American national security is not to the slightest degree threatened by the Taliban. Okay, so back in 2001 there was a gang of Arabs in Afghanistan which had since 1990, at least, expressed some hostility towards the US, but that crew, after all, had been set up by the CIA in the first place (you get the best fanatics money can buy, train them in demolition, rocket technology, and battle tactics, and you get what you paid for, often as "blowback"), and anyway, by 2002 it had been largely shattered and driven out of Afghanistan, and into Pakistan and parts unknown.
The current Afghanistan War, which President Obama claims is so "necessary" to American security, is not against Al Qaeda though; it is against the Taliban, and it simply cannot be won, anymore than the US war against the Vietnamese could be won.
Today, as in the late 1960s, the Pentagon brass is telling the president that it needs more troops. There is a military imperative not to lose a war. No general or admiral wants to be the guy in charge when the jig is declared up, and the troops have to be brought home as losers. Talk about a career wrecker! And so they are asking for more and more troops and weapons, in hopes of hanging on until they get get cashiered out.
Obama, like Johnson before him, will buy into this criminal policy, because he too doesn't want to "lose a war before he leaves office. That should be pretty scary for all of us, since I'm sure Obama is hoping that he will be in office not just through 2012, which would make such a justification for escalation bad enough, but through 2016. That's a long time to keep escalating a hopeless and pointless conflict, just to avoid having to say it was a mistake in the first place.
But lest you say that wuch a nightmare cannot happen, recall that the first US "advisers" (actually special forces) went to Vietnam in 1959, the big escalation began in 1964, and the US didn't leave until 1974. That's 15 years of war and ten years of major warfare.
Because the Bush/Cheney administration was always more interested in invading Iraq than in invading Afghanistan, and pulled out many troops from the latter country in late 2002 to ship them to Iraq, the Afghan War has escalated more slowly than the Vietnam War did. But I'd say that today we are about where we were in Vietnam at the start of 1965. That is, the big lie, and the big escalation in the fighting, are both just getting going.
If the American people don't rise up and demand an end to this thing right now, we could be in for another 8-10 years of brutal and bloody warfare, and in the end, the United States is, once again, going to lose.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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