Afghanistan May Become Barack Obama's Vietnam

Several weeks ago, President George Bush addressed the troops at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. He said: "It was here in Afghanistan that the terrorists planned the attacks of September the 11th, 2001. After that date, America gave the Taliban a choice: You can turn over the leaders of al Qaeda, or you can share in their fate. And when they refused, our just demands were enforced by the United States military. And thanks to you, the Taliban has gone from power, the al Qaeda training camps are closed, and 25 million Iraqis are free".

Of course, the problem for the President is that 25 million Iraqis do not live in Afghanistan and more than seven years after the Taliban lost power, they have returned to the country with a vengeance. Suicide attacks and roadside bombs have dramatically increased, and Taliban fighters have infiltrated wide swaths of countryside and now control provinces close to Kabul.

As a result, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has requested that between 20,000 and 30,000 additional U.S. troops be sent in early 2009 to Afghanistan to bolster the 31,000 already there.

So, what happened to the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Certainly, it became a fleeting victory after the Bush administration decided to turn the country over to NATO. The truth is that, for many NATO countries, being in Afghanistan was only about political window dressing, rather than actually fighting a war that needed to be won. The level of commitment of resources and troops from NATO countries was never close to what was required for peace to be maintained.

Now, President-elect Barack Obama will inherit this ongoing international problem that is called Afghanistan. The Afghan countryside once again needs to be secured and that will require another large United States financial and military commitment. However, the spiraling count of civilian deaths is shifting the long Afghan struggle towards a war of national liberation with America now in the role as the invader and infidel.

Soon, the combined forces of the United States and NATO will need to either bomb or take ground casualties to expel the Taliban resistance, and once again begin to hold territory. This military escalation will lead to more dead Afghan civilians, with towns racked with the deadly explosions of suicide bombers as well as the destruction and death unleashed by United States air strikes.

Russia and Britain have already been down this long, tragic road into the abyss. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who finally took Russia out of Afghanistan when he realized that he could never claim victory in 1989. At the time, the cost of maintaining a vast military force in the county was crippling Russia's already weak economy. Great Britain would experience a similar sad fate in Afghanistan about one hundred years earlier.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama is about to experience the same problems as Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1989. The United States economy is failing and President-elect Obama is about to inherit a guerrilla war that he can’t afford and that cannot be won in any conventional military fashion. However, he simply cannot abandon the country to the Taliban and al Qaeda. This action would take America in a full circle of failure back to the dubious events of September 11, 2001.

It’s said that those that do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. History shows that conventional military strategies in Afghanistan will not work. The President-elect needs to initiate a bold, new direction for the country. If not, Afghanistan may well be destined to become Barack Obama's Vietnam.

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