Looks like we’re about to find out how well option (b) works. Although if the ex-King can go in there and whup Taliban and al-Qaeda butt, I happily concede that option (d) wouldn’t be bad either. 
Not yet. Per al-Jazeera and other reports in Arabic that I’m hearing, the withdrawal appears to have been organized. Taleban appear to be withdrawing to their home territory, Pashtun territory.
Now the hard part starts. Not descending into a exitless civil war between the Pashtun and other southerners and the north. That means developing Pashtu opposition.
Actually, I should have been more specific–we’re about to find out what option (b) is like for the majority of Afghanistan. Kandahar is obviously going to be a rather more difficult problem.
Folks, this world in which we live is a violent one.
The beatings and executions described earlier in this thread are certainly repugnant. But you’ll find such things in virtually every war that has ever been fought. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that one of my ancestors behaved in such a way during the War Between the States–but if I did learn such a thing, I would not be much inclined to apologize for them.
In politics and war, you accept the allies you have to have, and many of them won’t be the kind of people you’d take home to meet Mom and Dad. Stalin was no more humanitarian than Hitler, but we accepted him as an ally in the Second World War. No one today faults the Finns for accepting aid from Nazi Germany when the Soviets invaded Finland.
That doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye toward those whom we have accepted as allies. It does mean we can’t afford to demand standards of behavior from them that we have often fallen far short of achieving ourselves. Sometimes wars have to be fought, and we can’t go into a war insisting that the war ought to be abandoned if we or one of our allies commit some act that violates the Geneva convention.
And there is, I think, a kind of holier-than-thou attitude on the part of some people who claim to be worried about the moral stature of the Northern Alliance. When a mugger popped me in the back of the head with a club and tried to take my wallet, I took his club away and beat the hell out of him with it. I must have kept beating that son of a bitch for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, long after he was any real threat to me. He was unconscious and bleeding when I left him. And, no, I didn’t call an ambulance. *Up until that day, I would never have thought that I was capable of that degree of violence–and if you think you’re not, you’re kidding yourself. *In the right circumstances, virtually anyone might act that way. There is murder in every soul.
No, I don’t approve of what those Northern Alliance soldiers did, but then on a purely intellectual level I don’t approve of what I did to that would-be mugger–so, you see, I think I may have some understanding of why those NA soldiers did what they did. There may be eminently practical reasons for refusing to ally ourselves with the NA or for keeping them at arm’s length if we do, but we should not refuse to ally ourselves with the NA solely on the grounds that they much too brutish for pure-minded, angelic beings such as ourselves.
Whether the NA is better isn’t really relevant. We aren’t attacking the Taliban because we don’t like them; we’re attacking them because they refused our ultimatum.
Kabul just fell to the NA.
Looks like we’re about to get a taste of whether they’re good guys or not.
whoops, I see others have beaten me to that observation.
The big problem is just kicking out the Taliban will not eliminate the threat of terrorism. Stability must be generated in the region.
The NA alone running most of the country will not create this. The people celibrating in Kabul did the same years ago when the Taliban forced the NA out.
The truth is we will have to go in there and eventually set up a proper democracy and constitution for Afghanistan as the allies did to both Germany and Japan.
If we allow only one of these groups to take sole power we just have ten more years of civil war and a breeding ground for more terrorism sheltered by one or more of the groups in this conflict.
We may have to get bloody if we want a lasting peace and stability in that country.
Collounsbury, according to the NY Times, the administration is thinking (somewhat) along the lines that I outlined earlier. See Two Wars, Many Fears
One aditional observation is that as the NA make further gains, the US has less and less leverage over them. I don’t think the US is about to go to war with the NA.
That in itself is a dangerous proposal. Particularly the we part. The “Nation building” part is going to hinge almost entirely on perception. Any Government set up would be better that the Taliban, in most senses. But any government set up would have lots of people pissed off about it just based on the tribal nature and political history of it. The most important thing is that whatever government gets set up doesn’t look like a U.S. puppet government. That would create so many more problems with the people screaming “American Imperialism” and creating resentment that we would be worse off than where we started. Once the war is over, Our best approach will be to get the hell out of the way and interfere as little as possible, while still suporting what is right. Throw in the extra difficulty that while not interfering we also have to be sure we don’t look like we are abandoning our responsibility in Afghanistan as we were percieved doing before.
Not to trivialize things, but the Star Trek prime directive(and the number of times Kirk and Picard wrestled with the morality of breaking it) is a good analogy of how hard a deal it will be to get them to autonomously choose to do exactly what we want them to do without direct interference.
Wolfman,
Forgive me for not being very clear but the we I refer to is not just the United States (as I’m not an American) but the coalition and key members of the Tribes in Afghanistan.
What I believe is that they must be guided towards a democracy and ensure the rights and freedoms of all of their citizens via a constitution. To allow them to hammer it out on their own without trying to mediate and influence their direction would only lead to another civil war as the several attempts since the Soviet occupation have lead to naught.
I admit there is a risk involved, but if we want a lasting peace then (Using the Captain Kirk analogy) “Risk [must be] our business”