A hoax coming apart
Posted on 1 years ago
Of course, the Taliban offensive was a big shocker dealt to the US and NATO generals. They had been vainly talking tall that they had broken the back of the Taliban insurgency and emasculated the Taliban's fighting capability drastically. But by taking simultaneously numerous targets deep inside Kabul's high-security quarters and outside in the secured NATO and Afghan bases in the country's interior, the Taliban belied these boastful assertions of the coalition generals disdainfully. With this, the Taliban have established beyond a shred of doubt that they are still very much alive and kicking.
To wipe out the beads of shame over their faces, not unpredictably the generals and their civilian allies have fallen back on their usual bogeymen and punching bags to take the rap for their own debacle. The offensive smacked of professional expertise, they said and insinuated that it could only be the work of the Haqqani group having its sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas. But the Taliban rebutted instantly. Even as the Haqqani group was their ally, their spokesman said, the offensive was in fact their own act, for which they had been preparing and rehearsing over the past two months.
In any case, the US and NATO generals are finding it hard to digest the hard reality that the Taliban are no ragtag militia but a war-hardened and war-veteran force that had fought a tough years-long fight with a Northern Alliance bankrolled, armed and actively aided by a congeries of regional powers. Nor are they ready to swallow the bitter pill that the Taliban enjoy a widespread public backing in their strongholds and that their support base is lately expanding beyond too increasingly. Indeed, the coalition generals appear misconstruing the absence of frontal confrontations by Taliban in battalion-strength as the sign of their debilitated fighting power.
But it is not the pitched battles but guerilla warfare that has invariably been the preferred weapon of the Afghan people to face the foreign invaders and occupiers. It is with this weapon that they had vanquished the British imperial army in all its incursions and frustrated its every campaign to subjugate them. And it is with guerrilla warfare that they confronted the Soviet invaders and harassed and tormented them into leaving their country in humiliation. And it is the same weapon that the Taliban are now wielding to humble and humiliate the US-led invaders and NATO armies.
And with quite a success. The Dutch have already left. And so have the Canadians. The French too are packing up to leave early. And so are the Australians. And it isn't any unimaginable if there is a scramble among the occupiers to rush away in not too distant a future. By every account, while the occupying militaries are losing all appetite to fight, their peoples back home are losing all patience with the Afghan war. Even in United States, it is fast growing into an unpopular war.
But none of all this is dissuading the occupation generals from painting to their own peoples a rosy picture of the war that bears no resemblance at all with the prevalent ground realities. And this is what Lt. Col Daniel L. Davis of the American army is bringing home to the American people. In an unclassified dossier leaked to the media, he notes that “the US army generals have deliberately misled the America people, Congress and Administration about the Afghan war effort”. “They have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable”.
He has also prepared and submitted a classified version of the dossier, statedly even more devastating, to the Congress, urging it to hold a hearing of the generals to know the real truth about the Afghan war. Indeed, crucial questions have never been asked and still remain unanswered, whereas all the while the American generals have been plucking awards, promotions and plum postings in their own army and in the NATO defence apparatus and even clinching key ambassadorial postings for touted heroic accomplishments in the Afghan war that exist not.
But there is a very dreadful aspect to this deception. While the occupation armies and their Afghan allies have veritably lost the war, no peace agreement seems in the offing between the Afghan factions. The Taliban are loath to have a truck with President Hamid Karzai's government. And the Northern Alliance is unwilling to shake hands with the Taliban. An inevitable bloody civil strife is consequently staring Afghanistan in the face menacingly in the ultimate analysis.
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