----- Original Message ----- From: "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 9:19 PM Subject: Re: war and peace
> At 03:20 PM 2/6/2003 -0600 Dan Minette wrote: > >If that's true, why are they wasting a golden opportunity in Afganistan? > > I take exception to this. > > First, the rest of the world has hardly borne their full share of the load > in rebuilding Afghanistan, You know better than to believe it would. >and the US is stretched thin by the need to > defend South Korea, Western Europe (just see how infuriated they get when > we talk about leaving), Taiwan, and Afghanistan while preparing to attack > Iraq. The cost of really doing nation building is high. Bush needs to tell that to the American people. Pushing through a tax cut that is narrowly focused on the wealthiest Americans sends the wrong message. As the Houston business column pointed out: for a significant fraction of the population, the used car market has a much greater impact on their net worth than the stock market. Let me quote from an article at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/107469_rashid06.shtml <quote> Ahmed Rashid did not take issue with the claim that Saddam Hussein is hiding chemical and biological weapons and is clearly the most dangerous Central Asian dictator in power today. And he only alluded to a fundamental disagreement with the way the United States plans to topple him. His message was a warning: Unless the world learns from the mistakes made after the Taliban was crushed in Afghanistan, the problems in Iraq and instability in the region will be 10 times worse. "There's been no reconstruction in Afghanistan," he said. "Until you start creating a self-sustaining economy, you won't win hearts and minds." Rashid said the United States now knows terrorism has political and economic causes. "This is rooted in a failed state," he said. "The same situation is going to happen in Iraq. You can finish the war in 10 days but are you going to straighten up the mess afterward? "Afghanistan had to be a model that showed we can bomb you, we can kill you, but then we are going to build you into the modern world," he said. "The U.S. has failed at that." He said the United States came to that realization shortly after an assassination attempt on President Karzai -- the only leader Rashid who believes is able to unify and modernize Afghanistan. Rashid is one of a few Mideast experts to whom the Pentagon and State Department officials turn for advice. He got calls from those agencies shortly after the failed Karzai assassination attempt, asking "Is there anyone else?" But he and other experts agreed there is no one. "Finally now, you've got some commitment -- $1 billion for road building -- but a year, you wasted," he said. <end> > Secondly, I don't know what illusions you were under about how easy > rebuilding Afghanistan was going to be, but Kabul only fell a year ago, and > remnants of the Taliban and warlords remain in the mountains. I'll agree that the Taliban are still in the mountains, but lets get real. The warlords rule all but Kabul. The US deals with them, for goodness sakes. What we've done is move back one space in Afganistan reinstituting the way things were before the Taliban took over. Yes, the Taliban was a step down, definately. But, we should be satisfied with Afganistan being a patchwork of warlord run enclaves? How much have we spent rebuilding Afganistan in the last year? Was it even $3 billion? > Moreover, > Afghanistan did need to be rebuilt - there was never anything to *re*build. > Afghanistan needs to be built. A few weeks ago, I posted a list of > achievements in building Afghanistan that have already been accomplished in > only a year - from an article that was primarily devoted to criticizing > some of the short comings of our post-Afghanistan policy. The Taliban are no longer in power. Al Quida was routed. That's all I saw. > Nevertheless, I don't think that any fair assessor of this successes could call our > post-war record in Afghanistan a "blown opportunity." We had military sucess, no doubt. That's about it. > Perhaps you think that the War on Terror should have stopped for 20 years > while we figured out how to build a free and prosperous Afghanistan from > scratch. No. But, do you really think going back to the previous chaos is something to be proud of? > I, however, think that it is perfectly reasonable to disagree > with that assessment. September 11th created a remarkable political > climate in the United States for pre-emptively securing the safety of the > US from external threats. This window of opportunity could not be missed. The safety will not be secured by replacing a very bad situation with a merely bad one. Would you argue that a country run by warlords is in good shape, for example? The problem is that bad can deteriorate to very bad rather quickly. > > Helping to build/rebuild mosques, > >schools, roads, sanitary water facilities, sewage plants, etc. seems very > >reasonable. And, of course, working on eliminating land mines, but I'm > >guessing that's being done without much fanfare. > > > >If the Administration is actually doing all that, and not publicizing it, > >I'd be shocked, because it would mean that they lost their PR touch. > > Alternatively, given the large difference between the highest economic > development achieved by Aghanistan and that achieved by Iraq, they don't to > lead *anyone* to believe that post-war Iraq will be "just like" post-war > Afghanistan. No, but given the hate between the factions in Iraq, we have a chance of a broader conflict starting, which we didn't have before. What if the Kurds revolt? Do we start killing Kurds? It has the potential to be very messy. Further, the oil wealth means that Iraq will be covered with carpetbaggers. How sure are we about whom to trust. > Additionally, much of the work is probably being performed not by soldiers, > but by various charitable NGO's (with a good deal of official US support) - > and thus this stuff is harder to take credit for. If they could spend 500 million between them, I'd be shocked. Face it, we are acting as though all that matters is that our enemies are destroyed. We won the war and forgot about winning the peace. Which is exactly what our enemies have been accusing us of doing. We need to do better. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
