IJC: Change of Command

Presidents come and go.  The pressures on them must be enormous.  For all of the inherent nobility of democracy, democracy often seems to demand mediocre decisions to keep winning the popularity contests.  The above two images are of Ahmed Shah Massoud—who was assassinated by al Qaeda shortly before the 9/11 attacks—and President Karzai.  Massoud is a hero to many Afghans and was respected by Americans.  He stood up to the Taliban, and the fact that you can see thousands of his pictures around Afghanistan is evidence of widespread Afghan hatred of the Taliban.  Meanwhile, Karzai seems to be losing his mind.  I made this image recently in Kabul, and shortly thereafter Karzai disappeared but hero Massoud is still there as of this writing.

Carlotta Gall is an experienced writer who also is noticing progress:

Carlotta writes:

“The change is palpable. In Marja, the district in Helmand Province where American Marines began the offensive 15 months ago, government officials can now drive freely.”

Carlotta is right.  The Taliban and other enemies are taking a terrible whipping.  Though I frequently call this war nearly ten years old, we just got serious last year or so.  In 2006 when I first started coming here, we were completely unserious.  Iraq was falling apart and Afghanistan was nearly forgotten.

Afghanistan.  The images you see daily could be from biblical times.  I’ve been to many provinces east to west and north to south.  From dusty Nimroz to the relics of Farah, to the orchards of Helmand across the desert of death to Kandahar, out to the moon in Zabul, that dead Taliban who was dumped in Urozgan, to the other moon of Ghor Province (you’ve gotta see that place), and keep going and tick off probably a dozen more.  Just keep right on going to the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif to the Blue Mosque with the white pigeons.  The people have been overwhelmingly friendly in each of these places and many more, and I’m not handing out money or lollipops.  Just showing up.  We are not natural enemies with the Afghans.

There are many sad faces of this war.  We say it’s been going on for nearly ten years, and it has, but we did not get serious about it until 2009-2010.  In that respect, it’s been going on closer to a year and our people are making accelerated progress.  If we pull out too quickly, there will not be sufficient time to hand off to Afghan security forces.  If we pull out too quickly, that will mean we made three major mistakes here: Under President Bush, we underresourced this war.  President Obama came in with more resources.  Still not enough, but enough to eventually succeed in pulling Afghanistan from the stone age to maybe the middle ages in a few decades.  But now President Obama wishes to again underresource the effort.  That means President Bush made one mistake, and Obama will trump that with two.  If we intended to pull the plug so quickly, why did we “plug” to begin with?  If we are going to pull the plug now, we should never have surged at all.   We have no responsibility per se to Afghanistan, but we chose a path.

I’ve been driving around all over the place and am at a downtown Kabul restaurant writing this.  The band U2 is playing over the restaurant speakers and the waiter is singing along, “We got to carry each other, carry each other.”  This guy is making me laugh.  Hearing an Afghan man singing along to U2 is a bit funny.  If the Taliban come back, the music will stop, and we will have wasted hundred of billions of dollars, not to mention the lives and limbs.

As we slowly march away from here we must remember why we came.