By Scott Wilson
| A WaPo reporter praises Colombia. Will wonders never cease ... |
Can the United States take the lessons of Iraq to the faltering war in Afghanistan?
The question loomed over the Obama administration's review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which concluded with the president's recent decision to dispatch thousands of additional troops, eliminate insurgent sanctuaries and internationalize a conflict that is increasingly viewed as America's problem.
But there is a more apt -- and more successful -- model than Iraq. And you'll find it much closer to home. If you want to roll back a homegrown insurgency inflamed by a pesky neighbor, millions in drug profits and a weak central government, Colombia offers a far better classroom for learning how to beat the Taliban.
I lived and worked in Colombia as a correspondent for The Post from 2000 to 2004. At the time, only the capital, Bogota, was spared the horrors of a war marked by massacres with machetes, machine guns and even stones that made it one of the most gruesome conflicts I've witnessed. Today, assisted by billions of dollars in U.S. military and development aid, the Colombian government has pushed a Marxist insurgency deep into the jungles where it was born four decades ago. Isn't that what Obama wants to accomplish in Afghanistan?
The conflicts in Colombia and Afghanistan share far more similarities with one another than either does with Iraq, which I covered in 2003 and 2004. The Taliban have caves and Colombian guerrillas their triple-canopy jungle and mountain hideouts -- terrain far more useful to insurgencies than Iraq's desert. Afghanistan's opium poppies fund the Taliban, just as coca fuels Colombia's guerrillas. As Pakistan does for the Taliban, Venezuela and Ecuador provide sanctuary to Colombia's insurgents.
Perhaps the most important parallel, though, is the lack of a strong central government. Colombia's government has rarely held sway beyond Bogota's nearly two-mile high plateau, and the frail Karzai administration in Kabul has a similarly short reach. As a result, Colombia has relied on brutal paramilitary forces to support a weak army, alienating much of the population in the process. In Afghanistan, that role is played by U.S. forces, which, although by no means as savage as the Colombian irregulars, have cost Afghanistan's government support among a people famously hostile to foreign invaders.
| Here is where he goes off the rails a fair bit, though he acknowledges the most important point later. That point is this: the Uribe government does indeed have far better popular support, and that is precisely why it has been able to contain and push back FARC, even as it has also contained and disarmed (mostly) the far-right irregulars who also plagued Colombia, and for mostly the same reasons. It's precisely because the Colombian people said, 'enough', that the country has some semblance of law and order. Afghanistan hasn't reached that point. |
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