Let's Just BUY Afghanistan ... ... by Bob Nelson
President Trump says he wants negotiations. Let's hope he means it.
About 45 years ago, I spent a year on a hill in the northwest of South Vietnam, a helicopter ride (the road was not secure) from Tam Ky. The village below the hill was called Tien Phouc. I was one of a team of five or six American advisers to a company of some 200 Territorial Forces. I don't pretend to have made a lot of friends among the Vietnamese, but I did get to know them a little. Every few weeks the company went out into the boonies as part of a larger operation. I went along. I was important. Not me personally, of course -- a wet-behind-the-ears Second Lieutenant.
But I could call in the resources of the US Army: artillery, gunships, and ... medevacs.
I felt a bit exposed. We often walked on the dikes between rice paddies: fifty guys 5' 3", then one guy 6' 5", then another fifty 5' 3". We were all dressed the same, but I didn't think Charlie would have much trouble identifying the American...
From time to time, things got sticky. My radio could call in the firepower that calmed the enemy pretty fast. It was "easy" -- all I had to do was stay calm and call in the coordinates... Have you ever heard a bullet whizz by your ear? Stay calm. Yeah... On the other hand, I have never been as "alive" as in those crystalline moments of adrenaline. I understand the men who become soldiers of fortune.
Or... sometimes we'd just be walking along, and I'd hear a "boom" from up ahead. Anti-personnel mine. This was bad news for the guy who'd walked on it, of course, but I was egotistical enough to worry about myself. I had to move up the line, so I could decide how bad things were -- could the guy be carried out, or did we need a medevac? Moving up the line meant... stepping OUT of the line... where any mines would have been detonated by some other poor bastard... and maybe stepping on one myself. (As another Looey from Tam Ky did one day. He went straight up and came back down with nothing more than a broken ankle and a one-way ticket home!)
It was the medevac pilots who did the miracle flying, but still, I was pretty popular with the Viets.
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The purpose of that long introduction is to give myself credentials.
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The US Army had an airfield a few kilometers away, on the other side of the village. (One day, the monsoon flooding was a bit more than usual, and the fifty-yard-wide steel-plate runway was rolled up like a carpet. The power of floodwater... but that's a different story...)
Alongside the runway was a helicopter pad. That was more steel-plate, a 100-yard square where several copters could park and refuel at the same time. Kerosene was stored in huge rubber bladders, and pumped into the copters by little gasoline-powered pumps.
Those pumps disappeared at a GREAT rate.
Rice-growing meant carrying water up to the highest paddy, from which it would trickle down (yeah, it worked in that context) through all the lower paddies. "Carrying water" meant "in buckets at the ends of a bar on your shoulders". You can guess where all those pumps went!
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Vietnamese peasants understood "democracy". They had elected their hamlet chiefs since time immemorial. So they knew that the national government (supported by all us foreign troops) had nothing to do with "democracy". From what they'd heard, the North Vietnamese weren't any better. A plague on both houses -- just let them live their lives in peace, please!
Our own little American team was reasonably well accepted in Tien Phouc, because we'd scrounged an extra diesel generator, to power a single light-bulb in each home for a few hours in the evening...
On the other side of the ledger, they had heard that there was a qualified medical nurse and a dispensary in every village in the North...
Water pumps, electrification, medical assistance, .... Those were the peasants' criteria for deciding who should win that war. "Democracy" was a lie, from both sides, and they knew it. But they hoped there was something to gain in their everyday lives...
For the cost of a single "Arclight" operation (a B-52 bomber flying all the way from Guam to drop 20 or 30 tons of bombs), we could have supplied an awful lot of water-pumps and electrical generators.
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We should have bought Vietnam. The whole country. We would have paid far less, and we would have "won".
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We cannot help Afghanistan's peasantry directly. That would be undercutting the warlords, so they would never permit it. So what?! The warlords -- they're called "Taliban" nowadays, and they'll pay lip service to religion if it is in their interest, and ignore the imams completely if that is a better deal for them -- those warlords would be only too happy to make improvements in the peasants' lives, as long as we let them take the credit... and a cut.
I calculated several years ago that we had already spent over $35 thousand per person in Afghanistan... every man, woman and child... and what do the people have to show for it?. Nothing. Not a fucking thing!
It would be far better for them and for us to let the warlords prosper, than for the Islamists to prosper... and those are the only choices we have.
Once again, in Afghanistan as in Vietnam, we have a simple choice: futile combat, or buying prosperity for the peasants...but not getting the credit.
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President Trump's presentation of his new strategy is important. I'm surprised no one on NT has seeded anything yet -- I'll do that next.
Trump made a very important addition to previous policy: he stated a willingness to negotiate with the Taliban. Let's not forget that our original motive for going into Afghanistan was to take away al Qaeda's safehold. We succeeded in only about six weeks... and then stayed on for various futile reasons for sixteen years...
No one has ever conquered Afghanistan. We won't either. The power lies with the warlords, always has and always will. So let's make a simple deal with them: we pay them not to harbor Islamist terrorists (and perhaps a teeny-tiny gesture toward improving the people's lives) and we leave them to it.