RSS Feed for This PostCurrent Article

Fred Thompson: Who Lost Afghanistan?

By John Batchelor on November 21, 2009 at 10:30 AM in Current Affairs

We’re sorry that so many comments were lost yesterday, but that always happens during server upgrades. We hope you’ll re-post many of your sage observations.

Karzai Rots.
Fred Thompson addressed his radio audience (above) with a concise and entirely accurate measure of the Obama administration’s incompetence with regard Afghanistan.

POTUS has stalled and manipulated the McChrystal request for additional resources, and this peculiar commander-in-chief conduct has exasperated the public and puzzled the politicians.

Why did POTUS call Afghanistant a “necessary war” as recently as August and as early as March of this year? Why has he allowed the soon to be eight strategic reviews to linger in the headlines? Why the clumsiness and tardiness?

There is an explanation. What Fred Thompson says is correct. We have lost Afghanistan. Lost it to whom? Not the Taliban. Not to Karzai, whose sour second inauguration this news cycle was attended in a surprise by HRC as if the Secretary of State was calling on the rotting regime of an enemy. Not to Pakistan.

We have lost it to the Wahhabists. It is the House of al-Saud who bought Afghanistan twenty years ago, and it is the House of al-Saud that has now renewed its lease on the Pashtuns. The north and west of Afghanistan is in the hands of the Tajiks, and they are indifferent to the Wahhabists and the Saudis. Only the Pashtuns of AfPakia and the Northwest Provinces are impressed by the Wahhabist cash and temperament.

Saudi Arabia has repurchased its lease on the Pashtuns. The status quo ante is to keep the Taliban attacking the Kabul government, aiming to reconvert the provinces to Sharia law. Meanwhile the Taliban from the Northwest Provinces will keep on agitating for their independence from the Pakistan army.

None of this has anything to do with stability in Kabul or good government in Islamabad. It is not about democracy and transparency. We have lost Afghanistan to the savages who never really lost it to us.

Did POTUS lose Afghanistan? Sure, that is, it is his watch, and he talked of a new and smart way during the campaign, and he spoke of Afghanistan as critical to his foreign policy. POTUS believed the false-tongued and deeply insane King Abdullah when he visited with him last June; he believed that the Saudis could write a check and the Taliban would obey a three-dimensional chess game that only Mr. Spock could solve; he believed that once the Taliban warlords took money, they would behave as stake-holders in Cook County real estate.

All rookie mistakes, all avoidable, all ruination now. The worst damage is political here in the West. The Pashtuns knew it would end with the Pashtuns back in control of their mountains. The question now is can POTUS retain control of his administration and the Congress as the price of losing the war comes home.

Afgh-Ghazni-snow.jpg