Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Afghanistan.

Another sad report of bright and valuable young lives lost. Oh their poor families! I do so wish, as the whole country does, that this could end.

From the very beginning I feared that the response to 9/11 was wrong and that the West, led by the ghastly Bush administration, was walking into an Al Qaeda trap. I am now sure this is the case. Not since the bumblings of the Crimea have we been engaged in such ineffectual wars. At least we kept out of Vietnam. Why have we forgotten the lessons of that epic U.S disaster?

Vietnam fell to the Communist North because it offered better, less corrupt, government which focused on the everyday needs of the population. It was willing to go on until the weakness of the corrupt institutions of the south sapped the will of its army and the patience of its people.

America tried overwhelming military force and arial bombings on WWII levels to no avail. It then, knowing its own public opinion was going cold on the project, redefined its strategy and trained and equipped the South Vietnamese army to take over after US forces withdrew. This it did and proclaimed victory for its intervention. The North launched its final offensive. The southern army capitulated and the government fled. The Northern victory was total. Total US casualties for this failed war were over 210,000 of whom nearly 60,000 died.

The defeat was, according to the US, supposed to trigger a communist overrun of all South East Asia. It did not happen. Instead the region became the cradle of the new emerging economies which now hold most of the cash the West has frittered on its borrowing binge, and without whose willingness to purchase US  and our own Government debt, we are all bust. 

The whole ‘protecting our homeland’ concept of these wars both in Iraq and Afghanistan, not only makes utterly flawed strategic assumptions and wrong claims to beef up public support, but forgets also every lesson of Vietnam. The truth is that the current frontier where terrorist threats to our citizens germinate is the cauldron of injustice in Palestine where Israel and her subjugated neighbours, the Palestinians, fight with every fair means and foul and have done for the last sixty years. Afghanistan and Iraq are messes entirely of our own making which have no other function than to make matters worse.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.