Summary
I have no doubt that most of the mujahedeen I shared tea with in 2001 are now fighting against U.S. troops. The heart of Gen. Stanley McChrystals battle plan for Afghanistan is to get these men to switch sides again. That strategy eventually succeeded in Iraq, after years of strategic blunders, but will be harder in Afghanistan. In Iraq, American officers could negotiate with the nationalist insurgents because they were led by men from the middle and upper classes, many of them with Western educations and secular views. The flat terrain also favored American tactics, making the insurgents want to talk.
The litany of seemingly insurmountable challenges has led many to call for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. After McChrystal's report leaked in September, Vice President Joe Biden floated a containment strategy in which the Pentagon would pull out and build a virtual wall around Afghanistan. We've tried that before, and we're still doing it with another country I've reported from: Somalia. U.S. troops provide equipment and training to every country that borders Somalia, and a naval task force sits off the coast. The Pentagon's goal is to simply contain the radicals where they can do no harm.Politicians and generals may talk about fighting terrorism, but frontline troops talk about the new school or the better hospital they've helped build. I've been on patrol with hundreds of young soldiers, and the one thing I've heard over and over again is that they can't believe how horrible the living conditions are in Afghanistan. And once they've been inside an Afghan family compound, they would often say: "I get it, I get why these guys become terrorists." They learn firsthand that defeating terrorism is not about killing people, but about defeating injustice.See the full content of this document
Extract
An Afghan Thanksgiving
On Thanksgiving Day 2001, my job was to take the turkeys out of the fire. I'd been out reporting most of the day, so when I returned to Jalalabad my contribution to dinner was to monitor four scrawny Afghan turkeys that were baking in Dutch ovens buried in hot coals behind the Spinghar Hotel. Once I was sure they were fully cooked, I sliced them up for a dining room full of war correspondents who were celebrating with an ...
See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
