Afghanistan! An Objective Analysis!!

Are you going to plant some gum trees, insert a few koalas and kangaroos to change the landscape of Afghanistan?

Or do you like to change their culture or religion?

Remember, the hopeless South Korean missionaries went to the war ravaged country to spread the ‘good news’ beside many zealots with their zealotry!

Ten years of genocide and destruction to export democracy and free speech (by murdering democracy and free speech) are paramount failure.

Faruque Ahmed

Moderator, Sydney Taxi Corruption and Expert, News behind the News

Mobile: 041 091 4118

Trumpeting in Afghanistan has echoes of Cambodia

Mike Carlton

February 20, 2010

On the face of it, the news from Afghanistan is all good. In the past few days, the Americans have captured the Taliban's No. 2 commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Thousands of American, British and Afghan troops have launched a powerful operation to clear the insurgents from the southern Helmand province. The local Taliban are fleeing, we are assured. The important town of Marjah has been taken from them with very few casualties, and the NATO commanding general, Stanley McChrystal , says he has ''a government in a box'' ready to move in and seize control. The war is at a turning point. From Kabul to the White House, everyone is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

This brings me a nagging twinge of deja-vu. Forty years ago, in May 1970, as an ABC war correspondent, I was perched atop a tank of the US Army's 11th Cavalry Regiment, thundering from South Vietnam across the border into Cambodia at a place we knew as The Parrot's Beak. It was the last throw of the dice for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who were convinced the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese were running the war from sanctuaries in nominally neutral Cambodia.

Those starchy briefing colonels at the Five o'clock Follies in Saigon liked to talk about the Viet Cong Pentagon or, officially, COSVN, the Central Office for South Vietnam.

The invasion - the White House preferred the word ''incursion'' - would destroy COSVN. The US could then begin ''Vietnamisation,'' another bright and shiny euphemism which meant getting the hell out and leaving the war to the Saigon government.

For days we crashed around the boonies, shooting up anything that moved; mostly water buffalo or the odd Cambodian peasant. It was tremendously exciting but, unfortunately, the Commie gooks declined to appear. The invasion captured a lot of weapons, ammunition and equipment. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese troops themselves were long gone, off like the wind, to regroup elsewhere. As it turned out, there was no such thing as COSVN. A Viet Cong Pentagon was entirely a figment of the American imagination.

Nixon boasted the invasion had been ''the most successful military operation of the entire war''. In fact, all it achieved long-term was to rock the Cambodian government to its foundations, creating a power vacuum that would eventually be filled by the genocidal maniacs of the Khmer Rouge.

Yes, I know Indochina and Afghanistan are different. But Mao Zedong's bedrock dictum for guerilla warfare still applies: '' The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.''

Now, as I read these optimistic reports of the Taliban in flight from Helmand, of government in a box, it looks very much like the same old same old. The insurgents cannot beat the NATO forces in Afghanistan but they don't need to. They just have to outlast them, as they did with the Russians. This is going to be a very, very long war.