Blood in the water

Although I haven’t heard much of it in awhile, (probably `cause I’m not looking) this article seems to put a real dent in the ‘pull out the troops, send in CIDA’ plan. I particularly like that this is written by someone with a vested personal interest in delivering aid to the Afghans.

The place is not safe, full stop. It is marginally (ok, a lot) safer if you’re heavily armed and travelling in armoured vehicles, albeit you are then a really obvious target. If you are in any way obviously a Westerner you are a target, not only from the Taliban but any criminal, etc. groups. The latter types don’t screw with the Army because they’re in it for the money, not to meet Allah in person, but they will certainly take out soft targets, usually for ransom. Painting a big Red Cross, etc. on your stuff just marks you as a soft target.

At that point the Taliban will kill you (although capturing and torturing first aren’t out of the question) and the plain crooks will try to find some way to make money off of you. The only things even slowing any of this down are the security forces; it’s obvious this year that they aren’t stopping it.

So what happens if Jack Layton and his ilk get their way? To this point it’s been: ‘stop the combat operations and focus on reconstruction!’ I have never believed that that would work, but I seem to have a lot more company these days. There is the equivalent to a good-sized (bigger than ours) army in Afghanistan trying to secure the place and it’s just getting worse.

Some will say that this is the symptom of the fighting; if you start talking instead all the nastiness will end. It’ll end alright; under the boot of the Taliban taking the place back to the Stone Age like it did a decade ago. It seems we went in to stop that, and the same bleeding hearts who don’t like us beating on the Islamist idiots are the ones who deplored the state of women (in particular) under the same Taliban.

If things were going our way, more dead Taliban would be an actual advance for us. We can, it seems, keep wasting them and an inexhaustible supply pours over the border from Pakistan and elsewhere; ergo, no net advantage.

Pakistan is trying to take the fight back into the Tribal areas of the NW Frontier, but with limited success. They have gotten kicked (due to plan leaks to the opposition) several times, but if they can find a quiet way to co-ordinate with the Americans, maybe we can kill enough bad guys to make a difference.

Should we stay or should we go? If we stay it will be trouble, and if we leave it will be double (or reverse that, I have no real idea), but the root of the solution involves killing them faster, in larger numbers, without taking a pile of non-combatants with them. Driving around in well marked aid agency vehicles is just a good way to get killed, etc. until we manage to do that. The Taliban know their business, and it’s a simple, nasty one; kill enough people and they’ll be too scared to keep trying to fix the place. The Taliban like it broken, it keeps the people in their place: ignorant and poor.

So leave the troops in and they at least have someone who can fight back, or pull them out and leave all the soft targets completely to their own devices. Yes, Jack and company, that will help all concerned, and we’re seeing the proof of that now. We’ve proved that killing aid workers will do more, at less risk to the bad guys, to undermine our objectives and our will to continue than killing soldiers can.

The key to being effective (as opposed to nice) is doing what works best, and killing defenceless aid workers works brilliantly against western governments and populations. Expect to see more of this.