Afghanistan turns into hot mess

To the editor:

Once again, one of America’s last credible newspapers — The Christian Science Monitor — sums up the coming Afghanistan disaster in a story talking about why a Taliban victory may not be everything Pakistan wished for.

Our “friends,” the Pakistanis, should have been harshly dealt with decades ago, and should not be forgiven for their betrayal of our country and its overt alliance with the Taliban and China.

It should also be remembered that, earlier in the war, the United States had routed the Taliban using Team Alpha — a combination of CIA intelligence and Special Ops teams, whose sole mission was to hunt down and destroy al-Qaida and their Taliban supporters.

They were not trying to impose American morality or democratic values on the Afghans. They successfully managed to control tribal rivalries, and supply intelligence, weapons and training to those allied with us in the fight for their own country.

Unfortunately, by December 2001, the Washington-led “mission creep” of nation building started to rear its ugly head.

Hamid Karzai’s attempts to include the now-defeated Taliban into peace negotiations were rebuffed by Washington. Instead of dealing with tribal leaderships and local warlords, the State Department airheads decided on creating a centralized — federal — Afghanistan democracy.

This along with various concerns, rules and regulations concerning punishing false surrendering forces, mistreatment and release of dangerous prisoners, universal education, women’s rights, and a vain effort to control opium production.

Nine years later, in 2010, the United States had gone from a few thousand operatives to more than 100,000 troops. And, not surprisingly, now appeared to the local population as occupiers instead of liberators.

A sickening repetition of our involvement in the Vietnam War, with as it appears now, the same embarrassing defeat we experienced in Southeast Asia.

The total now-abandonment of Bagram Air Field-BAF — also known as Bagram Air Base, and the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan — and giving up our advantage of air power over that region will, in my opinion, go down as one of the biggest tactical mistakes in recent military history.

And so, after America’s longest war, we will have created a humanitarian disaster and blessed the world with another chaotic, murderous, fractured country that will be yet another dangerous and destabilizing threat to world peace.

The horror.

Lou DeHolczer

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