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| Fifth Column |
| Give up, Americans! |
| 2004-12-15 |
| ...Weren't we told again and again that hopes for freedom in that war-ravaged country ranged from little to none? To begin with, the war in Afghanistan wasn't going to be won without a massive infusion of American ground troops. In the U.S. Senate, John McCain said the combination of American air power and a few Special Forces, plus Northern Alliance foot soldiers, wouldn't be enough. It was time to dispatch whole divisions to Afghanistan. The estimable Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post seconded the motion, and so did the boys at The Weekly Standard. Boots on the ground! That was the only way to win this war. If it could be won at all. "This is a war in trouble," warned Daniel Schorr - and just about everybody else one heard on NPR. Ditto, said Veteran Reporter R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times, who was comparing Afghanistan to, of course, Vietnam. Quagmire! Nothing that was actually happening on the ground could affect the pundits' predetermined line. Maureen Dowd, the Times' well-known gossip columnist and military analyst, summed up the whole geopolitical crux of the matter in her own scholarly way: Now, like the British and Russians before him, (George W. Bush) is facing the most brutish, corrupt, wily and patient warriors in the world... In short, there was only one viable option: Give up, Americans! By mid-November of 2001, just as the most brutish, corrupt, wily and patient warriors in the world were about to fall apart, Jacob Heilbrun of the Los Angeles Times scanned the horizon and saw no hope: "There does not appear to be a political force capable of replacing the Taliban," he warned the week before Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the advancing Northern Alliance. "The United States is not headed into a quagmire," he concluded, "it is already in one." Others were just as pessimistic. "Of all the proxies the United States has enlisted over the past half-century, the Northern Alliance may be least prepared to attain America's battlefield objectives." - The New Republic, Nov. 19, 2001. By the time my copy of that issue arrived in the mail, Kabul had already fallen to the woefully unprepared Northern Alliance... |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #1 ...and a few thousand Uzbek soldiers. |
| Posted by: gromky 2004-12-15 10:12:44 PM |