their own affairs.

[babylonsister]

7. Occupation isn't an option and not what the goal is. But you knew that, right? nt

[BunkerHill24]

8. Indeed, I know that.....but the "Industrial Complex" don't know that

which is what's driving this fubar in Afghanistan.

[babylonsister]

10. Explain with links, please? Because I think you're daft.

Idiot son gets all the credit for bolloxing up the ME. Now Obama has to try to make it better. No easy task, but I'm more encouraged now that we have a smart man as prez.

[Fumesucker]

3. There is but one reason the poppy harvest funds violence..

And that is the drug war..

End the drug war and remove the funding for the Taliban in one swell foop.

It makes sense therefore it will never happen.

[RandomThoughts]

9. The guy is chief executive of New Century Consulting

Which is some sort of IT consulting company for banks. Odd for technology company to be writing such articles in an opinion piece. Although he also has experience in military. I wonder what techs the company specializes in.

I got a sense he was talking about a larger sort of thing then just Afghanistan. His comment about it being life and death, and using the same line as Cheney about sacrifices. And a few other things almost seem to make it look like a wider story.

It could be spoken of as the same thing as some world wide societal control or situation. When you think about how bad media is in many places, you could see that as on the run.

Or maybe just that the same strategy in Afghanistan's is the same way to make any society stable. So Bush's failures in Afghanistan's can also be seen the same ways as his failures in USA. A failure to protect or give the people a sense of security.(security as in food, jobs, housing. Not fear and wiretapping)

If Bush would not have driven America to problems, people might have sleep through a different approach to do the same thing he wanted to do. He could be talking about ideas about social governments, or security states and what he said would still apply. It is really easy to see Bush as the same as the Taliban.

Although it could be flipped, where he is speaking of those that want change as a virus. Or it might be he is a left globalist. Impossible to know if their is an alternative interp in there.

Anyway, my bias makes me always think twice on think tank articles.