General Petraeus and Winning ‘Counter-Insurgency’ Strategy for Afghanistan

General Petraeus has said that the Taliban ‘insurgency’ is a ‘test of wills’ for control of the country. Afghanistan is unlike Iraq economically and politically though, the General’s presumptions may not be effective equally well in each nation.

Counter-insurgency strategy for El Salvador could confront an alien, Marxist political paradigm like it might a virus unnaturally introduced into the body. The Marxist leadership of the rebels could be attacked as a hierarchical and insular organization and reduced. The populist Muslim powers of central Asia are not alien though, and are instead popular without an elite cadre of leadership to decimate or co-opt into the powers of the dark side of the force of Spenserian capitalism.

U.S. military efforts have prowess and personnel equivalent to the 800-pound guerrilla of Afghan myth. We make employ predator drones to kill remote trans-border resistance leaders in Pakistan yet fail to develop a high monthly body count of insurgents. Instead, several suicide bombers perish each month along with the elites abroad, and a squad or two attacks sensationally and symbolically some powerful, well defended U.S. garrison in Afghanistan now and then. In comparison to the Afghan war to expel the Red Army of the former Soviet Union, the Afghanistan resistance to establishment of a U.S. puppet state tolerant of homosexuality and global business domination suffers comparatively few casualties. Instead of a test of wills, the Taliban seems to be waging a test of I.Q. and winning; they could have 250 suicide bombers and leaders killed annually for decades perhaps, and not have even one year’s worth of casualties incurred fighting the Red Army in the 1980s.

There are many compelling economic reasons for The Fundamentalist Muslim world to wage a protracted counter-U.S. insurgency in Afghanistan that will support al Qa’eda goals of economically reducing the United States. They may perceive themselves as a righteous power of the poor combating the decadent rich, international nation (the U.S.A.) that sponsors their local dictator, monarch or despot. Because of U.S. budget tactics in responding to al Qa’eda and Taliban tactics, the strategy is viable n drawing the U.S. to spend asymmetrically abroad. The Taliban know that as soon as they stop the suicide bombing and general resistance, the U.S.A. can begin slow withdrawal and financial recover over decades of course, of its own house affairs.

Following a U.S. economic withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan the usual local conflicts and contentions will return. New local and regional balances of power would emerge; the United States should not put itself in the position of being a remembered anathema to whoever emerges to rule from the chaos as it may. There are many tactics to interact with a popular Muslim vox populi in Central Asia and Iraq that are better cognizant of the lack of hierarchical ecclesiastical tradition in the Muslim world. That imam and populist neo-priesthood of believers phenomenality is well suited for a volunteer emanation of resistance movement fighters periodically against a foreign business-military hierarchy searching for ways to control the masses. In selecting its particular methods of reply to the decade old attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the leadership of the United States has continued to financially endanger the security of the United States as well as the physical security and well being of the people of the United States. The book of proverbs indicates that the borrowers end up being ruled by the lenders. General Petraeus and President Obama would do well to read the book of proverbs regularly.

The United States ought to develop a better, more thoughtful method of reply to challenges set by fundamentalist Muslims to U.S. and European security. A powerful minority with superior military weapons systems has dubious prospects of permanently subjugating billions of poor Asians; we should have learned that lesson in Vietnam. Neither must a Muslim nation necessarily be permanently antipathetic to U.S. national interests if the United States were to develop a better policy of ecological economic technical development at home and for support abroad. Because war for the United States today has become a form of economics through other means, a rectification of policy would require a rational economic foundational paradigm as a political philosophy appropriate for sustainable economic development of Afghanistan regardless of who is actually running the government there.

As it is, the United States has created a non-sustainable military enterprise that is of a phenomenal nature that later can be explained away with apologetics and PR for national political purposes. One hates to consider that sort of rhetoric tat will arise the next two or three decades as other, important challenges are set aside. Some sort of military assurance of non-belligerency and benevolent neutrality is required of Afghanistan because it allowed al Qa’eda to train there as well as in South Florida and Arizona, Minnesota and elsewhere before the 9-11-2001 suicide hijackings. The method to accomplish that requires a few more I.Q. points and a hundred thousand fewer soldiers and marines.