Lord Ashdown says Afghanistan is Lost

As a former member of Britain’s Special Boat Services (their version of America’s Navy SEALs), ex-Liberal Democrat Leader Paddy Ashdown is the only British leader of his generation to have been trained to kill (Mrs. Thatcher learned on the job). As former international envoy to Bosnia Hercegovina from 2002 to 2005, Lord Ashdown also knows more than a little about intractable conflicts. So, when he stated yesterday, “We have lost, I think, and success is now unlikely,” and “I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq,” some of the more alert members of the press took notice.

His remarks came just as a NATO meeting opened in the Netherlands to discuss what Dutch Defense Minister Eimert van Middelkoop called “fair risk-and burden-sharing.” NATO has 41,000 troops in Afghanistan, hardly enough to secure more than a couple of cities. American Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained, “I am not satisfied that an alliance whose members have over 2 million soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen cannot find the modest additional resources.” Well, perhaps if 150,000 or so Americans weren’t in Iraq-Nam supporting a pro-Iranian government. . . .

The problem in Afghanistan is largely a problem of geography. It is a mountainous area that is conducive to local warlordism. That isn’t to say that the Afghan people aren’t capable of developing a free, open society that is cohesive and able to defend its national integrity, but there’s scant historical evidence to support that idea. By the same token, foreigners do not do any better in those mountains. The Soviets had somewhere between 80,000 and 104,000 there at any one time during their occupation of the country, and estimates are that they controlled about 20% of Afghanistan’s territory on a good day. NATO needs more troops in Afghanistan, or if Lord Ashdown is right, needed more – but it’s too late now.

Yet as British Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup said to Sky News, “There is a common misperception that the issues in Afghanistan, and indeed elsewhere around the world, can be dealt with by military means. That's a false perception. The military is a key, an essential element in dealing with those problems, but by and large these problems can only be resolved politically.” He is correct, unless one is prepared to make a desert and call it peace, something that plays badly at election time.

Lord Ashdown spoke also of a domino theory of sorts that one is hesitant to accept, largely because domino theories don’t seem to work in real life. Still, he maintained, “I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shi’ite-Sunni regional war on a grand scale. Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this [failure] to match this magnitude.” One isn’t sure that Pakistan will fall, but it is teetering a bit. And the Shi’ite-Sunni war is already going on in Iraq-Nam. It is of little use to note that the Trojans should have listened to Cassandra.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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