When All Else Fails

The chorus has risen to a deafening crescendo. Hearts and minds cannot be won by bombing civilian enclaves, then drawing back in horror and avowing errors, reluctantly acknowledging an unfortunate slip-up, vowing to do better, and sorry, folks. These same folks, fundamentalist Muslims, long mired in their customs and traditions, make common cause with the very 'insurgents' who consider themselves freedom fighters against foreign troops in their land.

It was ever thus. The invaders see the fanatical Muslims who practise a kind of Islam that has a time-honoured past in that region of hard-scrabble existence, as brutish oppressors of the Afghan people. And so they most certainly are, exactly that. This is what the geography, the history and the cultural traditions have enabled them to practise, and the tribal people accept this as their lot in life.

It's a trade-off between being bombed by foreign troops who declare their intent to be the rescue and relief of the people of Afghanistan, to bring them to the civilized and civil way of life that people throughout the world enjoy. But then there's a problem, a huge, immovable boulder sitting squarely in the way of progress. The problem is manifold; endemic corruption, rigid theism, poverty.

And the cycle is repetitive; subsistence farmers becoming addicted to the economic security that opium-derivative poppy growing rewards them with, while financially supporting the determination of the Taliban in their violent overthrow of the current Afghan government, along with the ouster of foreign troops, fed up with their own sacrifice of IED- and suicide-bombing fallen military.

Another approach is surely required to reach anything remotely resembling success. It is what Hamid Karzai has been mumbling about for quite a while; reconciliation with the majority of those who fight for and with the Taliban, those who can be persuaded that a better life is attainable for the country with the rejection of jihad, the acceptance of moderation. An end to Afghans killing Afghan brothers.

The fanatics to be left to their own devices, which will inevitably blow up in their faces, it's hoped, while the malleable, can be brought into the fold. They represent the majority, those who have been pressed into action by hard-core Islamists. Reason, it's hoped, may eventually prevail, simply because the extent of the blood-shed cannot be sustained and the country emerge into peace.

Negotiation, soft power, offering the enemy the opportunity to become as one, for the sake of their own futures, that of their families, and the country at large. Political reconciliation; choose carefully to whom one speaks lest the enterprise back-fire. Yet the intransigently-rabid mullahs make well known their out-of-hand disdain and disgust with "American puppets" comprising the Afghan government.

Only a return to the glory days of the Taliban will suffice to persuade them to lay down their arms, in the wake of the international community of foreign troops slinking back from whence they came, defeated. Then they will take up their whips, to ensure the country is returned to their kind of order. It is, in a very real sense, the oft-repeated history of the country, a country refusing to be dominated by others than their own.

The UN and Western alliance of military support that the Karzai government depends upon - to sustain their own levels of corruption while attempting to adapt to anticipated levels of self-sustainability in their national police and military to fend for themselves - is determined to defeat the Taliban and their sibling Islamists, al-Qaeda. Both comfortably ensconced in the most hostile, unforgiving landscape in the world.

They demand the unconditional surrender of the Karzai government, and the swift withdrawal of Western troops, leaving them to the devices they know best how to administer, once again compelling a confused and reluctant population to submit to iron-fisted rule, irreconcilable with human rights.

And where once the collective military leaders overseeing the rescue of Afghanistan from the Taliban - determined to finally conquer the insurgents - would never have agreed to a negotiated settlement, they now, licking their own suppurating wounds - their wounded, their dead, their immense financial contributions - find themselves agreeable with that potential Afghan reconciliation program.

The war, alas, according to NATO's top commander, could not be won by military means alone. "Rather, it will be renewed by governance and development." It's come to this; hope against hope.