David Karki

President Obama announced a major pull-out of troops from Afghanistan this week, to be implemented in the months to come. This will mean the end, more or less, of combat operations that have been ongoing for a decade, since the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Sadly, it doesn’t appear that it’s better than – or even all that different from – when we first arrived.

Yes, the Taliban is gone and a lot of terrorists got to meet their 72 doe-eyed virgins, but I don’t think anyone can say for certain that that will hold for the long-term. Once we’re gone, who knows how the vacuum will get filled? History does not bode well in this regard.

The British could neither conquer nor civilize Afghanistan from India in the 1800s, nor could the Soviet Union do so in the 1980s. Nor could the United States now. All three eventually left or are leaving after wasting large amounts of money, materiel, and lives there with no real measurable accomplishment to show for it. The only thing that grows there seems to be poppies for heroin and opium, otherwise the high desert and mountains often look more like the moon than Earth. There might be some high mineral content, but you can’t perform scientific tests in ground riddled with improvised explosive devices.

And who is going to invest or set up shop in a war zone? Until there is law and order rising out of anarchy, Afghanistan will never see development. That won’t and indeed can’t happen until there is basic security. But so far security is something that no one – not the UK, the USSR, or the USA – has even been able to bring there, and one can only conclude at this point that no one ever will. The Afghans can apparently out rope-a-dope anyone who comes for them. That, among other reasons, is why Osama Bin Laden chose it as the base of his planning and training in the first place.

Given all that, if it also be true that Afghanistan will be reclaimed by the Taliban and once more become a haven for radical Muslim terrorists that threaten America if not modern civilization itself, on top of its otherwise irredeemable history and status, then there is only one logical alternative left for dealing with it so as to ensure neutralization of that threat.

And that would be to drop a nuke or two on it as we depart so as to rid the world of that hopeless wasteland once and for all.

I don’t relish saying that and I certainly don’t want to have to do that, but seeing as Afghanistan doesn’t appear to have produced anything of value since Persian King Cyrus some 2,500 years ago, only exports drugs and terrorists today, and has proven to be otherwise unconquerable and uncontrollable by any conventional means wielded by multiple world powers, what other choice is there? When the rabid dog is foaming at the mouth, you put it down. And since the tranquilizer gun has been repeatedly tried to no effect (except to harm the one firing it), the next step is the 12-gauge.

Perhaps if we could play some real, severely politically incorrect defense with regard to border security, immigration policy, and so forth then considering such an option would not be necessary. We could just let Afghanistan rot in its own filth and forget about it. But since that’s not the case, and we either can’t or won’t do what’s really needed to definitively secure the nation against another 9/11 attack, then offense is the only logical solution for ending the threat. If Afghanistan is going to be a threat to us so long as it exists as presently constituted, then its existence must end.

Which still wouldn’t be the end of the threat, of course, and that is exactly the point that the third world power being made to retreat from Afghanistan with its tail between its legs illustrates. The war that finally went hot for us on 9/11/2001 was never against the nation of Afghanistan as defined by lines on a map. Nor was it against the Taliban, even though they materially aided and comforted the perpetrators and deserved to be annihilated for that. And even going as far as wiping it off that map wouldn’t really end it that war.

This war was, still is, and always has been against radical Islam. Not “terror,” which is a tactic, and not one backwater nation represented by rather randomly drawn borders. It is small wonder that we can’t seem to win a war when we can’t honestly name or identify or define the enemy being fought therein. Even taking out Afghanistan would still leave hundreds of millions of replacements, both actual and potential. In short, we are vastly outnumbered. And the enemy has both the ability and the will to accept far more casualties than we are – to either sustain or inflict. That, in turn, renders our massive technological advantage useless – just as it did the USSR and UK before us.

The bleak, harsh truth is that the only way anyone will ever win in Afghanistan is to first defeat radical Islam.  That is what generates the numbers willing to kill and die long enough to outlast any foe.  But, frankly, I have a hard time seeing that ever happening short of the events of the book of Revelation coming to pass.

By the same token, we must have total confidence in the righteousness of our cause. The Greatest Generation didn’t respond to Pearl Harbor by wondering what we did to make Japan mad, and they didn’t draw moral equivalences between our way of life and theirs. They simply committed to defeating the enemy – period. And they didn’t apologize for it.

If we really wish to ensure that all those American soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan to have not done so in vain, we should do well to (re)learn the lesson that there is no substitute for victory. It’s only too bad that we didn’t figure it out before arriving rather than upon departing, if in fact we’ve learned it at all.

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