Sleep well
December 17, 2007Tea, glacés, the political debate in the Lower House on extending our mission in Afghanistan on TV. A tad bit weird way to spend a Monday afternoon.
I’m not sure what to think of all this. My instinct tells me we should bring our troops back home. Even though the politicians promised us a reconstructive mission, where our boys and girls would build schools and repair bridges, so to speak, it is now a pure fighting and war mission, where Dutch men and women are dying, and this situation doesn’t seem to be changing at all - in fact, it only seems it’s getting worse. Our boys and girls were sent there with the wrong mission statement, and this is reason enough to bring them home.
However, as a friend of mine who is in the military (cavalry) rightfully noted: you cannot leave when your mission is incomplete. All the lives lost will have been in vain. I concur with this viewpoint too; we, the international community, promised we’d build a safe and democratic Afghanistan, and a promise is a promise in my book. We can’t just up and leave now, and let the Taliban regain control over the country.
Obviously, we set out on the wrong foot anyway. The US and Britain (The Netherlands too for supporting this act of senseless aggression) are a bunch of moronic idiots in that they still thought they could impose democracy in a top-down fashion, in a country that has no democratic tradition whatsoever. Anyone with a sane mind could have told you that it simply does not work that way. Democracy is either a bottom-up process, or a slow, step-by-step top-down process that takes decades (see China, or, in fact, The Netherlands itself). Look at the German Weimar Republic in the 1920s and early 1930s; the German Empire had no democratic tradition whatsoever, and as such, it failed miserably, not at all unlike what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq now.
The people in charge never learn, do they?
The mission in Afghanistan (and Iraq) will fail utterly and miserably - in fact, they have already failed. We cannot retreat, since that would leave a vacuum the Taliban and other extremist idiots would easily fill. We cannot stay there, as it will result in countless lost lives, all in vain.
Thank you, politicians, for sending our boys and girls on this mission. I hope you guys sleep well at night.
Honestly, Afghanistan and Iraq are two completely, totally, and utterly different issues. 9/11 was a big deal, when you make such a public act of aggression against the most powerful nation on the planet, expect to be crushed. If Afghanistan supported the group who did it, they are guilty by association. IMO the US was justified in going to war with Afghanistan.
As for Iraq, I still have yet to hear a clear reason why they are there. First it was the Amazing Disappearing WMDs, and hints that Iraq was part of the 9/11 thing (many americans still think they were). Then it was because Iraq funded groups who funded groups who funded groups who funded al’qaida. Nowadays it is because they can’t leave. I have yet to hear any sort of legitimate justification for Iraq, other then the American government wanted to take them down, and used the fact that the nation was in a war mongering kind of mood after 9/11 to do it.
But back to the main point, Afghanistan wasn’t about bringing democracy to the heathens, it was about crushing the country that launched an un provoked attack against america (and I am sorry, the saudis letting american companies pay them boatloads of money to drill oil on Muslim lands is not a legitimate reason to declare war). Now that America has finished crushing and decided they were going to pull out, it is the role of the UN to come in a peacekeeping capacity. We shouldn’t be trying to shove democracy down their throats, but we shouldn’t leave until the country is stabilized.
Comment by google_ninja — December 17, 2007 @ 5:56 pm