You Break it, You Own it ..................

For a few weeks now, a very good friend has been asking me about Afghanistan and when was I going to write something?

Frankly, I resisted because my background on the country was limited to say the least Well, I didn’t actually resist but there was stuff that was easier to write. And, again I contradict myself because it’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s the research. And this subject was no exception because my knowledge consisted of schoolboy history surrounding the British and their battles in and around the Khyber Pass on the one hand and a movie called “Charlie Wilson’s War” from a couple of years ago on the other.

Well now it’s Obama’s War with a vengeance and, for once he can’t claim that all the ills were inherited because he campaigned on prosecuting this conflict vigorously. So, no longer could he choose to pretend it was all someone else's problem no more than I could pick the low-hanging fruit while ignoring the precarious ladder. It was time to hit every search engine I could find and then hit my keyboard with the results.

At the end of August, General Stanley McChrystal sent a request to the White House for more troops. For over a month, Obama didn’t even look at it nor did he talk to the worthy soldier except to berate him on a foreign airport tarmac while on his abortive quest to gain the 2016 Olympics for Chicago.

We know now, of course, that part of Obama’s reluctance to actually do something substantive may have been influenced by his impending award of the “Peace” Prize. Instead White House officials have been minimizing warnings from the intelligence community, the military and the State Department about the risks of adopting a limited strategy focused on al Qaida.

Recent U.S. intelligence assessments have found that the Taliban and other Pakistan -based groups that are fighting U.S.-led forces have much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11. Success for these groups would allow the terrorist network to re-establish bases in Afghanistan and would help Osama bin Laden export his radical brand of Islam to Afghanistan's neighbors and beyond.

Some White House officials, have concluded that McChrystal's approach could be doomed by election fraud, corruption and other problems in Afghanistan; by continued Pakistani covert support for the insurgency; by the strains on the Army, Marine Corps and the federal budget; and by a lack of political and public support at home, which they fear could also undermine the president's domestic priorities.

One phrase that always comes up in this administration's strategy sessions is "public opinion," which should be no surprise to anyone. But, now the White House is downplaying the dangers of doing the only thing that they think Congress and the public will support -- a limited war against the guys who hit us on 9/11.

The White House, as well as Congress and U.S. military, "have got to level with the American people, and they are not doing it," said Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department intelligence analyst now with the Middle East Institute . "They are taking the easy way out by focusing on the narrow interest of protecting the homeland from al Qaida."

Some U.S. intelligence and military officials expressed deep frustration with that which they see as the administration's single-minded focus on al Qaida's threat to the U.S., saying it's not discussing publicly other, more serious consequences of a U.S. failure in Afghanistan as identified in some assessments.

A U.S. withdrawal or failure could permit al Qaida and other groups to export their violence from Afghanistan into Pakistan's heartland, the Indian-controlled side of the disputed Kashmir region and former Soviet republics in Central Asia whose autocrats have been repressing Islam for decades. Allowing the Taliban to prevail could clearly reignite Afghanistan's civil war, which was fought largely on ethnic lines, and draw nuclear-armed India and Pakistan into backing opposing sides of the conflict.

Pakistan has long patronized Afghanistan's dominant Pashtun ethnic group, which constitutes the Taliban. India, whose Kabul embassy was hit on Oct. 8 by a car bomb for the second time in 16 months, supports the U.S.-backed Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and New Delhi backed the ethnic minorities who fought the Taliban before the 2001 U.S. invasion.

Finally, failure in Afghanistan would deal a massive blow to U.S. international standing to the benefit of Iran , Russia and China , and undermine the NATO alliance.

The intelligence assessments and the U.S. officials' views are in stark contrast to briefings and statements made last week by administration officials who downplayed the threat that al Qaida could pose if the Taliban were to regain control of Afghanistan. Administration officials have said that the Taliban are focused on Afghanistan and don't share al Qaida's goals of striking the U.S. and forcing its brand of extreme Islam on the Muslim world. We seem to have been told something like that before haven’t we?

An unspecified official has said that the White House has been "spoon-feeding distorted information" to a few news organizations in an effort to build public and congressional support for a policy that "rests on the nonsensical notion that you can separate some of the Taliban from other Taliban, al Qaida and other groups, when in reality those groups are more closely allied today than they've ever been."

Back in 1963, James Michener wrote one of his earlier historical novels called “Caravans” and it was based in Afghanistan. One troubling passage that stuck in my mind was this.

“In Afghanistan almost every building bears jagged testimony to some outrage. Some, like the walled fortress now owned by Shah Khan, were built to withstand sieges, and did so many times. Others were the scenes of horrible murders and retaliation. In distant areas, scars still remained of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Nadir Shah, of Persia. Was there ever a land so overrun by terror and devastation as Afghanistan?”

We owe the Afghani people better than to add to that terror and devastation. So Mr. Obama, it’s time to return your dubious "Prize" to its even more dubious donors just as you returned the bust of Winston Churchill to the British, then back your soldiers and lead for once instead of reading the left-over tea leaves.