The Quagmire in Afghanistan

The very public spat in the United States between General Pervez Musharraf and Hamid Karzai and exemplifies how myopic and ill-conceived US foreign policy in Afghanistan is. General Musharraf is a military dictator trying desperately to cling to power, and Hamid Karzai is little more than the US governor of Kabul, who rather pretentiously refers to himself president of Afghanistan: it was not a position he was elected to in a dmemocractic election and it is not a position he occupies.

In truth, the North of Afghanistan remains under Northern alliance control, and in the South there is a Pakhtoon uprising. It is the Pakhtoon tribesmen, which are disingenuously referred to as the Taliban. NATO is not fighting the Taliban nor are they fighting terrorists, they are fighting the indigenous population.

Little wonder then, that so many NATO countries are reticent to commit troops to the current quagmire in Afghanistan. This is not a war that NATO is going to win.