In PJ Media this morning I discuss why we should get out of Afghanistan, and should have done so long ago:
American and Afghan officials in Afghanistan’s Farah province were holding an inauguration ceremony last Friday for new recruits to a village police force. As part of the ceremony, the new policemen were given weapons that they would use for training. As soon as one of the recruits, Mohammad Ismail, received his, he turned it on the American soldiers who were present, murdering two. This was the seventh such attack in two weeks — and each one is emblematic of just how foolish and wrongheaded our national adventure in Afghanistan has become.Farah’s provincial police chief, Agha Noor Kemtoz, explained: “As soon as they gave the weapon to Ismail to begin training, suddenly he took the gun and opened fire toward the U.S. soldiers.” Ismail had just joined the Afghan Local Police force the Sunday before his attack. Nonetheless, according to the Associated Press, “the NATO-led coalition has said such attacks are anomalies stemming from personal disputes.”
They have gone even farther in other attempts at face-saving, claiming that the attackers are not part of the Afghan jihad against NATO forces. According to ABC News, “officials have said most of the attacks are motivated not by support for the Taliban, but for ‘private reasons’ including grievances against local Afghan commanders, ethnic feuds, and depression. Senior U.S. officials have insisted the attacks don’t indicate a high level of Taliban infiltration into the army.”
On the other hand, says the AP, “the supreme leader of the Taliban boasted on Thursday night that the insurgents are infiltrating the quickly expanding Afghan forces.”
Which explanation is more plausible: the Taliban’s or NATO’s? Is it really likely that over the five long days that Mohammad Ismail was involved with the Afghan Local Police he stored up such serious private grievances against Americans that, once he got a weapon, he had to start shooting? Or is it more likely that he was a member of the Taliban from the start, and joined the police in order to get close enough to Americans to kill as many as possible?
These murders keep happening because there is no reliable way to distinguish an Afghan Muslim who supports American troops from one who wants to murder them, and political correctness prevents authorities from making any attempt to do so anyway, because it would suggest that Islam is not a Religion of Peace. And so ever more U.S. troops are sacrificed to this madness.
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Robert's comments are well-taken. I know a number of US servicemen that have recently been(and continue to be) deployed to the sewer that is Afghanistan. None express any confidence or trust whatsoever in the Afghans. The 800-pound gorilla in the room can never be mentioned officially; however, scratch a service member and you will find an increasing understanding of the true nature of the problem.
The fundamental stupidity of trying to establish a representative democracy in a country ruled by a peverted ideology whose constitution is based on the Qur'an almost defies belief.
By the way, how did that Iraq thing work out? 11 billion in support to evade sanctions from Iraq to Iran as soon as our troops left. Seems like now is the time to leave the savages to prey on one another.