http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/world/asia/22strategy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
This article puts the choices that the president has in great perspective on his decisions on Afghanistan.
Afghanistan almost seems like a loose, loose situation. We either continue to fight the insurgency or we pull out and let the government fend for itself. I know that lots of people will say that we need to keep trying to help the country in its current situation, but we also need to look at the problem from a different view.
Before we make any true decisions on what we believe we first must understand why the Taliban are opposing us.
We also must understand that the Taliban is not Afghanistan. the Taliban is a social group just like any other collection of people with a common mind or belief. Just like the KKK, Republicans, Democrats and the Nazi's. The major difference between the Taliban and some other groups is that there religion justifies what most people would call radical or insane behavior, but that is not totally true either, it all depends on your interpretation. For example, Christianity did not stay one unified group but through different interpretations developed into many branches that use almost the same book as the foundation of their belief but very different ideas about what the books mean.
One of the issues that I see with the situation in Afghanistan is the number of people from American foreign aid organizations that can speak in Pashto or Persian. A census done by Hyon B. Shin with Rosalind Bruno in 2000 came up with these numbers.
Nearly 47 million people -- about 1-in-5 U.S. residents -- age 5 and older, reported regularly speaking a foreign language at home in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. The figures represented an increase of 15 million people since the 1990 census.
This shows that the number of Americans that speak Pashto or Persian(Dari) has to be incredibly low. This language barrier has to cause U.S. military a lots of problems communicating, fixing problems and connecting with the people. If we can't find a solution to these problems then there will be no end to this war, yes we might kill all the Taliban but we will not win the minds of the people.
This is a very interesting post. I particularly like what could be a tangential analysis that would seem to suggest that the author has as an underlying thesis that the Americans in Afganistan may not understand the country that they are involved with. Although this is possibly a valid point, it may not be proven by looking at the entire population of Americans because the entire population is not the actors in the war nor the thinkers behind the war.
ReplyDeleteAs a societal statement, the insular and some might say arrogant approach to language education in America can have tangible effects when persons try to solve problems together. The Europeans countries involved in Afganistan as part of the NATO coalition have soldiers who likely had more broad language training in their youth. However, it is unlikely that a core part of the curriculum in an Italian school for example included Pashto or Dari. So, while the idea of low numbers of speakers is interesting, it seems that in this discussion it might be a bit of a red herring.
Also, important is to recognize that the American government has loads of people translating and trying to act as communication personell with local people. This does bring us to the realization (maybe with the help of the red herring) however ,that Americans in Afganistan are as they say" out of their element" Some might argue that because of that, America should not have gone to Afganistan in the first place.
What is most critical to discuss now however is what can be done at the current time. The author correctly and brilliantly nails the point that the Taliban is not Afganistan. This is the core core point that from a foreign policy point of view must be understood. I am interested what the author thinks of the idea of Nato partnering with some elements of the TAliban to facilitate an American/ NATO exit from Afganistan.