General Stanley McChrystal's campaign to boot the Taliban out of southern Afghanistan is not going well. Marred by civilian casualties and stubborn Taliban resistance, his assault on the small town of Marjah has been slowed to a snail's pace. Kandahar, the Taliban's “capital”, remains far out of his reach. Operation Moshtarak, which mobilized 15,000 allied and Afghan troops, was initially expected to last a few weeks. It was thought that the few hundred Taliban fighters defending Marjah would melt away into the mountains. Instead they are fighting back and have planted thousands of mines to check the American advance. The latest estimate is that the campaign might take 12-18 months to reach its goal – if indeed it is ever reached. The stakes are high. If McChrystal's campaign fails – or simply gets bogged down in endless bloody skirmishes – then the whole strategy, which he persuaded President Barack Obama to adopt, will collapse. McChrystal asked Obama for 40,000 men, in addition to the more than 65,000 US troops already in the country. He got 30,000, as well as a few thousand more to add to the roughly 40,000 troops from 43 countries, mostly from America's reluctant NATO allies. In all, he asked for – and will get – a total of close to 150,000 troops by the summer. His war plan is twofold: first, to seize the military initiative from the Taliban, driving them out of key localities in the south; then to win over the population in these “liberated” regions by providing protection, jobs, and good government. Once these goals are achieved, it is argued, rank-and-file Taliban will renounce violence, abandon their leaders, accept the Constitution, and agree to be “integrated” peacefully into President Hamid Karzai's Afghan state. In the new situation thus created, Taliban leaders will have no option but to enter into negotiations – in effect to sue for peace. The centre piece of this ambitious reconciliation effort is to be Karzai's “peace jirga,” a grand tribal council at which the whole of the Afghan nation – Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, insurgents, warlords, tribal chieftains, government ministers – will come together to forge a new society. This, alas, is a fairy tale. There was always a fundamental political contradiction between making war on the Taliban and seeking to negotiate with them. Instead of launching the campaign in Helmand, had the US called an immediate loya jirga to proclaim a ceasefire – and invited the Taliban leadership to join in the initiative – violence might have been stemmed and a new era ushered in. But to bomb the Taliban into submission and then to seek to negotiate with them was always something of a pipedream. A second flagrant contradiction was to promise the Afghan population protection while exposing them to airstrikes and tank fire, killing dozens and displacing thousands. Unable to flee, many terrified families are holed up in their villages without food or medicines, nursing their wounded or struggling to care for their young and for their old and inform family members. It is hardly surprising that McChrystal's campaign has so far made more enemies than friends. A third blunder – which has dogged America's war in Afghanistan since its beginnings in 2001– has been to underestimate the profound xenophobia of the Pashtun tribes, who detest “infidel” foreigners and are prepared to die in defense of their religion and their tribal traditions. This was a lesson that Britain learned to its cost in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th. US casualties in Afghanistan in the past eight years have just passed the 1,000 mark. But America's imperial hubris – especially that of the neoconservative “war lobby” in Washington – has still not been wholly blunted. A country that is able to spend an astonishing $700 billion on its armed services this fiscal year – including $160 billion earmarked for Iraq and Afghanistan – cannot easily admit defeat. “We will succeed!” says General McChrystal defiantly. It is striking that the only foreigners who seem to be welcomed in Afghanistan are the Turks. They are building roads, schools and clinics, rather than killing Afghans. Among America's allies, only the Turks seem to understand that very many Afghans, as well as many Muslims in other parts of the world, see America's long war in Afghanistan as a neo-colonial Western aggression against a Muslim country, which they profoundly resent. The idea – defended by Obama and by Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown – that defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan will protect Western society from terrorism is fundamentally flawed. The contrary is true. The more Muslims are killed by Western forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, not to mention Somalia and Yemen, the more home-grown militants in the West – whether in New York or in British cities – will want to hit back. It is no accident that an Afghan, raised in the US, was charged this week with wanting to blow up the New York subway system. The way to defeat terrorism is to stop killing Muslims and to impose on Israel a just settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the single most important source of hostility to the West. Meanwhile, America's European allies are showing great restiveness with the war. European public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of withdrawal. The Dutch government, which collapsed last weekend, was the first European government to fall because of the Afghan war. The Labour Party quit the government of Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, which means that most of the 2,000 Dutch soldiers will be home before the end of the year. Having already lost 21 soldiers in Afghanistan, the Dutch think it is time other nations – and particularly the Germans – assume the burden. The Canadians and the Italians could follow the Dutch in pulling out. British forces would already have been withdrawn were it not for London's enduring concern to protect its ‘special relationship' with Washington. For its part, the British public sees no British interest in an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan. Eight years after 9/11, the war in Afghanistan makes no sense at all. Every Afghan killed, every child mutilated, every village destroyed only stokes the fires of revenge. There is no doubt that General McCrystal has good intentions. But his gamble rests on mistaken assumptions. On balance, it might be best if he failed.
